The Monkey King and White Acceptance

I remember growing up and watching old VHS tapes of the Chinese Monkey King cartoon series, a mind-numbing series of TV shows every Chinese kid at the time was being raised on. Adapted from Sun Wukong from Journey To The West, the cartoon series was a ubiquitous series in China comparable to SpongeBob in America. While Journey To The West and the Monkey King, specifically, have literally experienced hundreds of remakes in television, film, and literature, Chinese media adaptations of the novel have largely been substanceless rehashes of a familiar name; however, Gene Luen Yang takes this familiar name and throws it into an unfamiliar American territory to represent a much deeper, race-motivated issue in America.

In a nutshell, white acceptance is the idea that underrepresented groups seek out approval from white members of their community in the effort to be considered generally accepted in society. In American Born Chinese, Jin Wang seeks out white acceptance from his white peers at school because he simply wants to fit in and the Monkey King seeks out acceptance from the gods because he wants to be more than just a monkey. By relating white people to the deities, Chinese people to the monkeys, and generally accepted “white culture” as the heavenly disciplines that the Monkey King chooses to master, the symbolism relating the Monkey King and Jin tells of the Asian-American experience from the perspective of a boy who feels like an outsider.

As the novel progresses, the Monkey King and Jin both experience sudden transformations on their perception of themselves; the Monkey King accepts that he is indeed a monkey, and Jin accepts that he certainly is Chinese. Wong Lai-Tsao makes the Monkey King recognize this, and the Monkey King does the same for Jin. As the Monkey King reveals himself to Jin, Yang ties together the different parallels within American Born Chinese and allows for the reader to consider the value of accepting oneself for who they are rather than seeking out white acceptance.

While the Monkey King is a mythological character, he serves as the best representation Yang provides to explain the struggle of Asian-Americans and other minorities when it comes to white acceptance in America. That said, Yang’s use of parallelism provides guidance for kids struggling with white acceptance in predominantly white communities and opens white students up to some of the deep challenges minority groups have in a clean, well-told manner.