American Born Chinese

     As we have seen in previous readings, American Born Chinese is another comic that is touching on the personal life experiences of its creator from a child’s perspective. The greatest difference is the use of a Chinese mythological folktale as a secondary story running along side the primary narrative.

Each frame-by-frame movement of the story takes the reader through various moment-to-moment transitions, subject-to-subject transitions and action-to-action transitions. However we rarely see an aspect-to-aspect transition during the story. If you think back to Scott McCloud’s chapter ‘Blood in the Gutter’ these transitions show a lot of “happening” moments.

How do you think that these transitions invoke the reader’s emotional response to the story? Or do you think that these transitions bring a different light to the story being told?

 Do you feel that these transitions differ in their use when compared to how such transitions were used in previous stories?

Remember Scott McCloud said, “Traditional western art and literature don’t wander much. On the whole, we’re a pretty goal-oriented culture.” So a great deal of western art and comics often emphasize ‘getting there’ versus ‘being there.’

How do you think this concept of ‘getting there’ versus ‘being there’ is shown in or has impacted how this story perceived?

The Ending

The Title and The Ending

For me, Adrian Tomine ended Shortcomings perfectly. The reader sees almost everyone’s different failures, or shortcomings, in relation to each other. Miko apologies to Ben for her faults on page 102:

She continues to clearly lay out Ben’s inadequacies through page 103:

The novel ends leaving Ben, and the reader, in mid air, just short of a landing, or resolution.

What did everyone think of the ending? Should it have ended on a more resolved note to “fix” some of the shortcomings? What were some of the other character’s shortcomings? How did race play into perceptions of failure? 

Ironic Twist and Lesbian Tolerance?

Throughout the entire reading of the book, we see Ben’s personality as an obnoxious womanizer obsessed with Caucasian women. He claims to have a “distant relationship” with Miko even when he starts to date other women when she leaves for New York. When we get to page 90, irony hits Ben like a truck of bricks when he sees his ex dating a Caucasian man. He speaks the same language Miko speaks and appears to embrace the Japanese culture, much to Miko’s liking. What do you make of this? Do you think that this form of irony is well deserved for a character like Ben, or do you feel sympathetic for him? What can we draw from Leon (the new boyfriend), a White man embracing Japanese culture? Do you think that this is a form of racism?

 

Another important topic that I found in Shortcomings was the portrayal of sexuality. There appears to be more acts of homosexuality involving girls than there are boys. This is important to analyze because the lesbian community appears to be easily accepted and no one is objecting to this. In Stuck Rubber Baby, there are multiple acts of male homosexuality that are frowned upon by the community. So if the male homosexual community was looked down in Stuck Rubber Baby, why was the lesbian community accepted so easily in Shortcomings? Is this a matter of a time where people were intolerant? Or do people accept lesbians more because of a more…. sexual…. desire?

Comics and Caricature

 We discussed this topic a bit in reference to Maus, but it's important to revisit as we read both Tomine's Shortcomings and Gene Yang's American Born Chinese. In radically different ways, both texts look directly at questions of race, racial stereotypes, and, in the case of Yang's work, caricature.  In Shortcomings, we see a number of characters who are anxious about the politics of interracial dating and the identification of Asian American men with a compromised masculinity (one insidious stereotype Tomine explores through his unsympathetic narrator).  How else does Tomine explore race and valences of race as they relate to gender and sexuality in Shortcomings?

Moreover, on a broader level, how do all comics artists have to contend with the history of caricature in their comics?  As we discussed early in the semester, cartoons function so effectively because they work through amplification, eg a character might have oversize or even grotesque features that don't conform to how real people look in order to encourage reader projection or identification.  What effect does this have on how comics artists draw race? 

In the U.S., as some of the images below attest, there has been a long and deeply troubling history of representing Asian Americans (and dealing with anxieties about immigration and ethnic difference) through caricature.

How do Tomine and, as we will see, Yang deal with this issue in their work, if they do so at all?  How does this question of racial (or other identity-based) caricature hang over a lot of the work we've read this semester? How does work like the Asian American superhero anthology attempt to subvert stereotypes associated with Asian American identity, particularly those related to gender?

As some of the exhibits below demonstrate, many groups, especially African Americans and new immigrants to the U.S. (including the Irish), were racialized and subject to caricature during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Trigger warning: These images can be very upsetting!

Check out this:

Exhibit on racist caricature and cartoons

Site on caricature of Asian Americans called "yellow-face"

Slideshow of racist caricature in commercials

Archive of Caricature of the Irish

Interesting article on the politics of caricature

Crepe Expectations

What did you guys think of the transition from the illustration style of King to Shortcomings? I was a bit thrown off; King had such a complicated, dark style while Shortcomings has a very typical, cartoony style. 

Shortcomings deals with race in a very different way than basically any of the stories we have read so far. It is the first we have read set in more contemporary times, and the first to discuss Asian-American culture. After reading three books about African-American and black culture, how do you read this text differently? How does Tomine discuss issues of race differently than Johnson and Pleece, Cruse, or Anderson? 

What do you think about the importance of or emphasis placed in stereotypes? This novel seems so rooted in it through Ben's character; discuss! 

Is Ben trying to live out a fantasy of being with a white woman, is he just done with Miko, or does he hate himself so much that he wants nothing to do with even his heritage? There is a lot to say about a person's attractions. 

And lastly, do you think the title just relates back to Ben and Miko's relationship, as far as we can tell now? Neither is reaching their full potential with the other person nor supporting the other in the proper way. 

Discuss relationships, stereotypes, Asian-American culture, and self-loathing in response to this post, basically!

Background Profile

The first thing that struck me about Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings was the title page. Tomine displayed, or what I assume, all the main characters of the book right under the title facing the left in profile with their name, age, height and place of birth.

He essentially gives the initial profile of each character from the beginning, rather than using the text and images to tell us, the reader, this basic but important info. I often found myself flipping back to this page to check the characters as they were introduced and revealed more about themselves.

Did this initial profile view of the character strike anyone else? Did you pay attention to this page as an important indicator of the characters? When viewing this page I automatically thought of the way we, modern society, have access to everyone's basic, even in depth at times, through social media. Do think Tomine had this in mind while making this page? How does this page affect your view of the characters as individuals? Lastly, do you think pages like this is important in a modern comic where society is so obsessed with size, looks, gender and overall profile of person?

"Protagonist"

For the most part, the novels that we have been reading have been centered around some pretty altruistic protagonists (I mean, we can count Martin Luther King amongst them, for god's sake). Sure, they might say or do things that we don't agree with from time-to-time, but for the most part we can consider them to be unquestionably "good people."

Shortcomings offers a very different kind of protagonist than what we have seen so far. Ben Tanaka edges very close to being a true narcissist; he seems almost exclusively interested in only his own personal problems, non-receptive to the feelings and emotions of others, and seemingly incapable of dealing with people in way that doesn't demean, mock, or somehow otherwise belittle them. Most of his problems stem from flaws in his own personality, but he seems incapable of understanding this, and thus, incapable of addressing the issues. Even in the small section we have read, there are no less than three separate scenes where major arguments flare up between Ben and Miko, simply because Ben is unable to take any measure of criticism.

How does this affect your reading of Shortcomings? Does following such a selfish character make the book more difficult to read, or does it make it more engaging? Do you see any of your own personality traits in Ben, or any other characters in the book? Do those personality flaws make the characters more relatable in some way? Or am I completely off the mark, and is Ben just misunderstood?