Gene Yang’s Thang

At a recent talk on children’s literature, the presenter spoke of the growing popularity of graphic novels, and their use in schools. My knee-jerk reaction—disdain for these “non-books,” lament for the death of reading—was overcome by one of his examples, a volume titled American Born Chinese by a young San Franciscan named Gene Yang.

The speaker held this book up, literally, as a serious work for young adults, one that had won an important award, a story about growing up Asian American. As the father of a five-year-old Asian-born son, I was intrigued. The book’s clean handsome graphics drew me in immediately, and I was touched when after the program three young Asian women, Chinese graduate students, approached the lectern and shyly professed their love for it. The next day I borrowed the book from the local library—mildly surprised that they had it—and read it in an hour and a half.

American Born Chinese is a book about immigrant identity, specifically the tensions faced by Asian American kids who feel caught between the old world and the new, distanced from their parents but not accepted by their American peers. On top of the normal trials of adolescence, they are visibly and self-consciously “other,” and so subject to an amplified version of the cross-currents of longing and shame, anger and self-loathing that roil the passage to adulthood. It’s a fresh take on an old story.

The book is composed of three distinct stories that play out in alternating chapters. The central story is that of Jin Wang, a boy whose family has just moved from Chinatown to the suburbs, and his efforts to make his way in his new, lily-white, middle school. Jin’s story is flanked on the one hand by a version of the archetypal Chinese legend of the Monkey King, a fiery proud trickster who tangles with the gods, and on the other by the antics of ChinKee, an agglomeration of comically exaggerated Asian stereotypes who torments his American “cousin” Danny with his egregious behavior. Yang weaves these strands into a compelling, humorous and finally rewarding whole, using the side stories to echo and deepen our understanding of Jin’s progress.

Yang, by day a high-school teacher, is particularly adept at rendering the tender contradictions of Jin’s adolescent psyche as he struggles between wanting desperately to fit in and being himself. The side stories illuminate and in the end gracefully reveal themselves as aspects of this psyche personified.

The graphic medium seems ideal for this combination of realism and fable, humor and poignancy. Yang’s cinematic eye, strong, unfussy drawings, and spare, well-written dialogue make a sometimes painful story wonderfully accessible, in a style reminiscent of Spiegelman’s Maus. With sensitivity and compassion, he guides young-adult readers through Jin’s confusion and rage over various trials to his final hard-won self-acceptance, offering through this sympathetic and well-drawn character a model of hope and understanding for their own lives.

The story has layers of resonance; it speaks first to Asian American kids, then to other immigrant kids, and finally to all kids, immigrant or not. American Born Chinese is a worthy, well-wrought book, and it opened my eyes. I want to learn more about Gene Yang, and about the world of graphic novels. And I’m going to buy a copy for my son.