American Born Chinese Transposed to Prose Pgs. 30-35

            Jin Wang stood next to his teacher in front of the classroom, looking out at the rest of the class.  He searched for a face that looked like him, and it took a real effort.  There was only one girl, Suzy Nakamura, in a sea of pale faces.  As the teacher mispronounced his name and misunderstood that he was not actually from China, Jin quickly discovered that it was going to be a long year.  Rumors began to fly all over the school about Jin.  Some kids accused him of eating dogs.  Others thought that Jin and Suzy were related simply because they looked alike.  When they discovered they were not related, the rumor changed to they were arranged to be married.  Because of all the rumors, Suzy and Jin spent as little time together as possible.  Their commonality turned out to be a curse.  Jin spent most of his time alone, when he was not getting teased for being Asian.  One day, a big boy named Peter approached Jin.  He told Jin that if he gave Peter his sandwhich he’d be his friend.  Peter was a bully, but since Jin had no friends, he agreed.  Peter continued to push Jin around for the rest of the semester, but to Jin he and Peter were best friends.  Over winter break, Peter went to visit his uncle in Pennsylvania and never came back.  Once again, Jin was all alone.
        I decided to try and turn a few pages of the American Born Chinese into prose.  This was an experiment in how the change in format would change to mood of the story.  To begin with, changing the format was a bigger task than I anticipated.  Though I tried to keep the pieces in order, there were certain details that I had to change in order for the story to make sense.  I also found that when the visual aspect is taken away from the story, the humor pretty much goes away.  In fact, the plot becomes incredibly depressing.  The one part that I feel became more apparent out of the transfer was how lonely Jin Wang actually was.  I saw this by emphasizing that he did not spend time with Suzy Nakamura, even though they had their heritage in common, because of the way that they were teased by their peers simply because they were similar to each other.  I also find it sad that the students made fun of them in that way, and yet all of the students look similar as well, yet none of them are making fun of each other for it.  It seems a little hypocritical to me.  Tolerance is what makes America such a great place to live.  What I want to know is if our society is based on originality and being proud of our own culture, why do so many people spend their energy bringing others’ down?  There is an extreme lack of disrespect in this passage that should be there.  That’s what this country is about.