Border Writing in A Graphic Novel: Multicultural Identities and Translation

This article investigates border writing in Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese, which narrates the author's experience of and reflection on multicultural identity. Border writing concerns border crossing in terms of culture, identity, gender, and so on, and the form itself sways between original writing and translation. Many minority writers adopt this special form of writing/translating as a metaphor of their multicultural and multiracial background. On the other hand, graphic novels incorporate another form of border crossing between words and pictures. As a result, Yang's work, as both a graphic novel and a border writing, explores the identity crisis of American born Chinese in a way that can be called multidimensional translation. By translating and hybridizing classics and cultural symbols from both China and the West and in both words and pictures, the graphic novel presents itself as a work that simultaneously de-familiarizes and familiarizes both Chinese and English readers in different modes, giving rise to a poetic effect that resonates with the author's hybrid identity. With an analysis of the author's methods of border writing, the article discusses the relationship between identity and translation from the perspective of deconstruction.