I was always worried how that was going to translate into a television series or a movie.” I’ve always been hesitant because of the stereotypes I talk about very explicitly in the book. “There has been interest in adapting the story. “My big dream was to have it someday collected as a graphic novel,” he says.
He recalls his book’s humble origins as Xeroxed mini-comics that Yang stapled by hand and distributed himself. “I did not imagine this,” Gene Luen Yang tells Inverse. In fact, it was only after conversations with showrunner Kelvin Yu that Yang’s anxieties were assuaged. In an interview with Inverse at the Television Critics Association this year, Gene Luen Yang said he never imagined his comic as a star-studded Disney show. The live-action version is streaming on Disney+ now, with 23-year-old actor Ben Wang leading an ensemble that includes Daniel Wu, Chin Han, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong, and Oscar winners Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. Though it received numerous literary awards, including an Eisner Award (the Oscars of comics) and praise from Time, Publishers Weekly, and NPR - with Kotaku calling it “The Realest Comic About Growing Up Asian American, and Hating Yourself” - the prospect of a Disney-fied version can make one pause, given Hollywood’s reputed habits to flatten cultural nuance to appease the mainstream. Jin’s story just happens to involve bickering Chinese mythological deities and his own awkward efforts to date a white girl at his high school.
“I was always worried how that was going to translate into a television series or a movie.”Īt heart, American Born Chinese is the typical coming-of-age tale of Jin Wang, a Chinese-American teenager. Despite a playful art style and an absence of violence and nudity, Yang’s searing portrait of Asian-American self-loathing, including the ghastly character “Chin-Kee” who intentionally evokes the Yellow Peril demons of yore, makes Yang’s comic a challenging reading experience. Originally published in 2006 to critical acclaim, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese is a graphic novel that interrogates racial identity in America in unforgiving terms. Of all the comic books to become a show on Disney+, American Born Chinese is perhaps the last one anyone would expect.
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