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GENE LUEN YANG: REPRESENTATION AND HOME IN COMICS
Written by Anusha Fathepure & Grace Simmons
Being an Asian American is just as valid as any other identity in the country.
In the vibrant realm of graphic novels and comic books, Gene Luen Yang stands as an illuminating figure whose work transcends traditional boundaries, weaving intricate narratives that resonate with readers of all ages. An accomplished cartoonist, writer, and educator, Yang’s ability to touch on sensitive topics with a sympathetic tone has allowed him to carve a niche for himself in the literary world.
Yang’s work is characterized by its diversity and depth, addressing a wide range of themes that challenge societal norms and provide a lens through which young readers can explore profound questions His works often serve as a bridge between cultures, reflecting his commitment to fostering understanding and empathy through the universal language of storytelling.
Born in 1973 in California, Yang's journey into the world of comics began at an early age, fueled by his passion for storytelling and his interest in the art of visual narratives. For Yang, comics have always felt like home.
“My parents fought a lot when I was a kid…so my brother and I, a lot of times when my parents were fighting, we would be in a room reading comics,” Yang said. “There was a sense of safety there, a sense of feeling like the Marvel Universe was maybe more of a home than our actual home was. The fights that happened in the Marvel Universe, they always get resolved in 22 pages and the heroes always come out on top ”
In October of 2023, Yang was awarded the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature for his critically-acclaimed graphic novel American Born Chinese. For the Neustadt Lit Fest, he visited Norman where he accepted the prize, spoke about his work, signed books, and met with OU students.
Published in 2006, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang is a graphic novel that weaves together three interrelated stories: the struggles of Jin Wang, one of the few Asian American students in his school system; the legend of one of the most prominent characters from Chinese mythology, the powerful Monkey King; and the sitcom of Chin-Kee, a personification of Chinese stereotypes, who ruins his cousin Danny’s life. These three stories weave together to explore themes of identity, cultural heritage, and self-acceptance.
Within the novel, Yang interconnects seemingly disparate narratives, illustrating how the characters’ struggles with their identities overlap. Jin Wang's narrative explores the difficulties he encounters as a Chinese American boy trying to fit into American culture while facing racial stereotypes and bullying.
The Monkey King's story, on the other hand, delves into themes of arrogance and the quest for acceptance, presenting an allegory for those who have faced cultural discrimination. Danny and Chin-Kee's narrative brings in elements of conformity and self-denial, bringing to life the internal push and pull of identity to illustrate the sacrifices some make to fit in with their peers.
After years of praise and accolades, in 2021, news arrived that American Born Chinese would be adapted as a live-action Disney+ streaming series. Despite the excitement, there were also fears from many, Yang himself included, of how an adaptation could be created.
One of the most shocking and thought-provoking aspects of American Born Chinese was the character of Chin-Kee, a caricatured, exaggerated version of a traditional Chinese character, with features and behaviors that perpetuate stereotypes. Physically, Chin-Kee is depicted with exaggerated stereotypical traits, such as a queue hairstyle, large buck teeth, and traditional Chinese attire. These physical features are intentionally overblown to mirror the demonic and dehumanized portraits of Asians throughout the early 20th century, highlighting the harmful nature of racial stereotypes and the impact they can have on individuals. Chin-Kee's behavior is equally exaggerated speaking in broken English, using inappropriate idioms, and engaging in behaviors that perpetuate the "foreigner" stereotype
Within the graphic novel, his character serves as a commentary on the harmful effects of racial stereotyping, illustrating how such caricatures can be dehumanizing and contribute to feelings of alienation and otherness, but in a live adaptation, Yang feared the character on screen could be counter-intuitive to the point he wanted to make in the novel’s original release back in 2006. He worried that clips of his caricatured nature would be taken out of context and shared over social media in a racially offensive way.
“I was worried about how some of the aspects of that book were going to make it onto a television screen,” Yang said. “I was worried that those pieces would come out really weird.”
It wasn’t until he talked with the producers Kelvin Yu and Melvin Mar that Yang felt someone might safely introduce Chin-Kee to the screen. Kelvin Yu said his solution was to approach the character from a new direction, directly addressing Yang's fears.
“The answer ... is you take the problem, you say it out loud, and you bake it into your process,” Yu said “If Gene was worried about that character being clipped onto TikTok out of context, what if that is the plot in the show? What if we make the cousin character a beloved nostalgic character from the 90s, and he's being clipped into TikTok and Instagram? So we just put it right in the show.”
The character of Chin-Kee was reimagined as a character named Freddy Wong. Played by Oscar-winning actor Ke Huy Quan, Freddy Wong appears in self-contained scenes of the show-within-the-show, “Beyond Repair.”
The character, although toned down from the novel’s Chin-Kee, is portrayed as a clueless and eccentric foreigner with a thick accent who often mixes up words, playing on harmful stereotypes of Asians in America.
Within the fictional world of the American Born Chinese series, the ’90s-style family sitcom “Beyond Repair” has gained new popularity on social media, and the character of Freddy Wong has become a meme used to make fun of Asian kids, like Jin, using the tagline “What could go Wong?”
“Suddenly, it's like the character that he's talking about is an explicit representation of a lot of the stereotypical images that Asians grow up with,” Yu said.
Following the show’s release, it was nominated for numerous TV awards and even screened in the White House by President Biden in celebration of AAPI Heritage Month. The adaptation has received many praises for its elegant yet entertaining way of approaching the experiences of second-generation Asians and the difficulty of fitting in, mirroring the way the novel was received in its original release 17 years ago.
Yang's ability to empathetically and emphatically tell stories of racism and identity struggle through relatable characters like Jin in American Born Chinese is tied to his own relationship with identity and bleeds over into how he approaches other work. His 2014 work, The Shadow Hero, allows us another insight into what being Asian American means to him.
The Shadow Hero is an origin story for the Green Turtle, a superhero that precedes Yang’s time. The Green Turtle first appeared on pages in Blazing Comics in 1944, being discontinued after only 5 issues were released. A skilled fighter, the superhero wore a turtle-shell cape and aided the Chinese in their fight against the Japanese during World War II.
Yang’s interest in the character was sparked by the rumors surrounding the absence of the character’s face. In every panel the titular character appears in, his face happens to be obscured or faced away from the view of the reader; this allegedly was an intentional choice by the author, Chinese American writer Chu F. Hing, to spite his editor at the time. Hing originally wanted to create a Chinese American superhero, but his editor believed an Asian superhero wouldn’t be profitable. According to Yang, Hing “reacted really passive aggressively” and never showed the superhero’s face.
The comic was discontinued very early into its run so Hing never got around to revealing whether or not the Green Turtle was actually Chinese American, which intrigued Yang. He thought this was a gap in Chinese American history that could be filled, and so he called up his collaborator Sonny Liew and got to work to create an origin story that outright displayed the superhero as Asian American.
In a class discussion with the Neustadt Literature class, Yang was asked why it was so important for him to take the story of the Green Turtle and finally cement him as an Asian American superhero.
“There's just this feeling that came over me when I read about him, and I think it has to do with the fact that a lot of times…for my generation, a lot of Asian Americans felt like we were perpetual foreigners; like we were treated as foreigners even if we were born here,” Yang said.
Yang described superheroes as a deeply American genre, detailing how the rise of this superhero genre paralleled America’s emergence as a superpower on the global stage. This is what made this early superhero so impactful for him.
“To find out that there's this character who might be an Asian American at nearly the beginning of a genre that was quintessentially American, it kind of felt like comics history was telling me that people who look like me were there from the beginning, even if we had to hide our faces, we were there from the beginning,” Yang said. “There's just something very affirming about that, and Sonny and I kind of made the story out of that feeling of affirmation.”
Despite his current passion for The Green Turtle, Yang didn’t always hold this attitude towards Asian representation in comics. Opening up about his initial aversion to Asian heroes when he was young, he described how he had adamantly avoided comics such as Marvel’s Shang-Chi as a kid, trying to distance himself from any Asian stories.
“I did go through a long period of my childhood where I was embarrassed about being Chinese American. I was embarrassed about my parent's accent, I was embarrassed about the food that we ate, I was embarrassed about even the way my face looked, y'know? And I think I had to figure all that stuff out before I was ready to explicitly embrace stories about people who look like me.”
This embarrassment and shame of himself, his family, and his culture eventually became a catalyst for Yang’s desire to write Asian American stories as he matured and came to terms with his identity—something he largely credits to his time in college at UC Berkeley, where he first discovered the term “Asian American.”
“That was where I kind of came to terms with this idea that America is sort of a collection of subcultures,” Yang said. “Ultimately, what it means to be an American is expressed differently in different subcultures and it was almost by design...being an Asian American is just as valid as any other identity in the country.”
Yang remarks on how as he’s matured, he’s learned to make peace with certain fights that he’ll have for the rest of his life in regards to the duality of his identity. Looking to the future, Yang plans to continue to represent Asian American stories, taking pride in creating stories where younger Asian generations can see themselves in a positive and realistic manner in a way that he never experienced growing up.
“When you tell a story to a kid, you're getting a story into their heads at a super important time of their lives. I think all of us, especially as we get older, realize so much of who we are is rooted in our childhood experiences,” Yang said. “So to tell a story that can be part of that for somebody else, it seems like just a real honor.”
