Hybridity & Integration
Darren Chetty reviews Chinglish: An Almost Entirely True Story by Sue Cheung and Alterations by Ray Xu
Review by Darren Chetty | Originally published in the print edition, April 25th 2025
Britain’s Chinese community tends to garner less political attention than its Caribbean, African, and South Asian counterparts, and this extends to books. For adults, we’ve recently seen Angela Hui’s Takeaway, a memoir interspersed with recipes. For children, Maisie Chan’s Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths is an illustrated middle grade novel, the title subverting a common stereotype.
Chinglish: An Almost Entirely True Story by Sue Cheung and Alterations, a graphic novel by Ray Xu, are about the children of Chinese immigrants growing up in what is commonly referred to as ‘the West’ in the 1980s and 90s. Both are coming-of-age stories that draw heavily on their authors’ own childhoods, sitting somewhere between fiction and memoir. Memoir written for adults will attempt to describe events as they occurred, and also include reflections on these events from the perspective of the adult author.
The adult presence isn’t verboten in memoirs for children; Roald Dahl’s Boy gives us insight into how the adult Dahl views his child self (and many of Dahl’s books have a sometimes avuncular, sometimes mischievous older narrator). However, the third-person storyteller is often regarded as old-fashioned in children’s and YA publishing today; the adult voice intruding on the (artifice of ) child speaking to child. Simultaneously, most YA fiction is set in the present; the main character, in many cases the narrator, is a contemporary of the intended reader. This is a key difference between books such as The Buddha of Suburbia and Submarine on the one hand, and books like The Hate U Give or Heartstopper on the other.
Chinglish begins in 1984, Alterations a decade later. In Sue Cheung’s, Jo Kwan lives with her parents, helping them run a Chinese takeaway in Coventry. She has cousins in Canada – and it is there that Xu’s protagonist, Kevin Lee, lives with his mother who runs a business altering clothes. Each book alludes to the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a reason for their families relocating. Both characters are conscious of living in predominantly white areas – and make references to what we might term ‘the other Asian’ as a point of comparison and contrast.
Criticisms have been made of Chinglish in regard to the portrayal of Jo’s father, a violent, abusive man who flushes his daughter’s head in the toilet and holds a cleaver to his wife’s neck. We are in need of positive representations of Chinese men in children’s literature and indeed the broader culture in the UK, and this is clearly not one. Young readers might well benefit from a content note at the start of the book. It is worth noting that we need to take care over burdening individual writers, particularly minoritised writers; when a person cannot write honestly about their life because it reflects badly on ‘the community’ they incur a further harm.
Jo and Kevin are living in environments where difference is stigmatised and at an age where friendships are often formed through shared interests and similarities. We see how this impacts their connection to family members, who are frequently sources of embarrassment. The social pressure to de-emphasise certain aspects of oneself in order to gain acceptance with one’s childhood peers is present in both stories. The phenomenology of difference – smell, taste, sound, sight are all invoked. Kevin’s concern is that he is invisible. When visibility comes, it is through an incident with a century egg (prepared by his grandmother) that results in him being known as Eggboy. Kevin wants nothing more than to fit in. He considers the alterations required to be just another kid. Jo has similar concerns. However, she views herself as different to her parents and her white school mates; she speaks of ‘The Chinese’ and ‘The English’, and ‘Chinglish’ (though occasionally used to describe her family) becomes her identity. This is the story’s resolution but the seeds are sown earlier; while posters of 80s pop star Nik Kershaw adorn her bedroom walls, she imagines conversations with Yoko Ono. Western pop meets East Asian artist (albeit heavily mediated by western pop). Teen identity-formation is shown to be in part a creative act; selecting who and what we wish to identify with. The younger Kevin is given more prosaic advice: “I try not to worry too much about what people think of me.”
But such advice is perhaps undercut by the fact that it comes from Maverick, a super-hero alter-ego that Kevin has himself created in order to cope with his situation.
Ultimately, Jo, Kevin, Sue and Ray find a home in creative practices; film, fashion, and illustrated books. In these industries, originality is valued (at least rhetorically). Childhood difference, so often subject to racist and xenophobic stigmatisation, is reframed as a potential source of originality. Young readers will likely respond well to the message that you can and should be yourself. Writers of colour might question who exactly that real self is and whether in the memoir form we are required to find innovative ways to commodify our pain – indeed whether this is the price we pay for creating a place for ourselves. That said, Cheung and Xu offer compelling stories while implicitly communicating to young readers ‘I survived this – and you will too.’ There is great value to this message.
Dr Darren Chetty is the author of Beyond the Secret Garden: Children’s Literature and Representations of Black and Racially minoritised People, and the forthcoming picture book I’m Going to Make a Friend, illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat.