CR Post #3 American Born Chinese
In Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, protagonist Jin grapples with internalized racism as he yearns for romantic connection with others. Through the graphic novel’s repeated image of lightning through Jin’s permed hair, this internalized racism depicts itself as a false means of confidence.
Throughout the novel, Jin seeks to erase his Chinese heritage in order to fit in better with his white classmates. When he develops a crush on the white girl Amelia, he gets his hair permed, hoping to impress her by looking like other white boys in his class (Yang 97). When given the opportunity to ask her on a date, he receives “a jolt of confidence,” accompanied by the image of lightning fizzling off of his permed hair (Yang 105). While this image coincides with the narration’s description of a “jolt,” the choice to have this electrifying confidence be depicted through Jin’s attempt to hide his heritage is not accidental. The staging of the panel makes it so that the hair is the focal point, just as Jin equates achieving whiteness the focal point to attaining Amelia’s heart.
This image is repeated again after Suzy admits to Jin she feels ashamed to be Asian-American. Suzy confesses to feeling like a “chink” (Yang 187) all of the time, and in a three panel span, Jin goes from looking at her blankly to having the lightning run through his hair, to kissing her. This romantic confidence stems from Jin’s feeling of perceived connection with Suzy. Through the image of his permed hair, he falsely perceives her shame to be a desire for whiteness, something he finds attractive. The inclusion of the onomatopoeia “krak!” (Yang 188) as Jin kisses her represents Jin’s electric excitement at the situation, just as it displays Suzy being startled. While both are ashamed of their heritage, Suzy does not hold whiteness as the ideal, as Jin does.
I’m really interested in your focusing on the detail of the lightening. I think it’s a good piece of visual rhetoric to follow up on. What’s interesting is that it actually appears in several frames when Jin is furious. There also seem to be a similar kind of lightening when the Monkey King fights the last monster as he decides to follow the wise man and accept himself as a monkey.
I mention these because I think your post is on to something good, but I have two comments. First there’s a little feeling right now that you’re mapping more onto the lightening then you’ve been able to show the text bears out. Like I am not sure that there is a 1:1 correlation between the lightening and his desires for whiteness. We don’t get the lightening when he first gets the perm or when he tells Wei-Chen to speak English. I don’t think you’re wrong per say about your conclusion, but I think you might be jumping some steps in your close reading, which brings me to my second point, which is that I think it would be worth spending more time describing this bit of visual rhetoric. You can tell us how many times it appears. You could describe how much of the frame it takes up, the color, the style of the lightening (traditional symbolic bolts?), and the number of bolts. All those details might not be totally necessary in the end. Still it would allow you to first paint a clearer image of what you’re describing and then also to have a strong understanding of how this visual rhetoric appears and works in the text. So that you can make sure your conclusion is based on these elements. So it might be that the lightening is more a display of severe and completely game changing violence (think the lightening in the Monkey King’s fight) and that then b/c Yang renders the lightening coming out of Jin’s head, he suggests a kind of psychic violence (not unrelated to the perm, but not reducible to it ether). Then you can open up the grounds for thinking about the psychic violence being done in these particular panels. Does that make sense as an unpacking of your ideas?