SPOILERS AHEAD
I just love this book. Yang's ability to take a bildungsroman and make it new, imaginative, cultural, touching, and humorous astounds me. The beauty of this book is the layers it is able to produce: autobiography, myth, and visual and written metaphor. However, what I think this book does the best is show the impact of racist stereotypes on a human level and what it feels like to be a child who cannot be seen for themselves, but for their ethnicity alone.
The three tales of this story (the story of Jin, the Monkey King, and the Danny and Chin-Kee) are all hitting the same points in unique ways. The strength of this method is the reader is able to see how deeply personal it is to be racially profiled. From the Monkey King forcing himself and his followers to wear shoes, to Danny assaulting Chin-Kee, to Jin ruining his friendships after he's rejected by his white peers, each protagonist is hiding a piece of themselves.
Yang is careful in the details of his illustrations as well. For moments of significance he blacks out the panel background, only showcasing the focus character and any relevant text. After Jin is bullied for his dumplings and is accused of eating dog, he is shown only eating sandwiches. In these moments Yang is directing the reader without words, but with subtleties that I seem to always find more of upon rereading.
For any audience from middle school and above, this is an essential tale of learning to accept yourself when everyone around you makes you feel like an outsider.
