Essay About Similar Vein And Gene Yang

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In life, every individual is faced at one point or another with a
struggle for identity. It is inevitable for not a single person who
has ever roamed this earth has fully been able to accept who he or she
is without a certain amount of difficulty. Faced with the ideals of
the world at large, most feel at some point a sense of alienation or a
need to conform. However, for most, such feelings or notions are
nothing more than fleeting worries, their sense of self vastly
outweighing any passing fears that their identity, as it stands, is
not adequate enough. Yet, it goes without saying that there are those
individuals that find it exceedingly more complicated to accept who
they are than most – whether their issues with identity arise from a
different cultural identity, a feeling of alienation or an inability
to accept the family from which they come. These are the issues that
plague the characters from Gene Yangs American Born Chinese, Daniel
Clowes Ghost World, and Chris Wares Jimmy Corrigan. Each brilliant
graphic novel contains a character that must grapple to grasp who he
or she is in a world that doesnt exactly embrace diversity with open
arms, all to differing results.
In Yangs National Book Award nominee American Born Chinese, pride of
identity is the theme at the core of each of the three storylines.
Though the story of Jin Wang focuses on the struggle to assimilate in
a mostly white town, his tale is interweaved with two others, the
legend of the Monkey King, a Chinese folk hero, and a sitcom called
Everybody Ruvs Chin-Kee staring an exaggerated Chinese stereotype with
buck teeth and slurred speech. All three of these storylines cleverly
play off one another as they examine the clash between gaining social
acceptance and preserving personal identity: the Monkey King, after
being trapped under a mountain for five hundred years, must relinquish
his pride and reassess his true identity in order to find his place
among the divine, Chin-Kee exists as a caricature draw so
fantastically that one can only shake their head at the knowledge that
this was once the perceived identity of Asian Americans and Jin must
face classmates who believe he eats dog while simply trying to adapt
to life as a child of Chinese immigrants.
The message at the core of Yangs piece is clear, embracing the
identity of a Chinese born American is a task that is far from easy.
With these three storylines, Jin somehow comes to term with two
prevalent expressions of Chinese heritage, the folkloric
representation of Chinese culture and the cultural stereotypes held by
most Americans, all while slowly embracing his own mixed identity. The
books final image of Jin and Wei-Chen, in the midst of their boy band
performance, is reminiscent of the square stamps often seen in Chinese
art, a symbolic reference to the hybrid identity that Jin finally
accepts.
In a similar vein, Daniel Clowes Ghost World follows the journey of
Enid and Rebecca as they struggle with their identities as outsiders
thrust into the real world upon graduation from high school. In ways
similar to Jin in American Born Chinese, Rebecca and Enid are
individuals dealing with the expectations of society that they
themselves do not conform to completely, though theirs is not one of
cultural differences but mental ones. In a ghost of a world, the pair
search for their identities, constantly grappling for a place in a
society that they simply do not feel a part of. Through all of their
myriads of disappointments, the girls remain steadfast in their quest
for meaningful identities, for lives of purpose, all the while holding
on their nostalgic vision of the past. Only further adding to this
theme, Clowes blue toned, monochromatic panels feature an array of