Chin-Kee

I don’t even know where to begin with Chin-Kee’s character. My reaction to him was...well, I think someone else said it best on Blackboard – he made me cringe, and I think he was supposed to. It was a very uncomfortable experience to read him, because on the one hand, he’s written as such a caricature/stereotype/embodied insult that you can’t exactly like him. But on the other hand, you have Danny whose perspective you’re looking at Chin-Kee through, and Danny is so completely opposed to the idea of Chin-Kee that that is offensive as well. And you do find out in the end, of course, after suffering through this, that this is exactly what Jin’s inner struggle means to him, to be faced with only two superficial choices of self and not yet have the ability to understand how to embrace parts of both to create a valued self. We get both extremes in order to realize that the middle ground is what’s best. It’s like Wei-Chen’s transformers – there’s more than meets the eye.