What is genre play? And how does American Born Chinese utilize it?
Genre play is characterized as "the ways in which rhetors playfully re-conceptualize reified norms, working both within and against those socially constituted ways of doing and knowing". In other words, it challenges our commonly held view of something by "deploying a text that blends, repurposes, or moves in and out of genre expectations". American Born Chinese shows examples of genre play by remixing the genre of both Journey to the West and Transformers as well as taking stereotypical tropes and turning them on their head.
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Serious to Comedy
American Born Chinese remixes the tale Journey to the West in a way that goes against the original genre. While Journey to the West was a serious tale, American Born Chinese's target audience is much younger, and Yang utilizes comedy as a way to reach out to a wider audience.
Action to Emotional
Transformers is an action comic/cartoon/movie series which usually depicts mechanical battles, explosions, and other action genre tropes. American Born Chinese on the other hand, has none of these. This novel remixes how the theme of Transformers is used, primarily as a mode of understanding ones true self.
Ignorance to Learning
The Monkey King transforms himself into the minstrel character Chin-Kee. Chin-Kee is Jin's cousin, and represents all the negative stereotypes that Jin has come to believe represent Chinese people over the years. These aspects of Chin-Kee are inspired by ignorance, yet the Monkey King uses them as a tool to teach Jin important lessons.