Teaching American Born Chinese isn’t Beyond Repair: Preparing Preservice Teachers to Navigate a “Great Wall” of Mirrors and “Bamboo” Windows

Abstract

I analyze Gene Luen Yang’s 2006 graphic novel American Born Chinese (ABC) in order to highlight ways in which this text presents opportunities for teachers of Asian American young adult literature to lean into the complexities of Asian American identities and stereotypes (Yang 2006). By putting American ideologies of Orientalization into conversation with Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit), I create an analytical lens that centers the transnational circulations of power that inform the curricular representations of Asian Americans in the US curriculum. Building on this, I insert considerations of teacher education literature into Asian and Asian American Studies in order to trouble dichotomization between “US” and “world,” which leaves little room for K-12 teachers to foreground transnational contexts. I offer a model for navigating the self-work that informs their pedagogical decisions to teach complex texts by identifying the “Great Wall” of mirrors and “bamboo” windows of racial stereotypes and racializing rhetorical positioning within texts that influence their decisions in the classroom, including their selection of which texts to offer their students. I show that this model provides a framework for resisting essentialized narratives of Asian American identities by centering teachers’ own critical self-reflections.