ABSTRACT

As an adult, graphic novelist Gene Yang was startled to discover his childhood rendering of an ethnic joke in an old sketchbook. In his cartoon, a buck-toothed Mandarin giggles, “Me Chinese. Me play joke. Me go pee pee in your Coke.”1 A Chinese American, Yang puzzled over his ability to access American racial stereotypes while refusing to see them as self-implicating. Was the stereotype such a gross exaggeration that it bore no relationship to his self-conception? Or is this wishful thinking? Caricature would find pointed use in his first graphic novel, American Born Chinese: Chin-Kee, the excruciating embodiment of all Chinese stereotypes, is sent to test the novel’s self-hating protagonist. Their encounter culminates in a kung-fu movie parody, a battle symbolizing Asian Americans’ struggle with the reviled form of misrepresentation popularly known as the stereotype.