American Born Chinese Analysis

In class we talked about how it is important for the author to keep the story on track by using different writing techniques. Since the story is titled “American Born Chinese”, the author tell us a story mixed with different cultural perspectives. He playfully tells us about part of his Chinese heritage by starting the book off with a story about a mythological monkey god, who is personified as a king, but is still treated as a monkey. The tale serves to establish the beginnings of the novel, and leaves the reader wondering how it could tie into the next part. Then when the story turns to the narrator’s life, the author uses the dialogue on pages 30 and 31 to illustrate the general misconceptions of Chinese people among Americans. The author shows us characters that are simply ignorant of the narrator’s true personality, and he shows this through their dialogue: the teacher guesses incorrectly at his name, then assumes he has moved to this particular school district from China, then one of the students thinks that the narrator eats dogs. The author places emphasis on the incorrect assumptions by bolding them in the text. As we can see from the beginnings of the novel, life in America will not be easy for the narrator.

My Turn Paragraph

So it comes as no surprise that I might want to escape a town where 9 out of 10 kids wear polo shirts to school and attending the debutante ball in the winter is normal. But now that I am at Tufts, a university that prides itself on its diversity, I ask myself how that has really come into play here. For example, although the university has many different houses for certain ethnicities, such as the French House, the Latino Culture House, the German Language House, and even an International Culture House, I have never set foot in one of them. Come to think of it, I don’t even know where they are located. It appears that the old adage has some truth to it: you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.