I took a glance at this, and being a fan of Storage Wars on TV I could tell that the author had been influenced by that.
I'm a sucker for animal companion stories so there is that as well.
As for the racism. So far, ten percent of the way into it, as near as I can tell the racism is trashtalking coming from rivals who are not known for being polite. If he hadn't been Chinese they'd have found some other taunt they'd think would work to get him off his game. I'm not going to go so far as to say they are not racist, but you have to take into account the situation. Real life is not like social media. There is no referee waiting to ban and block the trolls. Thank goodness.
The M.C. has lots of good relationships with many Americans who treat him nice from the beginning. It's the people who would treat him like crap no matter what race he was that supply the bulk of the racist content, and they mostly get what is coming to them.
