The real mask in Superhero literature

Gene Yang's Shadow Hero depicts the life of a Chinese immigrant offspring whose Chinese spirit ables him to deflect bullets. He wears no mask at first, but decides later to keep his face hidden while wearing the costume of The Golden Man of Bravery/ Jade Tortoise/ Green Turtle/ Shadow Hero. The multitude of hero names shows a wary sense of questioning one's identity in this story. Yang admits in his epilogue of this graphic novel that this publication is a celebration of the superhero genre and a tribute to the Golden Age of the comics industry. He refers to the early comics of Green Turtle whose artist hid the hero's face from view at all times arguably as an effort to hide the Chinese identity of a character who was supposed to be Caucasian according to his publishers. The fantasy of the Chinese-born author, however, was to preserve the Asian heritage of the hero and keep his facial features secret.

In similarity to the original Green Turtle Yang and Liew express their thoughts of the Chinese American identity through the psyche of their hero: Hank. As the son of immigrant parents, Hank battles with his identity as he negotiates between preserving his Chinese heritage and assimilating to American culture. Ultimately he submits to wartime propaganda and agrees to fight against his own blood by allying with American troops in WWII. He does, however, demonstrate apprehension and reluctance as he makes his unsettling decision to do so. In the grand scheme of this novel, Hank's disillusioned mother, who never loved or showed love for his father, persuades him into becoming a superhero. The falsehood of the marriage of Hank's parents expelled any positive influence of Chinese heritage in Hank's upbringing, and forced him into an assimilated lifestyle. Sure, he did show a strong affinity toward his father and living the life of an honest and hard-working man. He did not, however, stay true to this value of humility as he transformed into the Green Turtle. His inheritance of the shadow tortoise figure was ambiguous in the ending, with no resolution of the conflict among the shadow animals from the introduction of the story. These shadows were faced with death as the Chinese dynasty fell in 1911, and were in search of a new caretaker for the ancient principles of Chinese history. After Hank becomes victorious, the fate of these shadows is uncertain. The only certainty to be gleaned from this, though, is his reluctant decision to fight alongside the American troops, thus abandoning the preservation of his heritage altogether.

Yang uses the "celebration" of the superhero genre as a mask beneath which is a remorse for Chinese American history. He uses Shadow Hero to show that the identity of Chinese ancestry was long lost in the emigration of Chinese citizens to American in the early 1900s. Hank represents the thousands of second-generation Chinese immigrants who were bedazzled by the depiction of the American Dream, which was the source of hypnosis for Hank's mother. The only way to hold on to the heritage that has been long gone, according to Yang, is to piece together the assimilation event and pick up where it was left off.