Read Twice to See Just How Much Yang Foreshadows the End

Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese consists of three seemingly unrelated storylines. The first is about a monkey who is different from all the others, the second is about a young American Chinese boy named Jin, and the third is about a white blonde boy named Danny. While all of these stories had their own characters and plots, in the end they all tie together and on the second read, the book actually became more interesting because one could draw connections between the various storylines early on in the book.

The main character in the second storyline is Jin, who struggles with going to a predominantly white school. He only has two friends who are also Asian and is picked on by many of the white students. Jin is particularly aware of his differences from his peers when he develops a crush on a white girl named Amelia. Jin is worried that Amelia likes a white blonde boy named Greg, which makes Jin wish he had blonde hair too as shown in an illustration on page 101. 

While Jin is a Chinese boy with a desire to be more American, Danny, the main character of the third storyline, is an American boy with a desire to escape his Chinese cousin. Danny’s cousin Chin-Kee is portrayed as a stereotypical Chinese boy with buck teeth, long hair, traditional Chinese clothing, who is unable to speak proper English. Chin-Kee embarrasses Danny by eating fried cat, answering every question in class, and peeing in someone’s coke. Danny claims he doesn’t even understand how he is related to Chin-Kee, and the only apparent similarity is pointed out by Melanie when she tells him “[his] teeth kind of buck out a little” (Yang 127). 

For a majority of the novel, the storylines do not crossover with one another, however, on page 195 an illustration shows Jin morphing into Danny. The previous evidence of Jin wishing for blonde hair and Danny having bucked teeth foreshadows the fact that the two characters are actually the same person. This page is extremely important because there is finally some insight as to how the second and third storylines are related. When reading this novel for the first time, this came as quite a shock, however, after reading the novel a second time it is evident that there is a great amount of foreshadowing that shows the plots will all connect in the end.