American? Chinese? To be or not to be?

​Jin Wang, a teeage American-born-Chinese(ABC), was our protagonist in the graphic novel American-Born-Chinese (2006) by Gene Luen Yang. Jin was introduced after a rendition of one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature Journey to the West and followed by a story of a White American boy Danny, who turned out to be Jin's transformation, and his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee, who turned out to be Monkey King's transformation.

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Being a transformer was Jin's childhood dream. As the first generation of ABC, Jin was born in America but his parents were not. This background had great impacts on Jin's identity crisis, which he wanted to become a native (White) American boy but he was an ABC. There is no doubt that he was an American but he was a different one as you could see from his skin color. He couldn't make many friends because he was not accepted as part of the gang in school. His classmates stereotyped Jin with behavior like eating dogs and isolated him because of prejudice. In the book <<Asian and Pacific Islander Americans: Issues and Concerns for Counseling and Psychotherapy>>, it is suggested that ABC are prone to suffer from bicultural stress(D. S. Sandhu, 1999). Jin's parents had very traditional Chinese ideology. In the beginning of the story, Jin mother told him an old Chinese parable to explain the importance of living environment to a child's learning experience. Believing that a high salary meant a good husband, his mother also told him to study hard and later he could have any girl he wanted. Growing up in Chinatown (a liminal space) and having traditional authoritarian Chinese parental style of teaching, Jin was not like other Americans. His bicultural experiences made him special as he was not like any of his American neighbors or the Chinese in China. He was in-between American and Chinese. Therefore, he wanted to transform into an American just to fit in.