American Born Chinese Coming of Age Quotes

We never really meet Jin's mother, but we're betting that if she were more a part of the book, she'd be pretty funny. Take this parable she tells Jin: it's all about a mother who keeps moving with her kid because they keep ending up in an environment that distracts her son from a good path in life. They finally end up across the street from a university, so the son ends up studying all the time. It's a funny story because it's so clear what the goal of Jin's mom is: she just wants Jin to study hard (instead of play)—which is why they move to the suburbs. The sad part of course is that it's that much harder for Jin to feel at home with his Chineseness in white suburbia.

The Monkey King meets Tze-Yo-Tzuh and gets called little monkey—that can't be good for the Monkey King's ego. Talk about patronizing, right? We think there's a pretty good chance that Tze-Yo-Tzuh does it on purpose just to irk Monkey, who—predictably—gets irked. But what's funny is that Monkey doesn't say he's not little; instead he says he's not a monkey. Then Tze-Yo-Tzuh just layers it on and calls him silly little monkey, which of course makes Monkey even madder.

Maybe Monkey deserves to be called a silly little monkey because he's clearly not very mature. What does he do when he reaches the five golden pillars on his flight away from Tze-Yo-Tzuh? First he graffitis a pillar, and then he pees on the pillar. (By the way, if you're wondering what he writes, he basically tags the pillar with his new name "Great Sage.") It's hard to get more juvenile than that.