28 May 2009
Asian-American Graphic Novelist Gene Yang Turns Life into Comics
Childhood struggle to accept heritage inspired nationally acclaimed book
Gene Yang started publishing his comics at the local copy store under the name Humble Comics in 1996. Within 10 years, Yang, who also teaches computer programming at a high school in California, had become the national bestselling author of the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award. The book, American Born Chinese, also received the 2007 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Graphic Album and the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature from the American Library Association. He is a self-professed “geek.” Yang spoke with America.gov writer Sonya Weakley about his work.
Question: What was the inspiration for American Born Chinese?
Yang: In my [junior high] class were two groups of Asian boys, two cliques. The one I was a part of, [we] were either born in the states or came when we were really young, and we felt more comfortable speaking in English than in our native tongue. And then this other group came when they were much older, and they usually spoke in Chinese or Korean. I remember very distinctly feeling like we wanted people to know that we were two distinct groups.
That’s sort of what I wanted to get at with my two characters Jin and Wei-Chen. They’re sort of friends, but there’s this weird tension that’s caused by Jin’s shame in himself. I think that’s how it was with us.
Q: What is the intent behind the stereotypical character called Chin-Kee?
A: I’m trying to make fun of the stereotype itself as opposed to trying to suggest that it’s true. I think most people get what I’m trying to do, but every now and then I get these reactions to Chin-Kee that make me cringe like, “Oh, he’s so cute and he’s so funny. Will you ever make a T-shirt of him because I would buy it?” That wasn’t what I was trying for at all.
Then I get a lot of people that [say] he makes them really uncomfortable, and [that] those parts of the story are very difficult to read. I think that’s kind of what I was going for — that’s a good thing. It’s either that, or you find him really funny, but you feel weird about laughing at him.
Chin-kee is still around in modern America. In the beginning there were several Asian-American independent bookstores that refused to carry the book after thumbing through it. They changed their minds after they were encouraged to read it. I ended up writing some essays about why I constructed the character the way I did and posting them on my publisher’s Web site.
Q: What is a graphic novel?
A: People argue what graphic novel means. It’s a term that was popularized in the 1970s. [Comics writer] Will Eisner used it as a way of separating his work from superheroes or funny animals. He wanted to do something that was more serious. I think it was sort of invented as political play to get people to disassociate the medium from disposable entertainment.
Nowadays, it is used as a way of describing any comic book that is thick enough for a binding. I think there’s some bleeding in there of the definition, like if you get a collection of Spider Man comics that is serial, they usually call that a graphic novel. Peanuts collections show up on graphic novel lists sometimes. So I don’t think there’s a hard boundary on what’s considered a graphic novel; it depends on who you ask.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have a project [titled Boxers and Saints] set in China in the late 1800s, and it’s centered [on] the Boxer Rebellion. I’m Catholic and grew up in a Chinese Catholic church. In the early 2000s the pope canonized a bunch of Chinese Catholics and these were the first Chinese that were recognized. So I started looking into the lives of some of these people, and I realized a lot of them were actually martyrs during the Boxer Rebellion.
The drive behind the Boxer Rebellion was basically all the European powers were flooding into China at the time, and there was this common-people’s uprising that was mostly led by teenage boys who just came from the countryside into the cities and massacred Europeans and Chinese Christians along the way.
So what I saw in that incident was these two halves of myself — my Catholic half and my Chinese half — coming into conflict. I felt like there was a tension there for me personally. I wanted to explore that tension, so the story I have now is actually told from two different perspectives — one is from the Boxers and the other is from the martyrs. So the good guys in one retelling will be the bad guys in the other.
I had to do a lot of research; I had to read a bunch of books. I even went to France to research it because they have a Jesuit archive there and they have a photo archive of old black-and-white photos from that time period.
Q: Your most recently published book is The Eternal Smile. What is it about?
A: It’s about escapist fantasy and the role [it] plays in modern life. The three stories sort of mirror my own thinking about escapist fantasy. I think being a geek and being really involved in geeky culture, escapist fantasy is something I definitely indulge in. But I think that for a lot of folks, the technology has become so immersive that it has become a very easy escape hatch from reality, especially from real relationships that can be difficult. So the first two stories talk about how escapist fantasy can pull you away from real life.
But then, several years ago, I had a student who was very, very shy in my computer programming class. He came in one afternoon [to finish a lab project], and I found out he was really, really into this online game, and he told me about the guild that he ran. He told me that all these people in the guild were all like 20- and 30-year-olds, and he was the leader; he established it. He would set up campaigns to go kill dragons and stuff.
I saw this completely different side of him; he wasn’t shy anymore. He came out as really confident and really knowledgeable about what he was talking about, and he sounded like a leader. So that got me to thinking maybe escapist fantasy has a role in modern life of bringing out aspects of ourselves that may be obscured by everyday life. And I think maybe that’s a more productive way, especially for educators and parents, to use escapist fantasy — as a way of allowing students and allowing ourselves to see pieces of ourselves that we don’t necessarily see in everyday life, and to find some way of bridging that into real life.
Q: You have written a book tentatively titled Four Angels that is being illustrated by artist Thien Pham. What is it about?
A: It’s about a video game addict who becomes a med[ical] school student after he is visited by angels. [The story came] from my brother [who is] a doctor now. He wasn’t a video game addict, but he really liked video games. When he was in med school he would come home and tell me all these crazy stories about what he would have to do, and they were just ridiculous. Like he went into a classroom once for a test and hanging on the walls around the classroom were these human heads — actual human heads. He and his classmates would have to go and label all the little parts of these human heads. So he told me all this stuff and [I said] that all belongs in a story.
A photo gallery on Gene Yang and American Born Chinese is available on America.gov.
For more information about Gene Yang and American Born Chinese, see http://www.geneyang.com/ and http://firstsecondbooks.typepad.com/mainblog/gene_yang_guest_blogger/.
