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.