American Born Chinese Review: Culture Clash Designed for Mass Consumption

The show’s most powerful moments come from its small cultural specificities.

American Born Chinese
Photo: Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja

In recent years, films and television shows have been tasked with the mission of depicting under-represented groups on screen while passing a simple litmus test: Who is this for? For American Born Chinese, it’s immediately apparent that the answer is everyone. The show’s characters speak Mandarin about 30 percent of the time, and signs of Asian-Americana are littered throughout. Yet despite its cultural specificities, this adaptation of Gene Luen Yang’s 2006 graphic novel of the same name is an obvious play for Disney’s general audience, what with its comic storyline mixed with fantasy and martial arts.

The series begins with Jin Wang (Ben Wang), a teen struggling to find his social footing, being tasked with showing Chinese transfer student Wei-chen (Jim Liu) around school. A culture clash ensues as Wei-chen, due to his accent and awkwardness, thwarts Jin’s burgeoning popularity. Jin is initially horrified by Wei-chen’s lack of awareness of the social hierarchy, but they eventually bond through a shared love of manga. Jin begins to question not only his own desire to be a “regular guy,” as he says, but also what that even entails for someone like him.

The book’s multiple plotlines have been streamlined into one more easily digestible story, which allows space and time to more fully flesh out secondary characters. Michelle Yeoh’s Guanyin, for instance, serves as both a teacher to Wei-chen and an emissary of the Buddha. While a similar character exists in the novel, Yeoh’s Guanyin proves to be a highlight of the series, doling out wisdom to Wei-chen as she kills time building IKEA furniture or getting seconds at the buffet line. Elsewhere, Daniel Wu plays Wei-chen’s father, Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, through the lens of a weary hero, living out an epilogue where he long stopped being the protagonist.

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Perhaps the most poignant change that the show has made in relationship to the graphic novel is its homing in on Simon (Chin Han) and Christine (Yeo Yann Yann), Jin’s parents, whose marriage embodies both the hopes and struggles of first-generation immigrants as they stumble again and again to climb the social ladder. That said, these scenes have almost a whiplash effect when juxtaposed with the much lighter plotlines surrounding Jin and Wei-chen. And as soon as Wei-chen reveals his celestial origins to Jin, American Born Chinese morphs into a full-blown action series, and its themes of self-identity and racism become diluted.

This is put into stark relief whenever we catch glimpses of Beyond Repair, a fictional sitcom starring Ke Huy Quan as Freddy Wong, an outdated and racist trope of a character from the novel. It’s a clever way for the show’s writers to funnel in aspects of the Chin-Kee caricature found in the novel, and Quan takes the performance to surprisingly meta places. (It almost seems as if Quan isn’t even acting, but simply channeling his own experiences as an actor.) As a seemingly isolated aspect of the series, the Beyond Repair subplot is a reminder that perhaps the so-called golden age of Asian representation is, more than anything, gestural and has minimal impact in terms of improving the lives of the people it aims to represent.

Despite its martial arts flair, American Born Chinese’s most powerful moments come from its small cultural specificities, like the moment when Jin complains about chicken feet in his soup, or when Simon reveals that he’s a huge Bon Jovi fan at work. The series isn’t as revelatory as its source material, but 10 years ago, it might have been unthinkable to see such a broad display of Asian and Asian-American life in mainstream TV, even if it does feel we’re merely watching a Chinese kid essentially inhabit the role of a white Disney protagonist.

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 Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Ben Wang, Yeo Yann Yann, Chin Han, Daniel Wu, Ke Huy Quan, Jim Liu, Sydney Taylor, Stephanie Hsu, Rosalie Chiang, Jimmy O. Yang, Leonard Wu, James Hong, Lisa Lu  Network: Disney+

Anzhe Zhang

Anzhe Zhang studied journalism and East Asian studies at New York University and works as a culture, music, and content writer based in Brooklyn. His writing can be found in The FADER, Subtitle, Open City, and others.

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