AMERICAN BORN CHINESE 25
Th e novel consists of a trilogy of interspliced narratives. Th e fi rst follows the
adventures of the Monkey King, a fi gure from traditional Chinese mythology and
popular culture who fi rst appeared in writing in the epic tale Journey to the West , a
Ming Dynasty narrative attributed to the scholar Wu Cheng’en. Journey to the West
follows the adventures of the Monkey King, or Sun Wukong, as he accompanies a
Buddhist monk on a mission to India. It also narrates the exploits of his early life
and rise to immortality, portraying him as a mischievous, ambitious, and proud shape-
shifter who resents being looked down upon by superior deities. American Born
Chinese appropriates the character of Sun Wukong as allegorical adolescent, driven
by humiliation to pursue fi rst social respect and ultimately self-knowledge. Th e novel
opens with the story of the Monkey King’s mortifying rejection from a dinner party of
the gods because, as the guards inform him, “you may be a king—you may even be a
deity—but you are still a monkey ” (15). When he returns in shame to his royal cham-
ber, “the thick smell of monkey fur greeted him. He’d never noticed it before. He stayed
awake for the rest of the night thinking of ways to get rid of it” (20). Th e Monkey
King’s socially compromising monkey-ness thus frames the novel’s primary theme of
how Chinese ethnicity forms a part of an American teenager’s identity.
Th e second narrative follows a boy named Jin Wang from his early childhood in
San Francisco’s Chinatown to his ordeals in elementary school and junior high in a
primarily white suburb. Th e son of Chinese immigrants, Jin is an “ABC,” or “American
Born Chinese,” a term used within immigrant communities to emphasize the diff erence
between fi rst and second generation Chinese Americans, particularly the compromised
“Chineseness” of the American-born generations. Jin’s experiences include being intro-
duced by a teacher to his third-grade classmates as having “moved to our neighborhood
all the way from China!” (which he must correct as “San Francisco”) (30), enduring
perpetual racist slurs from bullies, and attempting to start a relationship with a girl
at school despite his classmates’ disapproval of his dating a white girl and his parents’
disapproval of his dating at all. As an “ABC,” Jin feels neither Chinese nor American,
and the awkwardness of living between these two categories compounds the traditional
humiliations of American adolescence. Another Chinese American boy, Wei-chen,
arrives at Jin’s elementary school later in the year when his family moves from Taiwan.
At fi rst, Jin reveals that “something made me want to beat him up” (36), but eventually
the boys realize that they share common interests and become best friends. While Jin is
an “ABC,” Wei-chen is an example of an “FOB,” which stands for “Fresh Off the Boat,”
another term used within Chinese American communities to demarcate the diff erence
between the American-born and the foreign-born. Just as “ABC” is used pejoratively
by fi rst-generation immigrants to call the group’s Chineseness into question, “FOB” is
a similarly pejorative term used to call attention to new immigrants’ failures to assimi-
late into American culture. Jin’s initial hostility toward Wei-chen refl ects these histori-
cal tensions within a community that is under pressure to embody multiple identities
at once. Yet when this hostility gives way to friendship, readers see how social alien-
ation can produce camaraderie rather than antagonism. Th e trials of Jin and Wei-chen’s
