The pilot of American Born Chinese promised both a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel’s spirit and a handful of surprises and new dimensions to fill a season of TV in 2023. Episode 2, “A Monkey on a Quest,” sees Jin take his “whole community… three steps backwards” (as Suzy Nakamura accuses him) for the sake of social– and soccer team –acceptance, continuing the themes so artfully drawn from Gene Yang’s seminal graphic novel. But does the show’s sophomore installment live up to the pilot’s promise?
Reminder: SPOILERS for this second episode of American Born Chinese.
1. “He’s a Smart and Special Boy”
This second episode starts with Wei-Chen in his milieu, crashing to the ground with his unlikely vision that Jin is the solution to the uprising in the heavens. The episode ends with Jin knocked out, the uprising in the heavens having crashed into his school cafeteria kitchen. No matter how well or poorly the other elements of the show work so far, the creators were sure to make the chemistry between Jin and Wei-Chen really solid, a love-hate that’s believable as a genuine bond AND a tragic betrayal on Jin’s part. Like Gene Yang’s original graphic novel, Jin’s cruelty to Wei-Chen is patently a bit of self-hatred or internalized prejudice, but perhaps there’s more pathos or richness than Yang’s comic could accomplish. The screen time that Ben Wang (Jin Wang) and Jimmy Liu (as Sun Wei-Chen) share allows for layer upon layer of dynamics. Wei-Chen’s description of Jin as that “smart” and “special boy” with an “athletic body” in front of the whole school doubles as a hilarious show of Wei-Chen’s boldness and as a really sweet signal of his devotion to his new friend. For me, their connection holds the rest of the show together, as the show’s creators surely intended.
2. Suzy Nakamura and the Culture Club’s Uprising
Meanwhile, the fallout from episode 1’s meme of Jin’s laundry cart mishap, topped with the racist “What could go Wong?” bit, is that Suzy Nakamura’s Culture Club rallies to Jin’s defense in anti-AAPI Hate protest fashion. On one hand, I was thrilled that they took a peripheral character from the graphic novel (where Suzy Nakamura was the only other Asian kid in Jin’s class, for that reason alone paired romantically with Jin by his ignorant classmates) and animated her, played by Rosalie Chiang, with the kind of political pride and voice that Asian Americans in media are too rarely depicted with. On the other, while the show’s Suzy Nakamura demonstrates a breadth of savvy, strength, and empathy, the whole “We Hate Hate,” “Justice for Just Us” “movement” of the Culture Club gets played at best as a device for Jin’s shameful racial self-abnegation, at worst as a risible parody of “woke” (I’m so sick of that word appropriated as a cudgel) Asian American activism, perhaps ineffectual or over-sensitive. I think the show could plausibly deny intending that disappointing representation, but I also think the wrong audiences could plausibly infer it.
3. Shot down… in a Blaze of Glorrrryyyy
I should’ve seen it coming when Simon’s boss catches Simon (Chin Han) bellowing along to Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory” in his car, and instead of humiliating him, his boss turns out eager to chat up Simon in their shared BonJovism. The situation puts Simon the Taiwanese immigrant in that familiar discomfort as an outsider/insider in American culture. His wife Christine (Yann Yann Yeo) has been pushing him relentlessly to request an overdue promotion, even using her advice to Jin about the soccer team as an occasion for very unsubtle shade at Simon’s spinelessness. Some of the Mandarin lost in English translation is how biting Christine actually is when chiding Simon to assert himself. The translation also undersells how much her reproach echoes her urging Jin to “use your voice… That’s how you get your power!” While Christine being the furthest thing from submissive is refreshingly anti-stereotype, I’m not sure how I feel about Simon slotting into some racist cliches of Asian masculinity. But that’s all very fraught, and I think the show earns some faith to serve up a complex cast of characters who both defy and slip into tropes, as any of us might perform.
4. “Way Worse!”
Very punchable Greg Wallace, however, with his curly blond locks and skeevy quid pro quo, is grossly trope-y. Greg is the older kid on the soccer team who trades a good word with the Coach for Jin publicly exonerating him for making the meme video. He acts like his excuse, to impress the other idiots on Varsity who say stuff that is “way worse,” is any kind of excuse at all. In fact, it’s all an ugly web of false innocence that, like Amelia’s friend apropos of nothing inserting, “BTS is like my favorite band,” feels suffocatingly ubiquitous in very White spaces. Greg is somewhat cartoonish and buffoonish, but honestly, not far from the truth of my experiences. That makes Jin’s inexcusable tradeoffs also understandable, the kind of compromises I cringe that I made in desperate adolescence.
5. Journey to the East
…Which then makes me smile wide when I see Pigsy appear, the Zhu BaJie character who is part of the main cast of “Journey to the West,” the Chinese classic telling Sun WuKong’s and Guanyin’s story. As I mentioned, Sun WuKong’s exploits were the stuff of my childhood bedtime stories, and “Zhu BaJie” is literally what my mom would call us when we acted stupidly or messily. Pigsy doesn’t show up messy at first, raking leaves like an oddly-dressed groundskeeper at the school. By the ending fight scene in the cafeteria between Wei-Chen and Pigsy, trying to recapture Su WuKong’s iron staff, Jingu Bang, he’s in full Zhu BaJie glory, fighting and flipping and eating and chortling, busting into Jin’s reality with jarring mythic strangeness.
I admit there’s a small part of me wondering if any viewers fall off of the show at this point, especially ones completely unfamiliar with “Journey to the West” or incurious enough to scoff at the juxtaposition. I remember the pride one moment when I first saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in a California theater, followed by the grief when non-Asian audience members started laughing derisively at the Wuxia fantastical leaps on treetops (performed by Chow Yun Fat and… Michelle Yeoh!). Some part of me still winces in preparation for that kind of disdain. But that’s the same part of me that sympathizes with Jin’s decidedly un-woke, traitorous choices, and then I feel immense pride that Zhu BaJie– and Suzy Nakamura– are going to come crashing irresistibly right into Jin’s world.
See you next week with our take on American Born Chinese episode 3, “Rockstar Status.”
