The Bluest Eye and American Born Chinese have characters that are similar to one another. For example, The Bluest Eye character named Pecola wanted to be beautiful and she wanted to have blue eyes. In American Born Chinese Jin Wang wanted to be beautiful and to be white. He did not want to be Chinese. Both of these characters were teenagers and they both wanted to fit in with society.
One of the themes in The Bluest Eye is discrimination because at school the teachers and the students treated Pecola differently. Everyone did not want to associate with her because they thought she was ugly. She was an outcast in her school. Another example of discrimination in The Bluest Eye is when Maureen, Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola started to argue with one another. They started calling each other bad names.
Discrimination is also in American Born Chinese because Monkey King was not allowed to go inside the dinner party because he was a monkey and he did not have shoes on. Another example of discrimination in American Born Chinese is when Jin Wang was introduced to his new classroom. His teacher could not pronounce his name correctly. Also he did not have any friends until Wei-Chen came to his school. The people at his school would make fun of him because he was a different race than the other people.
Each of these texts relate to power and privilege because it showed that the whites had power over the blacks and Chinese. Both of these characters Pecola and Jin Wang wanted to be able to fit in with their society.
I agree with you, in both of these novel discrimination is one of the major themes and is visible. Both of these novels really relate to one another in ways other than discrimination too. Both Pecola and Jin do not see the "beauty" or "pride" in themselves or their background. Power and privlege, like you said, also are main roles in both American Born Chinese and The Bluest Eye.
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