The high-stakes feat of bringing ‘American-born Chinese’ to TV

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In a supplement to a new issue of “American Born Chinese,” Yang notes that Asian Americans “sometimes feel like we are guests in the United States,” treated as foreigners no matter how long they have lived in this country. “We try to be nice guests and not make a fuss,” she says, “because America feels like someone else’s home.” When I asked Yang when he first had that feeling of being a guest in his own country, he quietly replied, “I don’t remember ever No feeling like this.” It wasn’t until he attended Berkeley, surrounded by students who looked just like him, that Yang began to feel like he had always belonged. The young people who tell him how much they identify with “American-born Chinese,” he said, are “almost always the children of immigrants. They are often not Asian American, but their parents came from somewhere else and they grew up here.”

“You have informed a generation with that book,” Kim told me. “Of all of us, I think Gene had the biggest impact on the world. He is like our Beyoncé”.

In “Dragon Hoops” of 2020, partly a memoir about his last year as a teacher, Yang writes that the characters in a comic should function “like the characters in an alphabet. Each one should be visually distinct, with easily identifiable markers.” You can see this most clearly in Yang’s noses: he makes flourishes, dashes, wedges, round poking blobs. (He sadly states that this is “just me making up for my own inadequacies as a cartoonist.”) He used to start the books on napkins, which made his first doodles look low-risk, and his style was clean and clear and attractive. – preserves that accessibility at the napkin level. “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 anatomical proportions.” Part of that intimacy comes from the way Yang uses visual metaphors to show emotion: Jin’s cloud-like hair crackling with lightning, or a word from his crush covering him in bed.

Television speaks a very different language, but Disney+’s rendition of “American-born Chinese” is a surprisingly effective translation. It opens with a visual effects-laden chase scene between the Monkey King and his son Wei-Chen, whose shaggy prosthetic hair bears a striking resemblance to Teen Wolf. But the show soon unwinds into something much closer to the book’s deep and funny charisma, honoring the surreality of Yang’s world with little touches like an Old Navy-style store that also sells, for some reason, milk. In the book, all three story lines are given equal weight, but the show is recalibrated. Wei-Chen, played by Jimmy Liu with endearing confidence, becomes the hero of the second story, instead of his father. And Jin’s parents, barely present before, come to life in an arc over her sour, no-nonsense 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?