Gene Yang’s remarkable graphic novel grapples with racial prejudice

American Born Chinese features three story lines—one about the Monkey King, a traditional Chinese folk hero; another about Jin Wang, an Asian-American boy who attends an all-white school; and the third about Chin-Kee, the embodiment of negative Chinese stereotypes. How did you come up with the idea?

Originally, I was going to do it as three separate books, and I was trying to decide which one I wanted to tackle first. Eventually, I saw that there were a lot of common thematic elements across the three stories: there’s one about transformation, another about what it means to be an Asian American, and another theme about prejudice and acceptance.

When you were growing up, was your experience of racism as disturbing as Jin Wang’s?

I spent most of my childhood in a small town next to San Jose, CA, called Saratoga. In elementary school, I was one of a handful of Asian-American students in my classes. A lot of the more virulent racism, the more outright racism, I experienced in junior high. There was a group—we called them stoners, back then—that were particularly virulent. A lot of the words that come out of [the character] Timmy’s mouth were from that group of kids. I wasn’t good at sports, and I was pretty geeky. When I got into high school, it became really unclear to me whether things were happening to me because I was just kind of a geek or things were happening to me because I was Asian.

When did you start drawing comics?

I had a fifth-grade friend named Jeremy Kuniyohi, who brought me to my first comics shop, and we started drawing comics together. Now he’s a doctor, but I kept drawing comics. What attracted me to the form was, originally, when I was in third or fourth grade, I read all these books on Walt Disney. I decided I wanted to be an animator when I grew up because I liked to draw, and I really liked to tell stories. But I found with a comic book, one person can have control over the entire thing.

How did you develop such a clean, expressive style of drawing?

I was heavily influenced by Disney cartoons and animation, in general. Batman, the animated series, also influenced me. Bruce Timm’s designs on that series were really brilliant. I also have a day job, so I need to be able to draw pretty quickly.

What’s your day job?

I’ve been at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, CA, for nine and a half years. I started as a math and computer science teacher. Later on, I worked for three or four years as an educational technologist, which is just a fancy way of saying that I help other teachers develop tech-based instructional units. And then just this year, I’m moving into another position with an even fancier title. I am now the director of information services.

What’s been the reaction of Asian Americans to American Born Chinese?

Most of the Asian Americans that I’ve shown it to—they’re my friends, so I don’t know how honest they’re being—seem to like it. They say it does resonate with them, which makes me happy. I have heard through my publisher that some Asian Americans have been offended by the third story line.

Why? Chin-Kee seems like a caricature of all the negative Chinese stereotypes rolled into one.

That’s exactly what he’s supposed to be. Some people feel like just having that character there perpetuates those stereotypes. But I wanted to show that even though in modern-day society that stereotype is inexplicit, it’s still around. A lot of things that happen today, in 2006, really point to that.