American Born Chinese Foreigness and "The Other" Quotes

This is the part where Jin ignores Amelia after he sees her with Greg. After he walks away, Greg says: "'See what I mean? He's a nice guy, but he's kind of a geek. I mean what's with the hair?'" Clearly Greg's not a really nice guy, but what we're stuck on is his comment about Jin's hair—it ends up being ironic and kind of funny because he doesn't realize that Jin's hair is a complete copy of his own hairstyle (only without the blond color). Greg can't recognize a part of himself on someone else because he thinks Jin's so different than he is.

It's rare for this book to feature a girl talking deeply, so it's cool that Yang includes this scene with Suzy. She's telling Jin about how she felt excluded at a party given by an old Japanese school classmate of hers, and then she links her sadness about the party to Timmy's cruelty. Suzy expresses with more honesty than anyone else in the book just how hard it is to deal with the kind of name-calling Jin and the rest of them experience at school everyday. But we're also curious about something else: Why can't Jin—even Wei-Chen—state as clearly and as honestly as Suzy does how they feel about being excluded from mainstream American life? Why does Yang give Suzy these lines instead of the guys?

Ah… the Chin-Kee/William Hung/Ricky Martin performance… Where do we begin? Obviously the performance is completely cringe-worthy and embarrassing for Danny, and not just because the venue is totally inappropriate (they're at a library). It's also the fact that Chin-Kee just doesn't care—he's completely un-self-conscious, without any sense of shame in his performance or himself. So while he represents the foreign or the Other like no one else in the book, significantly he doesn't represent this to himself. This performance drives home the reality that all Chin-Kee's (and everyone else's, for that matter) Otherness is everyone else's problem projected on to him.

Also worth noting is that fact that Chin-Kee's having fun with American culture, which makes us wonder: Why isn't anyone else? Why is everyone else so serious and protective of whatever constitutes American culture?