American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang provides us with a different way to approach and portray topics for readers. Instead of solely relying on pages of text to tell a meaningful story, Yang created a graphic novel that utilizes frames of pictures with small amounts of text and speech bubbles to get his points across. While it is possible to just read the text on each page to get a general idea of the story, the pictures are what provide the reader with the full story.
For graphic novels, the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” holds true. Instead of having to describe everything in the story using words, the author can use a single picture to describe multiple things at once. When Jin and Amelia are at the movie theater together, Yang almost exclusively uses pictures without any text to show both of their experiences that night. When the pair first get seated inside the theater on page 165, they both have nervous sweat coming from their heads and empty speech bubbles showing the reader that their situation is awkward and neither of them know what they should do. Within the same scene on page 170, Yang again decides not to use words to describe the interaction between Jin and Amelia, which in this case is Jin making the classic move of pretending to stretch to put his arm around Amelia. Here, the reader can see that at first Amelia is a bit shocked by the action and doesn’t immediately react, making Jin nervous and slightly embarrassed. Amelia sees Jin’s reaction and leans into him, surprising him. In the last frame, the two are seen leaning into each other happily. Although there isn’t any text to describe the situation to the reader, they are able to infer everything they need to know from the provided images.
American Born Chinese being a graphic novel also helps Yang examine the racism and stereotyping that Asian-Americans face in this country. With the use of images, Yang is able to show a character that consists of the most common Chinese stereotype characteristics. The character Chin-Kee is shown as a Chinese teenager who wears traditional Chinese clothing, has squinty eyes, buck teeth, switches his R’s and L’s, and mentions that he is eating “clispy flied cat gizzards wiff noodle” (114). If someone was to just read the text on each page, they would be able to understand that there was a Chinese character who struggles with English, it isn’t until looking at the pictures that one realizes that the character is meant to embody the American stereotypes of Chinese people. The character of Chin-Kee jumps out at the reader and is easily understood in what he represents. This allows Yang to focus more on what he wants the reader to take away from his work.
Graphic novels facilitate a more visual way to tell stories and teach lessons compared to regular, text only novels. By utilizing pictures to capture scenes and body language, graphic novels are able to tell stories just like their plain text counterparts, but instead without a large amount of text. Graphic novels are able to tell stories efficiently thanks to pictures being “worth a thousand words”.
I really like what you are saying about the benefits of having pictures in graphic novels. The utilization of imagery in this way makes the books a lot easier to write and a lot easier to understand. On top of that, I think that there are a lot of things that can be shown in pictures that would be really hard to get across in just words. However, I do think that there is one major problem with graphic novels that isn't an issue in regular books. It is really easy to whip through a graphic novel without analyzing the pictures and just reading the dialogue. In doing this the readers miss out on a fundamental portion of the storytelling. I think that many just read the words without looking at the pictures and, while they do get a general understanding of what the story is about, they miss out on the depth that the novel has. The pictures are absolutely vital to the narrative of a graphic novel and if you just skim through and don't actually analyze them then you are doing yourself a disservice. This is the main thing that, I believe, gives regular books an edge over graphic novels. There is no way to skim through the descriptions in a book and still understand what the plot is. If you put in the effort while reading a graphic novel I think the benefits are there, but sadly I do not think a lot of people do.
ReplyDeleteI personally love how you describe the graphic novel of the American Born Chinese to the saying of a picture is worth a thousand words. I personally believe that because of this saying, this is the reason the book is not that long in length. In what takes an author two chapters to describe a character, Yang is able to show the reader exactly how he pictures the character in just one graphic.
ReplyDeleteWe talked in class briefly about this as well with Pride and Prejudice in comparison with the Lizzie Benet Diaries. Most of us agreed that the pictures in our head in which we imagined for the characters for Elizabeth and her sisters were far different than how they were portrayed in the diaries. Even with the same description of the sisters and characters within the literary reading, we all envisioned a different look for the characters. However, with the American Born Chinese because we can see the visual representation of the characters, we all see them to be looking the same within all our envisions. For example, Danny will always be blonde, with spiked hair, and a greenish striped shirt for all the readers.