The “Asian Invasion”: An Interview with Gene Luen Yang
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Since 1941 the University of Minnesota has been hosting Book Week: an annual celebration of children’s books and authors. One of the oldest ongoing literary events of this type in the country, Book Week draws the audience of teachers, librarians, and students to hear a keynote address by a featured author or illustrator. The event is sponsored by the College of Education and Human Development and by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. The 2013 Book Week hosted the award-winning Asian-American cartoonist and author Gene Luen Yang.
Gene has been drawing comics since fifth grade. Ten years after the publication of his first work, he was catapulted to national fame when his American Born Chinese (2006) broke new ground becoming the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award and the first to win the Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature. American Born Chinese and another of Gene’s books, The Eternal Smile, both won Eisner Awards for best graphic novels. Gene’s most recent publications—companion volumes Saints and Boxers—were finalists for the National Book Award. These companion books are set at the time of Chinese Boxers Uprising in 1899–1901 and offer a glimpse into the complexity of the political turmoil of the time as experienced by two adolescent protagonists swept into the opposite sides of the conflict. Through killing and dying, both of them struggle to achieve selfhood in extremely trying circumstances of cultural and religious clash. Gene is also the author of the script for a comics continuation of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender series. He teaches creative writing for Hameline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.
Gene lives in California with his wife and four children, but travels whenever he has a chance to advocate the use of comics and graphic [End Page 123] novels in education—even at the risk of being tarred, feathered, and shipped back as cargo. An affable person whose smile lights up everything around him, Gene won the minds and hearts of the audience at the University of Minnesota’s Book Week through his passion for graphic formats and his understanding of the potential they have for engaging young readers. The full video recording of Gene’s talk is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-e9KM0RelQ&feature=youtu.be. The following interview includes questions asked during the conversation on stage, incorporates some of Gene’s answers to questions that were asked by the audience, and accommodates our follow-up communication through email.
What kind of child were you? Were you a good student?
(laughs) I was … a cookie-cutter geek and I wasn’t awesome at school. My brother was the guy, the kid who got straight A’s, and he’s now a medical doctor, which makes sense. But I was a cookie-cutter geek, so I basically collected, read, and made comics. One thing I clearly recall from when I was a kid, is that I really wanted to work for Disney. That was my dream when I was in third grade or so. In fact, I was kind of obsessed about Disney and reading as many books as I could about him. I remember looking up in an encyclopedia when Disney died. I was really hoping it would match my birth date because that would mean I could be his reincarnation. But then, as I got older, I realized that animation is so labor intensive that you really need a team to produce an animated movie. Very few people actually have direct control over the story and I would find it hard to believe that I would be able to express anything of myself within a corporate environment like that.
Looking back at what other dreams and aspirations shaped you as an artist, we wonder if your parents exposed you to traditional Chinese stories and folklore or is this something you discovered on your own?
It was both, in fact. On the one hand...
