Transform or Be Yourself?

As I've alluded to in other posts, I don't exclusively do Young Adult Librarian stuff at the Hayden Library. When the Youth Services department needs a hand, I'm one of the go-to guys. During this summer, I get to go to Ramsey Elementary and do some crafts with the School Plus kids and the Summer Meals kids. This is my third time coming down during the summer, and right now I'm waiting to see if my afternoon group is going to show up. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So I figured that I would write up a quick Book Blurt while I was waiting. American Born Chinese is our title for this week. Last time that I came to Ramsey Elementary, I started reading this graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang in the down time, and today I got a chance to finish it. This title has come across a few of the magazines and reviews that I look at because it received the Michael Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. It caught my eye on the bookmobile shelf, so I decided I'd see what it was like.

The book starts with three distinct stories being told. One story is started, and then the novel jumps to another story line and then the other, and then starts the cycle over again. At the beginning of the novel, these stories don't appear to have anything to do with each other. One tells the story of a young boy who is a first generation Chinese-American. Although he has lived in America his entire life, he still has Chinese traditions, and has a hard time fitting in. The book opens with the young boy, Jin Wang, meeting another Chinese-American boy, Wei-Chen Sun. They soon become friends because they can understand where the other is coming from. Another story line tells of a monkey king who strives to become one of the gods. After he is thrown out of gods' dinner party, he decides to master the art of Kung-Fu. After years of discipline he masters the art and is now invincible to almost everything and can also change his form. The third story line is an American teenager, Danny, who has to put up with the visits of his weird Chinese cousin once a year. His cousin is so bad that he has had to transfer to another school every time his cousin leaves because no one will associate with him. At the very end of the book, we find out that these three story lines are actually one story line after all. The author just hadn't told us what the connections were yet.

I found this book very interesting to read. The book opens with the story of the monkey king and then jumps into the real life events of the two boys. The contrast between the supernatural and natural is rather strange the first time you read the book. You wonder what the supernatural events of a monkey god are doing in the story. Although its a little bit confusing, knowing how the stories were entangled would take away from the effectiveness of the story. The main theme in the book is being content with who you are. Several of the characters try to change their physical appearance in an effort to change themselves and avoid their problems. By the end of the novel, the characters have learned that its better to be yourself than to be something that you are not. Although the tale of accepting who you are has been written several times, American Born Chinese is definitely its own work, and is an interesting way to approach this topic. On a side note, I don't mind graphic novels at all. Although I wouldn't read them exclusively, I think there is literary value in the pages of this book, and I'm looking forward to looking at some other graphic novels.