Essay Questions

Why Cheerios?

Yang’s death comes as the family is eating breakfast. Eating bowls of Cheerios cereal, to be precise. Cheerios is one of the most iconic cold breakfast cereals in America’s history. It is right up there with Wheaties and Corn Flakes. Wheaties, however, also comes with its slogan, “Breakfast of Champions” which carries a bit too much competitive baggage. On the other hand, Corn Flakes is too generic. Cheerios carries a thousand memories of Saturday morning television commercials and cartoons for tens of millions of readers. It is hardwired into the American DNA as the breakfast of normality. In killing Yang in this fashion, the author instantly gives Yang a dose of that DNA, making him a little bit more human for the reader right off the bat.

Why is cloning not considered progressive?

The narrator and his wife reject cloning and instead choose adopting a Chinese child because “it seemed like the progressive thing to do.” This implies that, in their view, cloning is not progressive. Later, Jim will identify Russ, the racist and xenophobic owner of the first repair shop he visits, as likely being the type who sports a bumper sticker reading “WE CLONE OUR OWN” which suggests that this is a rather popular public pronouncement among the cloning crowd. His surprisingly complex neighbor, George, is an obviously more advanced member of that crowd, but even his cloned “kids” are described identical twins. Though not explicitly asserted, the subtext very strongly hints that cloning is procedure being used to increase the prevalence of the white majority and to obstruct the evolution of diversity within the American population.

What is the underlying significance of the narrator’s observation that Yang’s delivery of information about Chinese history is “mechanical” and lacks passion?

Jim informs the reader that Yang arrived “fully programmed” with just about every tidbit of information about China that could possibly be known. He is also designed to look just like a Chinese teenager. But, being a machine, he is, of course, only “Chinese” in the sense of being built there. He may well know everything thing there is to know about Chinese culture, but simply knowing those things does not make Yang actually Chinese any more than it would make someone born to Caucasian parents and raised in Idaho actually Chinese. This raises the question of what, exactly, is culture and what, exactly, makes one a member of any national or ethnic identity? The significance of this question lies beyond the mechanistic origin of Yang: if Mika is raised by white parents in a white community who learns about Chinese culture through a machine, is she really Chinese at all?