American Born Chinese Frame Analysis

This frame stood out to me for many reasons. First, I thought it was a cool idea, when the protagonist breaks through “reality”, to have the actually border of the comic be torn apart. I noticed how many of these frames abided by the rule of thirds, as shown above in my annotations. In the story, the Monkey King, ashamed of his heritage, attempts to find strength in becoming a powerful human, even more powerful than God. After the king breaks reality and, showing his hubris, vandalizes and urinates on a gold pillar, he zooms back to God and is shown he was in no way more powerful than God. The pillars, revealed in the lower slide, are God’s fingers, proving in a fun way that he is always in God’s reach. The monkey kind wishes to find happiness through leaving his identity of being a monkey, yet what God is trying to teach him is to find happiness through accepting what you were meant to be: a monkey. In the lower-right frame, the Monkey King towers over God. Although he has height, God still dominates the frame through his size, showing the king’s attempt and failure to gain dominance. Another thing that caught my eye was that the monkey king’s face is cut-off in the final slide. This closeup shows his realization that he was wrong about being superior. The other half of his face is omitted. I originally thought that this was because his self-indulgent, egotistical paradigm is being cut short, metaphorically and literally, yet I saw that on the next page the faces are continued, frozen, duplicated, in shock (see p78 for reference). Thus the reason behind this is so that his reaction is bridged on the two pages so it seems more fluid and connected. I still think my previous analysis, even though I just disproved it, deserves some consideration. This story of toxicity and trying to change identity is evidently interwoven with the main character’s story of trying to shed his Chinese heritage in order to assimilate and fit in with the other white children. He is rude to the Taiwanese boy, similar to how the Monkey King is rude to the fellow monkeys and makes them wear shoes. This rejection of one’s own identity, shown clearly in the two parallels, is a common theme and an interesting look into the complexities of understanding one’s own race and heritage and what it means to them.