"How Good It Is to Be a Monkey": Comics, Racial Formation, and American Born Chinese

More than any other racial minority in the United States, Asian Americans have found their status as racial minority complicated by claims of their many apparent economic successes. At the same time, they remain battered by perceptions that they are somehow alien to the nation. This tension between success and alienation has become especially acute since 1965, when passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act began to alter the Asian American population dramatically by, among other things, bifurcating it between professional-managerial and of largely blue-collar service workers. While many contemporary literary works by and about Asian Americans wrestle unsurprisingly with how such changes have made the stories of race and racism in their characters' lives more difficult to tell, Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese stands out as particularly focused on this problem. In this work, past and present ways of thinking about Asian Americans collapse into each other. As result, readers are encouraged to ponder how much race thinking has changed, in what ways, and where this change might be leading. American Born Chinese prompts such response by employing the unique qualities of its medium, comics, to reflect back to the reader the difficulty of following the development of Asian American racial formations. By invoking the term racial formation, I am obviously drawing on one of the most established approaches to the study of race and racism in ethnic studies in the United States. This approach does not, however, enjoy this position without controversy. Most recently, for example, critics of racial formation have found trouble with what Michael Omi and Howard Winant's analysis insists: that race not be thought of as either essence or illusion (54). In response to these requirements, Walter Benn Michaels argues that the pair is unreasonably attached to the concept of race as a central and even desirable factor in American life (Trouble 48). According to this critique, rather than seek to undermine the concept of race and the racism it enables, Omi and Winant, and by extension the many scholars in ethnic studies in the United States who rely on their foundational work, strive to maintain race at the centre of their thinking. This is also--Michaels reasons--occurring at time when race's importance is clearly on the wane, and when inequality has never been so stark, in part because focusing on the former allows one to ignore the latter: love race--we love identity--because we don't love class (6). (1) What seems to motivate Michaels in making this critique is less desire to return to the hoary debate about the relationship between race and (although such return is where his critique leads), and more the sense that current thinking about race fails to keep up with the present. This is similar to the point that Paul Gilroy makes in Postcolonial Melancholia, but with an important difference. While Michaels joins Gilroy in considering the ways in which the process of racial formation has become more difficult to comprehend as we move closer to the present, Gilroy does not see this as reason to turn attention away from race and racism all together. Instead, Gilroy argues that the problem of racism has become more acute because simpler hatreds must now co-exist with more complex patterns of group membership and contention that may only be respected if marked out in warm blood (37). In short, the more that familiar boundaries of racial difference and superiority are crossed, the more new boundaries are frantically, and even violently, erected in their place. If so, remaining focused on racial formation requires us to consider how race thinking can prosper even as it may appear to give way in some instances. Yang's American Born Chinese helps us to consider this apparent conundrum through its careful exploration of nineteenth-and twentieth-century ways of looking at Asians and Asian Americans. …