In a supplement to a new edition of “American Born Chinese,” Yang observes that Asian Americans “sometimes feel like we are guests in America,” treated as foreign no matter how long they’ve lived in this country. “We try to be good guests and not make a fuss,” he says, “because America feels like somebody else’s home.” When I asked Yang when he first had that sense of being a guest in his own country, he answered quietly: “I don’t ever remember not feeling like that.” It wasn’t until attending Berkeley, surrounded by students who looked like him, that Yang began to feel he had always belonged. The young people who tell him how much they related to “American Born Chinese,” he said, are “almost always immigrants’ kids. They’re often not Asian American, but their parents came from somewhere else, and they grew up here.”
“He’s informed a generation with that book,” Kim told me. “Out of all of us, I think Gene had the most impact on the world. He’s like our Beyoncé.”
In “Dragon Hoops,” from 2020, in part a memoir about his last year as a teacher, Yang writes that the characters in a comic should function “like the characters of an alphabet. Each must be visually distinct, with easily identifiable markers.” You see this most clearly in Yang’s noses: He makes curlicues, dashes, wedges, round pokable blobs. (He claims glumly that this is “just me making up for my own inadequacies as a cartoonist.”) He used to start his books on napkins, which made his first doodles feel low-stakes, and his style — clean, clear and inviting — retains that napkin-level approachability. “As I got older,” he says, “I realized that the intimacy of your illustrator voice is actually more important than things like perspective, or even, like, anatomical proportions.” Part of that intimacy comes from the way Yang uses visual metaphors to show emotion: Jin’s cloudlike hair crackling with lightning, or a word from his crush blanketing him in bed.
Television speaks a very different language, but the Disney+ rendering of “American Born Chinese” is a surprisingly effective translation. It opens with a VFX-heavy chase scene between the Monkey King and his son, Wei-Chen, whose shaggy prosthetic hair gives him a striking resemblance to Teen Wolf. But the show soon relaxes into something much closer to the book’s deep, funny charisma, honoring the surreality of Yang’s world with little touches like an Old Navy-esque store that also sells, for some reason, milk. In the book, the three story lines have equal weight, but the show recalibrates. Wei-Chen, played by Jimmy Liu with endearing confidence, becomes the hero of the second story, rather than his father. And Jin’s parents, barely present before, are brought to life in an arc about his tart, practical mother and her sad, demure husband, who believes perhaps too much in the American dream. “Don’t you remember who you used to be?” she pleads with him. “We came here with nothing, no connections. Where did that brave man go?”