"Why Do Chinese People Have Weird Names?"

[...]we will share additional theoretically and philosophically consistent pedagogical strategies for teaching another multicultural YA text, American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang. Representative comments include the following: "What I find most challenging when using multicultural literature is working it into our strict curriculum. Since the vast majority of students are White and from middle class families, they find it difficult to identify with characters who do not live similar experiences and/or have similar belief systems" (interview, February 23, 2009). After such analysis of Gloria's teaching, we began to wonder if what we learned from her classroom might be applied to other secondary school classes in which students read multicultural YA novels about settings and characters very unlike themselves. [...]we took what we learned and imagined how a similar teaching philosophy might look when applied to another popular multicultural YA text, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. [...]the uneasiness or disturbance students might have while reading about this character can serve as a superb opportunity to discuss such cultural stereotypes (Yang, n. d.).