I think choosing to write this particular story through the medium of the graphic novel was a very apt and successful decision, because the nature of racism against Chinese people in America is so utterly visual. We can see that just by looking at the PowerPoint on Canvas, but it’s fairly clear to identify outside of that; the number of racist slurs and ideas referencing “yellow skin” and “narrow eyes” are some of the first to come to mind. A lot of attention is focused on the appearance of Chinese people and how differently they look from white people, and certain icons (noodles, Chinese characters, traditional clothes, etc.) are recurrent in racist ideology against Asians as a whole.
This is why I think showing racism against Chinese people through the format of a graphic novel is especially effective; we’re forced to see and experience that racist imagery to a gratuitous and sometimes gruesome extent through the caricature of Chin-kee, and the ability to contrast that directly with Jin’s storyline and the normalcy of it is all the more hard-hitting when performed visually. It is rather jarring to go from Chin-kee—who is buck-toothed, has veritable slits for eyes, and dresses only in traditional Chinese clothing—to Jin, who looks like an average kid. I’m not sure that a fully written novel, for example, could have conveying this in the same way, or with the same effectiveness; a visual insult requires a visual response, and the conversation surrounding Chinese people in racist lexicon has been largely visual in nature. Reading a novel, we could have compared the difference in lives and, to some extent, appearance, but not in the same visceral, reactionary way possible through the graphic novel. I found myself, along with others I’ve spoken to, feeling genuinely uncomfortable during the Chin-kee segments, because they were so blatantly offensive, vulgar, and in bad taste; but that was the point. A description of this just would not have hit the same, because it wouldn’t have had the same immediate visual power and impact as the graphic novel’s portrayal did.
Aside from that, showcasing race relations/inner turmoil regarding race visually is (perhaps obviously) also more potent than doing so through other methods because race is, whether correctly or not, almost always associated with color. Showing Jin “transforming” into Danny is fundamentally visual even if it signifies something below the surface; people are judged racially based on their appearance, so a written account of this would, again, have lacked key notes that would to facilitate a reaction that would actually mean something to the reader (whether that be a change in perception, shock, etc.). It just makes sense to do it through a visual medium, and Yang, in my opinion, made the right decision when he chose to follow that course.
As I said earlier, the prejudiced conversation related to Chinese people is a visual one; by following that mode, Yang was able to effectively enter into that conversation with legitimacy and accuracy, speaking a language that both matched and subverted that of the racist ideas he was engaging with.
I think you’re absolutely correct in this analysis: American Born Chinese required a visual form of storytelling that a non-graphic novel could not provide. Chin-kee’s character in particular, I think moreso than any other character, required this kind of medium. I think this could be in part because it uses the exact same stereotypes that racist political cartoons use—just like the one from 2001 that we examined in class.
ReplyDeleteGoing further, I believe that the sit-com styling of the Chin-kee storyline could only be properly done through a visual media. Since sit-coms themselves use the visual media of television, it would be incredibly difficult to recreate that sort of feeling without the graphic novel format of this story. I don’t know how an author could describe a wide pan shot of the house from outside in a way that didn’t sound like simple exposition, and I doubt that the laugh track that ran across the bottom of each panel could ever be properly recreated with simple written text.
Overall, Yang’s novel absolutely requires the visual storytelling found in a graphic novel, for all the reasons you describe here and even more. I feel that if the story were forced to be a written text novel, it would need to take on a far more serious tone and would completely fail to tell the story in the same way. Yang absolutely made the right choice in making American Born Chinese a graphic novel.