1. In Min Hyoung Song’s “‘How Good It Is to Be a Monkey’：Comics, Racial Formation, and American Born Chinese”, the author talks about the development of Asian American racial formations through comics. The author especially talks about Yang’s American Born Chinese which described the racialism and the stereotype of Asians and Asian Americans. In addition, the author emphasizes that comics plays an important role to lead readers to consider the transformations in racial formations.
2. The author takes Gordon Yamamoto as an example. [Song 77] Gordon Yamamoto talks about the character Gordon works against racial discrimination. The author mentions that the drawings of Gordon make readers think Gordon is friendly, and it shows that visual meaning-making is a good way to make readers to accept the content in comics and consider the race and racism.
Another example is American Born Chinese. [Song 78] The author introduces that there are some points in this comic to show the consideration of race and racism. First, the character Chin-Kee shouts “Harro Amellica!” in the comic. This shows Yang used the textual storytelling to describe people’s stereotype of Chinese accent. In addition, Yang drew Chin-Kee as a person with pronounced buckteeth, small eyes and sickly pale yellow skin. This shows that Yang used the vision to describe the stereotype of Chinese people and impress readers in this way.
3. The author used the term “graphic narrative” to define a new type of comic.[Song 76] In my opinion, the graphic narrative comic is a combine of the realism comic and the genre fiction comic. Like Yang’s work American Born Chinese, he described the Asian American’s situations in real lives with a creative fiction story. In American Born Chinese, Yang described Monkey King fell into racial knowledge and he made some changes to prove himself. This implies Asian Americans are in the same situation that they have tried to know about themselves and fit into American society.
4. In this article, the author emphasized that comic is a powerful tool to lead people to consider the problems and situations in our real lives. I’d like to mention Japanese comic Crayon Shin-chan. This comic tells many daily stories which happened to Crayon Shin-chan. The readers can learn something like parents can also make mistakes from the comic. This is a wonderful comic because people will consider the problems raised by the comic, and people will be more comfortable to accept the consideration from the comics than other ways.
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