Just a Thought and a Book by Gene Luen Yang

Stories are a powerful tool. They allow us to peek into the inner lives of people we may never, or can never meet. Look around you at all the people you pass on the street or have minor interactions with every day. What are the histories of these people? What is reality to them? There are stories everywhere we look, yet, some of us will never think twice about this.

I think tunnel vision is something a lot of us suffer from. While we may intellectually grasp that we and our communities aren’t the only history surrounding us, gaining a deep understanding of that requires more work.

You don’t have to read biographies and history books if non-fiction’s not your thing. In fact, it’s far easier to gain an understanding of a people by reading their fiction. Fiction is powerful precisely because it doesn’t have to rely too heavily on historical fact. It can dramatize what put us to sleep in history and humanities classes, letting us see people instead of numbers.

This world needs more people to see the humanity in what they consider the “other”. Life is expansive, beautiful yet cruel, and we cannot appreciate every facet of it until we stop pretending “the others” exist. There is no other, there are only humans.

Growing up Black in America I found it easy to relate to Jin Wang’s, and the Monkey King’s, plight. As early as grade school I remember feeling pressured into staying with my “own kind”, or being careful to make only White friends. At the time, of course, I didn’t have the words to express this or the fear of alienation it caused me.

“It’s easy to become anything you wish, as long as you forfeit your soul,” a herbalist tells young Jin Wang, and this is what I did. I cherry picked my likes and dislikes, tailoring myself to be more approachable. This caused many complaints of me being “too white” from Black friends and classmates. Some even genuinely believed I was bi-racial. And I always surprised myself at how quick, how vehemently, I denied this.

“You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from 500 years’ imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey.”

It wasn’t until my twenties that I finally asked, “What the fuck am I doing?” Hobbies, TV, books, music — I no longer worry at being perceived as being “too White” or “too Black”, because there’s no such thing. My skin can only describe so much of me.

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