Analysis And Reflection On China Boy By Gus Lee

Gus Lee is an American writer and ethicist. In 1991, he published his childhood memoir, China Boy. He is the only American-born Chinese and son of the immigrant Shanghai family, he has three sisters but is also the only child who struggles with English because everyone else has a formal teacher. Later on, Lee attends West Point, study about East Asia history and then get a degree in UC law school. In brief, the story starts with how Kai’s family escapes from the civil war in China and came to the United States, situated in a tough, largely poor neighborhood, Panhandle. Kai’s mother loves him because he is the only son and pin large hope on him. His world is surrounded by his mother, almost over-protecting, so before he started school, he has no idea how dangerous and hostile people are, and the situation getting worse after his mother passed away. His father married a new wife, named Edna, she is trying to get rid of anything that relates to China or Chinese culture. As the only Asian in a black community, he simply becomes the target of the bad kids in the neighborhood. They bully him because he can’t speak English and he can’t fight, and his stepmother Edna doesn’t care. Later on, Kai joins the YMCA and start learning how to fight, in between, the conflict between the U.S and Chinese culture had to struggle him, but he learned how to deal with the problem. In the end, he fights against Willie Mack, and bit him up, get a final victory. There are a number of important characters in ‘China boy’, but the most important is Kai, The main character and narrator of the novel. He speaks neither English nor Cantonese, so he is pretty hard to make friends both in Chinatown or Panhandle. Kai learned from Mah-mee that fighting was harmful to his karma, that makes him hard on learning how to fight and fight back. Kai's mother, Mah-mee, had a great influence on Kai even after her death. Mah-mee is superstitious. She forbids Kai from fighting because she thinks it's very bad for Kai ’s Karma, this led to the one of the conflict between two culture, fight or not. At the same time she sits in the bathtub and talks with her father. Dedication is evidence that she is still very “traditional”.

Next, there is Edna, the stepmother of Kai. She is cold and abusive, she does the exactly opposite things that Mah-mee do, throw Kai outside the the dangerous world. She starves him mentally and physically. She doesn't allow Chinese to be spoken or ancestral stories to be told, Chinese food were off table, and she bit Kai a lot, makes him don’t want to back home. However, she is the a pretty important character, what she had done to Kai, forced him to learn how to fight and protect himself, not just worry about the bad Karma that Mah-mee told him. As a result, Kai learned how to boxing, he win the fight against Big Willie, and when Edna refuse to let him in the house, he told her that she is not Mah-mee, and he is not going to get picked anymore with his fits up. Finally, there is Big Willie. The biggest and meanest person Kai has to deal with among all the people who bully him.After Kai beats Lucky, Big Willie beats Kai so hard that Kai almost became mud, which causes Kai to lose all his confidence. Kai’s teachers at the YMCA figure out that Big Willie is the reason that Kai disconnecting to boxing, so he cheers Kai up and trains him hard, in the end, Kai wins the fight. The novel mentions a problem that many immigrants have to face: whether to abandon the culture of their family or to become a deserter of the culture of the country in which they live. The culture represented by Kai's mother and Uncle Shim is slowly disappearing after Mah-mee’s death. Kai is speaking broken”Shanghai”, which nobody nearby understood, and without language and reference point that can help him transition, he might be the abandon by the old culture and the unwelcome one in the new culture. Lucky, Kai meets his reference point at the YMCA, where the coach train him how to fight, and transit him into the new culture, Kai finally able to protect himself and preserve his integrity. What I like about this book is, this book is pretty true, I can even replace myself as Kai though I am in a much better than Kai. One thing I don't like about this novel is that it is full of too many trivial accidents, put up the pieces need many time and memory.