Disney Butchered Gene Luen Yang’s Watershed ‘American Born Chinese’ By Turning It Into “Asian People For Dummies”

Until I was 8 years old, my father read Journey to the West to me as my bedtime story. The 16th century novel authored by Wu Cheng’en is 100 chapters thick with poetry, folklore and (in the edition I remember) illustrated with fine pencil drawings. We got through it a half dozen times before I rejected it, and him. I only spoke Mandarin as a very young child even though I was born in the United States. I only started learning English when I entered the public school system when I was six. My parents were concerned I might learn their accent if they taught me the language and, more, I think they were concerned how an Asian accent would affect my ability to succeed in a country that had only recently lifted its quota on the number of Chinese allowed to emigrate here.

Initially, the bullying — at school, and beyond — was brutal. I had my nose broken that first year and, not quite knowing what to do, walked to my father’s gem store covered in blood. To mitigate the bullying, I began rejecting my heritage: the food my mom packed for me that my schoolmates, predominantly white, found to be disgusting; my given, Chinese name which my teachers and peers found to be hilariously unpronounceable, making the first roll call at the beginning of every new year an agony; the clothes my parents dressed me in that singled me out for ridicule. I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to assimilate. I developed a terrible stutter which caused my parent’s Chinese friends to refuse to let their kids play with me for fear they would “catch” it. I retreated into the books and records my parents found at rummage sales, and television, eventually movies on tape when we got our first VCR when I was eight. 

I made a friend in first grade whom I’m still friends with forty-four years later. He was the best man at my wedding and I was at his. Blonde and blue-eyed, he was everything I wanted to be and, failing that, as my best and only friend, he could shield me with his absolute belonging. He told his soccer coach I was great at it when we were nine and, after I joined the team, I started making other friends. Through it all, I steadily, consistently, sometimes violently, rejected my parents and their culture. I refused to speak Chinese anymore. I didn’t make friends with other Asian kids for fear I’d be associated with them after I had spent so much of my soul to not be them. I was cruel when a professor in college asked me to be the foster and guide for a Chinese student who didn’t speak English. I know I was just a kid trying to survive, but I’m ashamed. When my father died, then my mother, I felt the full weight of our divorce, finally, once reconciliation, always unlikely for the way we were constructed, became impossible. We get one shot at this and these choices I’ve made… I try not to live in regret, but I have so much of it. 

I read Gene Luen Yang’s watershed graphic novel American Born Chinese.a couple of years after its 2006 publication, the same year I watched John Woo’s two-part epic Red Cliff (which adapts another of China’s great epics, Luo Guanzhong’s The Romance of the Three Kingdoms). It was by watching this that I learned, for the first time, the origin of my name. My dad could have taught me this, I think, and probably tried. But I was long past listening and now it’s too late. Yang’s book tells three stories that interweave in such a way as to tell essentially one story. He tells my story and reading it felt like a miracle.

In the first story, middle school kid Jin develops a crush on blond, blue-eyed Amelia and screws up his courage to ask her out one night. Even though they have a good time, Amelia is warned against asking her out again by her well-intentioned friends. I have had more than one conversation with fathers of white ex-girlfriends telling me their daughters deserved better than an interracial relationship with an Asian. I never dated Asian women, myself, though because I was running away from myself. Anger is complex. Sometimes I’m angry at everyone else, mostly I’m just disappointed in myself. There’s a character early on in Yang’s book who tells Jin that he can be anything he wants to be so long as he’s prepared to sell his soul.

Jin is asked to help a Taiwanese student Wei-Chen transition into his new school and resents being associated with him. Wei-Chen starts dating the other Asian in their class, Suzy Nakamura, and there’s a devastating moment in the book where the three of them share a light moment that’s instantly destroyed by the malicious racism of a few bullies. Suzy later says that she can’t stop thinking about being called a “chink” because she realizes she feels like that – the other, alien, a slur — all the time. Yang’s work is the first that I had ever read that allowed me to see what I went through as something that wasn’t unique to me. He described a path to forgiveness, for myself and for others. Everything Everywhere All At Once helped me to understand my parents, and to forgive them, too — to see their story differently, to understand them as people who dreamed, and to come to grips with how much we hurt each other even though our family unit was all that we had. They risked everything to come to a place that took their son from them. Their story is a tragedy, I think, and I was central to it. I hope I can give it an epilogue that makes their sacrifice legible.

Everything Everywhere All At Once helped me to understand my parents, and to forgive them, too — to see their story differently, to understand them as people who dreamed, and to come to grips with how much we hurt each other even though our family unit was all that we had. They risked everything to come to a place that took their son from them.

The second story Yang tells in American Born Chinese is of the hero of Journey to the West, the Monkey King Sun Wukong, one of the great figures in all of the world’s mythology, who is born of a stone, is capable of astonishing feats of shapeshifting and strength, and possesses a weapon of surpassing power with which he challenges Heaven itself. He is one of three supernatural disciples who accompany monk Xuanzang on a journey to the west to retrieve Buddhist scrolls, sutras, that purport to contain divine wisdom but in fact are just catalysts to each of the pilgrims’ self-actualization. I love Sun Wukong. He was my first superhero. He could leap 10,000 leagues, he could create clones of himself with his fur, he is nigh invulnerable, immortal, and he can see evil with his blazing eyes. But he’s also a pain in the ass. Mischievous, indomitable, scatalogical. He likes to fart and to mark his achievements by emptying his bladder. He’s arrogant and prideful, and refuses to acknowledge he’s at the bottom of it all, just a monkey. Yang tells a little bit of Sun Wukong’s background and then tells of the time, for his immense hubris, how Sun Wukong is imprisoned beneath a mountain for five hundred years. He frees himself finally when he’s reminded that if he stops acting like he’s something that he’s not, that he will shrink back into his natural, monkey form, and thus shrunken, freed from his bondage. He needs to accept who he is, you see, and then he’s free.

The last story Yang tells is Jin’s fantasy of becoming white coming to fruition. Jin is now “Danny,” towheaded and a popular kid on the basketball team who is visited, suddenly, by his cousin Chin-Kee. “Chinkie” who is a nightmare hobgoblin assembled of despicable Yellow Peril tropes perpetuated in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century to, let’s face it, the present. Chin-Kee slavers after white women, gleefully eats cats and dogs, speaks with a ridiculous accent (see Wonder Woman antagonist “Egg Fu” who says in Wonder Woman #158 that “The Amelicans would be warned if the locket were fired at rong range!”), and as it happens is very good at school. He is the model minority and he is also depraved, humiliating, and ridiculous. He is Long Duck Dong and Data from The Goonies. Danny is horrified to be associated, to be connected in some way, with Chin-Kee so he rejects him. When the rejection doesn’t take, he tries to kill him. And then it’s revealed that Danny can’t kill Chin-Kee because Chin-Kee is Sun Wukong, and Sun Wukong is an essential part of who Danny is. Just like Sun Wukong is an essential part of who I am. I can no more survive cutting him out of my heart as I could cutting my heart out of my chest. He is a gift my father gave to me and it took me most of my life to be small enough to accept it. Yang’s American Born Chinese understands all of this inexpressible personal pain and complexity and somehow expresses it simply, poignantly, powerfully. 

Disney+’s eight episode adaptation of Yang’s masterpiece, however, is soulless, pandering garbage excreted by the company responsible for the ignoble mystical, systemically racist live action Mulan and trope-swollen, self-hating Shang-Chi. If there are things that are good about it, and I think Ben Wang as Jin and Jim Liu as Wei-Chen are exceptional, none of them are the things that make Yang’s book great. The show, in the Disney house style, is ground clean of anything that could catch or injure, polished to a frictionless sheen upon which it is impossible to find any kind of purchase. You know what else is smooth and frictionless? A suppository.

This adaptation wants very much to appeal to everyone, so the bullying in Jin’s story is done by kids who aren’t so bad, really; Sun Wukong is made into a joke in an extended sequence that also reduces the Chinese pantheon into a nightclub act of vile and derivative cliches; and because Disney can’t imagine a story about American-born Chinese people that does not also include unforgivably bland wire fu, redemptive father/son melodrama, and every flavor of mystical orientalist bullshit, there are endless razzle-dazzle sidebars that start nowhere, and then end nowhere.

Even on a narrative basis, it’s unbelievably careless. Early on, Jin shoplifts a jacket to try to look more “cool”; a few episodes later when his mom (Yeo Yan Yan) is cleaning his room, I expected her to find it. She doesn’t. I shoplifted as a child and was caught for it. I wanted to be seen and I was told we wouldn’t talk of it. I tried to kill myself next and when I was checked out of my mandatory three-day stay in the mental health ward, was informed we were to never talk about that again, either. Jin is acting out, too, but his parents from what I can tell are kind to him and supportive. They’re available. Jin has friends at school, too, and when he’s asked to try out for the soccer team I expected… something to happen. Yet nothing does.

He crushes on Amelia and they develop a connection. In the book, Jin who has never been taught to use deodorant, sneaks into a movie theater’s bathroom to rub soap under his armpits. I had several similar experiences throughout junior high when puberty makes your body a cesspool and left me with a different cultural strategy for how to deal with it. In the series, Amelia throws him a surprise birthday party at a bowling alley where Wei-Chen, who is Sun Wukong’s (Daniel Wu) son, is engaged in some exquisitely boring chopsocky with Bull Demon King (Leonard Wu). He’s after Sun Wukong’s magical staff, you see, that Wei-Chen has stolen. The Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin (Michelle Yeoh) comes down from Heaven to protect Wei-Chen’s right to steal it by domesticating herself and making a few Ikea jokes; and there’s also Stephanie Hsu as the Goddess of Stones who has an anus-less dog that eats gems. They are comic relief (Yeoh gets a fight scene, though, because she’s Michelle Yeoh), obviously shoehorned in to capitalize on their moment, and I’m embarrassed for them.

The parents, not present in the book, are given their own work melodrama with mom squandering half of their savings to sell Chinese herbal remedies and dedicatedly castrating dad (the great Chin Han) for not having the balls to ask for a promotion at work, leading to an episode in which dad discovers he and his white boss share a love for vintage Bon Jovi and then… nothing. I wondered if mom’s dabbling in entrepreneurship would bump up against the American regulatory agency that would be, rightfully, curious as to what exactly she was selling as snake oil to her church buddies but, nothing. Her business even starts out gangbusters before… before nothing. There are some threads that when left untied lead to introspection. Zen koans are threads, for example, that are impossible to tie. The attempt to solve them is the journey to enlightenment about your own predilections and heretofore hidden biases.

But then there are other threads, like these story threads, that when left untied are indicative of throwing familiar plots at four-and-a-half hours of runtime you’ve decided to pack with edgeless pap rather than substantive sociological excavation. Was this a rush job? It feels like the asking of the question is the answer. Oh, and in place of cousin Chin-Kee in a storyline where Jin becomes white Danny, there’s an old sitcom that’s become a TikTok meme starring Freddy Wong (Ke Huy Quan) who has a “whatchu talkin’ bout Willis” catchphrase that is essentially a deeply racist riff on the roles Ke has been forced to take for essentially his entire career until Everything Everywhere All at Once earned him an Oscar. Ke has said he had concerns about doing this role because it can easily be meme’d out of context. His concern becomes exposition when he stares directly into the camera in a late episode and says, bluntly, that everyone deserves to see themselves as the hero. 

This Disney-fied treatment is a thesis statement presented for an audience the series creators have judged to be too stupid to get there on their own. It’s a statement deemed necessary by a production team that does not seem itself to understand what it’s adapting or, more likely, have been given directions to extrude a franchise from a book that is decidedly not franchisable. They have made Yang’s American Born Chinese into a “for dummies” version of how white people see all Asian people. Everything that was elegant about the source material is now a hammer and you, the audience, are as dense and driveable as a tenpenny nail. It uses a valuable, delicate text to create an endlessly replicable tentpole explicitly designed to exploit its rapidly-fatiguing MCU audience. It even erases Wei-Chen’s Taiwanese heritage as a kowtow to Disney’s long-coveted Chinese market; parallels Sun Wukong with Jin’s nebbishy, ineffectual dad; and makes Jin’s mom into a dragon lady harridan hounding her woebegone husband into miserable servility. I realize that Asian-American artists have been assembled here to work on this project — even its needle drops feature Asian or Asian-American musicians — but I’ll be damned if I can find much evidence of an empathetic perspective in this beknighted trainwreck of strawmen and the kind of chingchong expectations I’ve been trying to live down my entire life. This isn’t diversity; this is colonialism.

Let me ask you this: what does this show have to do with being a person of Chinese ethnicity born in the United States? Let me answer it for you: it has everything to do with it, but not in any positive sense. If there’s a good thing that could come from American Born Chinese, it’ll be a few more people possibly reading Gene Yang’s work. Maybe a few who need to read it, even, but if you went there from here, you’re probably not going to like it.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.