Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese explores the times in young adulthood where making decision is a part of becoming who you are and finding yourself. For Jin, he made the decision to get a perm to look more like Greg, a blonde hair, blue eyed guy in his class. He gets this perm because he feels his love interest, Amelia likes Greg and he would have more of a chance with Amelia if he conformed to his idea of what whiteness looks like. For the Monkey King, he made the decision to train and meditate everyday so that he would be recognized as The Great Sage – Equal of Heaven. In both instances, these characters made choices to divert from the path they had taken their whole life and become who they felt would make for a better life. As young adults, parents, school, and what we see in the media subconsciously imposes roles upon us. We are taught to act, dress, and think a certain way and people learn these roles based on gender. In the text, Lang shows that despite the learned gender expectations and performances young adults face, self-acceptance is the key to freedom.
The Monkey King is the prime example in the text of breaking social norms. He spent his time training and meditating to perfect the four major disciplines of invulnerability. When the Monkey King had achieved this desired goal of the four major disciplines, he renamed himself The Great Sage – Equal of Heaven and left to declare to all of heaven his new title. But announcing his new name was not enough for the gods in heaven. Though the gods had heard of the Monkey King, he still needed to prove that he wasn’t the Monkey King anymore and with his new abilities, he was truly with the Great Sage.
With the help of social media, transgender people are informing the world of what being transgender truly means. According to Dicionary.com, being transgender is being “a person whose gender identity does not correspond to that person’s biological sex assigned at birth.” Gender transformation is not easy and the process can be mentally and sometimes physically straining, if the person decides to go through with some sort of surgery to match their sex to their gender and this is because, like the Monkey King, self-identifying with a gender isn’t enough. One must prove their gender by dressing, acting, and going as far to even having a sex change to fit society’s idea of how that gender should be performed.
Later in American Born Chinese, we meet Wong Lai-Tsao, a follower of Tze-YoTzuh – the creator of everything. Wong Lai-Tsao gets a mission from Tze-Yo-Tzuh’s emissaries that he will come upon three disciples, the first of which who ends up being the Monkey King. After forty long days of being followed by demons, he finally finds the Monkey King stuck under the mountain as planned. Lai-Tsao introduces himself as the Monkey King’s leader, but the Monkey King still refuses to believe he is under anybody’s authority. Lai-Tsao gives the Monkey King a choice: free himself by returning to his true form or let his own stubbornness be the reason for Lai-Tsao’s death. But Lai-Tso reveals the only way that the Monkey King can in fact free himself from the mountain: “to find your own identity… is the highest of all freedoms” (Lang 149). The Monkey King had fought for so long to create his own identity that any role he didn’t put upon himself, he would not accept. Triggered by the oncoming death of Lai-Tsao, the Monkey King reluctantly agreed to become his true form to free himself and save this complete stranger, which eventually led to becoming a disciple of Lai-Tsao.
Jin had a similar issue in which he was teased his whole life for being Asian. People would make racist comments based on stereotypes that they learned from others about him just because he did not look like everyone else. Jin’s choice to perm his hair in an attempt to fit in was his way of choosing his own destiny. We see that his wishful thinking caused him to literally transform into who he wanted to be – blonde, light-eyed, and white. In a way, Jin worked up to this point to finally get what he wanted. Like the Monkey King, he “deserved a new name” and “decided to call [him]self Danny” (Lang 198).
We learn gender expectations at such a young age that it’s almost second-nature that a girl wears pink and a boy wears blue. When we go to McDonalds for a happy meal, a girl will get a stuffed animal or doll and a boy will get a toy gun or action figure. When there’s a fight in the playground that involves guys, the excuses is that boys will be boys – but if it females were fighting, they would be scolded for being unladylike. Everything around us engrains how we are supposed to perform our gender and how one is raised is undoubtedly reliant on how we look from the waist down. But the problem lies in the case which what’s down there doesn’t match what’s in your mind and how you truly feel about yourself and your identity. Because as children, we assimilate these learned gender roles in how we live our lives – if it doesn’t match to what we think, we’re not normal.
The two extremes of you’re a boy and have to act a certain way or you’re a girl and you have to act another way makes outliers unaccepted which should not be since we are all humans and have unalienable human rights to freedom. Denying anyone of this freedom and their constitutional rights is implying that they are not human and not conforming to these expectations and roles makes somebody unhuman and essentially, a monster.
As gender is not biological, it is only fair that those whose sex do not match should be able to self-identify as they wish whether it be by how they introduce themselves, what pronoun they use on Facebook, how they fill out a college application, or even what it says on their state driver’s license. Accepting who you are with the adversary of gender norms might be hard and we must work towards a society that does not separate people based on sex and how it fits into socially constructed gender roles. Gender should not restrict anyone from being able to do anything because nobody is greater or lesser than anyone else.