Comics and The Monkey King

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on August 29, 2006 Sign up now!

by Sunyoung Lee, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 8/29/2006

Gene Luen Yang is not your average high school teacher. For one thing, he draws comics. For another, he’s used comics to teach his classes. As part of his masters of education thesis, Yang developed a project called "Factoring with Mr. Yang and Mosely," a plain-speaking, easy-to-follow interactive comic strip (now available online through his Web site humblecomics.com) that teaches kids about distributive properties, trinomial equations and other complexities of Algebra 1. Yang's ability to integrate two seemingly divergent interests shows one aspect of what makes him unique as both a teacher and a comic book artist—a talent for reconciliation.

Yang's latest book, American Born Chinese, coming in September from First Second, shows this talent to full advantage. It's a fable of sorts, one suffused with references to Chinese myth, pop culture and teen angst. In it, Yang weaves together three seemingly separate stories. The first revolves around a legendary and beloved Chinese folk hero, the Monkey King. The second follows Jin Wang, an alienated Chinese-American kid growing up in an almost all-white neighborhood. And the third story chronicles the exploits of Chin-kee, a no-holds-barred compilation of racist Asian caricatures, complete with buck teeth, pigtail and slurred l's and r's, who delights in ruining his cousin Danny's high school experience. Navigating the prickly territory of self-hatred and self-acceptance is far from simple, but Yang's clean-lined artwork conveys a remarkable range of expression with a minimum of fuss and manages to do so with impressive honesty and grace.

PWCW sat down with Yang recently to talk about life as an artist, Asian-American identity and what can be learned from comics.

PW Comics Week: How did this book get picked up by First Second?

Gene Yang: I have a friend named Derek Kirk Kim who's won all three of the comic book awards, an Eisner, a Harvey and an Ignatz. After that, he had a bunch of publishers approach him for another project. He eventually signed with First Second, but he also took my book and printed it out (it was published online) and bound it and send it off to the editor. Then he pestered the editor until he read it. And the editor liked it enough to give me a contract for it.

PWCW: When did you begin drawing comics?

GY: I did some as a kid when I was in fifth grade with a friend of mine. I stopped in junior high because one of my friends who was a lot more popular than me in junior high thought comics were kind of creepy, so I stopped reading them. And then in high school—you know how on the West Coast all Asian kids go to summer school at community colleges? My parents made me take physics and math, but I got to pick one class: a comic book art class. That got me back into reading comics. But I didn’t really start drawing comics until I was an adult.

PWCW: Did you ever imagine yourself as a comic book artist?

GY: When I grew up, I always wanted to be a Disney animator. I think it was around late high school, early college that I started changing my mind. Part of it was because of the nature of the comics medium. It allows one person to execute a vision from beginning to end. One person can produce a comic. But it’s very very difficult for one person to produce an animation.

PWCW: How much did the changing perception of comics during the ’80s affect your idea of what comics could do?

GY: The book that influenced me the most in terms of wanting to be a comic book artist was Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I remember, especially later in high school, I would go to the store and pick stuff up that was a little less mainstream. I would get The Spirit by Will Eisner, and I got his Heart of the Storm, and I’d think, man, I want this comic to move me as much as a film does, to show me that you can actually do that with a comic. And almost every comic that I got fell short, so I thought, maybe the medium just doesn’t have it in it. But then I read Scott McCloud’s book. That book really explores the potential of the medium, I think it was the very first time where I thought that you can see the kinds of things through comics that you can any other medium.

PWCW: When did you get the idea that comics could be used to educate?

GY: I was in a master’s program for education with an emphasis on online teaching and learning at Hayward State. I was also committed to helping out a computer art class. So every two or three weeks, I'd be out two or three days. To make up for that, I started to videotape my lectures and I’d ask my sub to play that videotape for the kids. The students hated that. So instead, I started drawing out the lessons in comics, just using a Sharpie. And the students really responded well. I was very surprised. Some of them even said that they preferred that to my lectures. A couple of the characteristics of comics came up. One was the fact that comics are visual and [the students] really liked that, and the second one was the fact that they could read it at their own pace. And out of that, I ended up doing the project on comics in education.

PWCW: How did you come up with the story of American Born Chinese?

GY: I always wanted to do an adaptation of the Monkey King, ever since my mom told me the stories when I was little. And my first two books were Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks and Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order. In those, I had Asian characters and I dealt a little bit with religious themes. But I felt that those were the two parts of my identity that are the most core or central—my religious identity and my ethnic identity—and I really wanted to do projects that hit that head on. So for the religious identity, I did a comic called The Rosary Comic Book, which is an adaptation of a popular Catholic chant, and for my ethnic identity, I did American Born Chinese. I also wanted there to be an Asian-American version of the Monkey King.

PWCW: How did you get the idea for these three separate storylines?

GY: I originally thought of them as three separate stories. For the Jin one, I wanted to take some bits of pieces of my childhood and make it more of a believable whole. For the Chin-Kee story, I think there's an aspect of stereotypes in general and Asian stereotypes in particular that have both fascinated and repulsed me, and I wanted to explore that.

PWCW: Did you grow up in a mixed environment?

GY: I grew up in a more mixed environment than what's in there. I spent most of my childhood in a suburb of San Jose called Saratoga. It's a fairly affluent community, and when I was growing up, there were a handful of non-white students in my class: there was an East Indian and a couple of Asians, and that was about it. And nowadays, it's half or three-fourths Asian.

PWCW: When did you learn the lessons that you write about in this book?

GY: I think it's still something I'm working through—acceptance of your identity and that kind of stuff is something that I think people struggle with their whole lives. In college I went to Berkeley, which was all about the Asian power thing and yellow pride, that kind of thing. I was involved with a Christian group, an evangelical group, but I wasn’t directly involved with any of the Asian student groups. But you learn about that—I took a sociology class where they talked about it. It's part of the culture of the campus.

PWCW: How much do you think transformation is a necessary part of Asian-American identity?

GY: What I'm hoping is that we'll move from more of a transformative mindset to more of a creative mindset, where rather than trying to become something that we're not, we're actually creating what we are, creating a new identity. I see that happening, especially with our generation.

PWCW: What do you think has changed to make that possible?

GY: Some of it is just critical mass; there are enough of us here now, we've been here long enough. And there's enough of us at an age where we can have some kind of impact on society. All of that lays the groundwork. I think for a while we were trying to be white, and then for a while we were trying to be black. Now I think that we'll probably see something that's different from any of the other cultures around us.

PWCW: There don’t seem to be that many big-name Asian-American comic book artists, certainly very few with major book deals.

GY: There's Jim Lee! Jim Lee's huge! Jim Lee made me mad! When he left Marvel and started his own company, he creates a superhero team with a white guy as the leader and no Asians on the whole team, I think there's only one East Indian. I was thinking, you finally get a chance to do what you want to do, and that’s what you do? You do the exact same thing that you were drawing for the white people in the corporate office? It made me mad. I've heard he's a nice guy, but I really wanted him to do something different.

PWCW: You've said in the past that you wanted the Monkey King to reflect your Christian faith. What elements of that are in the story?

GY: I look at my comics and I think I like using reconciliation as the climactic point of the story or the end result, as opposed to good triumphing over evil, or two people falling in love and consummating a relationship.

PWCW: What do you mean by reconciliation?

GY: Like a broken relationship being mended. I think that was an unconscious thing that I’ve become conscious of. That’s one thing, and the other is that I put Jesus in the book. And I replaced Buddha with the Christian God in the Monkey King story, because I think that Christianity is a vital part of the Asian-American experience. When I was in college, almost every Christian group on campus was completely Asian, and a lot of my Asian-American friends became Christian while they were in college. And I think there's something to that. I don't think that Asianness and the fact that they're attracted to Christianity is disconnected.

PWCW: What makes the Monkey King such a popular figure?

GY: He's a monkey that can beat people up! There is something that just attracts people, and especially young boys, on a visceral level. I read that in the 1970s, DC Comics would put monkeys or gorillas on practically every cover of every issue of every comic because it would sell more. He's been around Asian culture and specifically Chinese culture for so long that he's almost an icon of a culture.

PWCW: What does your family think about all of this?

GY: My dad has always been unhappy with my career choices. He paid for me to go to Berkeley, get a computer science degree, and then I’m a programmer for a few years, and then I become a high school teacher. For my comics, he’d always ask, "So how much money have you wasted on that? When are you going to do something real?" And then I got this book and I gave him a copy of the hardcover version and he wrote me this card about how my choices are finally panning out for me. He finally kind of approved of it. My mom's always been more supportive. When she came to the United States, she actually wanted to be a teacher, but she couldn't because of her accent. So she understands where my desire comes from better than my dad does.

PWCW: What keeps you wanting to do comics? Where does this compulsion come from?

GY: I think there is a universal compulsion to create, toward creativity. More specifically for me, I think it is tied in with my faith. There have been a number of times when I wanted to quit, and I've felt like I've been asked to keep going. To the point where at this point, I try not to question it any more.