The story of American Born Chinese consists of three seemingly separate tales, which are tied together at the end of the book.

A monk named Wong Lai-Tsao is sent by Tze-Yo-Tzuh on a mission to carry three packages to the west and is to pick up his disciple, The Monkey King, on his journey.

[3] His family moves from San Francisco's Chinatown to a suburb where he goes to school with only one other Asian student, Suzy Nakamura.

Jin struggles with his Chinese identity and begins to reject it until he meets a new Asian student, Wei-Chen Sun.

Danny is embarrassed by Chin-Kee, who is depicted as a racist stereotype, in traditional queue with buck teeth, speaking in pidgin English.

The Monkey King tells Jin that his son Wei-Chen was sent to live among the mortals without sin for forty years but no longer wanted to follow in his father's footsteps of serving humans after becoming sickened by his classmates' self-centeredness.

The primary example of these stereotypes is Chin-Kee, who is the embodiment of the term "coolie," a nineteenth-century racial slur for unskilled Chinese workers.

According to Chaney, he is "an incarnation of the 'Yellow Peril' era of racism"[6] which Song defines as "slant-eyes, short stature, sallow skin, predictably Chinese clothing, claw-like fingertips, and long menacing queue".

Song mentions that "[t]o emphasize further that this is an image originally formalized in newspapers and popular entertainment and later largely disseminated through the growth of popular mass media, the words 'clap clap clap' line the entire bottom of the panel...This, and the words 'ha ha ha,' are likewise repeated in other panels, replicating the canned laughter and applause of television sit-coms.

[3] During class with Danny, Chin-Kee knows the answer to every question in every school subject, including algebra, Spanish, anatomy, chemistry, and U.S. government.

When he is rejected, he is determined to prove to the world that he is more than just a Monkey, and masters the "four disciplines of invulnerability" in order to become "The Great Sage, Heaven's Equal."

The primary characters of American Born Chinese undergo phases of identity crises that are coupled with some sort of mental or physical transformation(s).

Fu[1] argues that the Monkey King's transformation into Chin-Kee is a representation of "[t]he legendary trickster figure [that] has been repeatedly re-imagined by Chinese American writers as a source of cultural strength, a symbol of subversion and resistance, and a metaphor for cross-cultural and interracial negotiation."

The Monkey King in Yang's version of the classic tale does not use his trickery so much for rebellion as for helping Jin Wang explore and accept himself and identify with his culture.

[1] Jin Wang "struggles to survive exclusion and racist bullying in his search for an identity in a predominantly white suburban school.

Wei-Chen Sun is actually the Monkey King's eldest son, sent to earth in human form as an emissary for Tze-Yo-Tzuh.