When Stories Collide

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0:41Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. So right before I got married, I went back to my parents' house and I cleaned out my old childhood bedroom. This is Gene Luen Yang. About 25 years ago, he was a high school teacher, and his hobby was writing comic books. I would tell my classes on the first day of every semester that I was also a comic book creator, because I was trying to impress them. And then I realized really quickly that it was just not impressive.

1:27They didn't find it impressive at all. So anyway, all those years ago, Gene was at his parents' house going through old letters and drawings. And I found this notebook that I had kept when I was in second and third grade. There's this cartoon in there. And on this cartoon, there's a slant-eyed bucktooth character. And then there's this other blonde character. And the slant-eyed bucktooth character is saying, Me Chinese, me play joke, me go pee-pee in your coke. And then the blonde character is spitting out his Coke. He didn't remember doing the drawing, but he did remember the joke. Yeah. Any Asian American who grew up in the 80s and probably early 90s remembers that joke.

2:10But I obviously thought it was funny enough to put in my notebook. And I wondered if my second grade self understood that that joke was aimed at people who look like me. I'm not positive he did. I'm not positive he did. But at that moment, seeing it again as an adult, Gene felt like that character was speaking to him. And so over the next six years or so, Gene started to work on a book with that character in mind. He really is all of these negative Chinese and Chinese-American stereotypes that I had grown up with. And drawing that character on the page felt like an exorcism to me. It was almost like I was working something out, you know?

2:59That book ended up becoming American Born Chinese, a graphic novel that came out in 2006 and quickly became a bestseller and the first graphic novel to ever become a finalist for the National Book Award. I was kind of shocked by the reaction. I was incredibly surprised and also encouraged by the amount of support that book got from librarians and from teachers and from booksellers, of course, but really from these readers. And there were mostly, like I heard a lot from not necessarily Asian American readers, but from the children of immigrants. It didn't really matter where their parents were from.

3:45It didn't matter what kind of food they ate at home. It didn't matter what language they spoke at home. It just mattered that there was this divide between the life that they experienced at home and the life that they experienced at school. And I heard from a lot of folks like that. Now, American-born Chinese is a classic and required reading in many middle schools across the country. The book has also just been adapted into a Disney Plus series starring some of the first Asian actors to ever win Oscars, marking a new era of storytelling that has finally arrived. And so today on the show, Gene Luen Yang explains his role in a quiet but extraordinary shift in how we educate and entertain the next generation.

4:31How he went from a comic book loving kid to the writer of Superman for DC Comics. What he learned teaching high school that he now applies to his graphic novels. and why he finally agreed to let Hollywood take a crack at the book that made him famous. We'll also hear from the young actor who stars in the TV version of American Born Chinese. But first, we need to explain a little bit more about the book itself. If you aren't familiar with this graphic novel, the story isn't probably what you think it is. Because it's actually three stories about three Chinese teens. There's Jin, a kid who moves and goes to a new school where he's the only Chinese-American student.

5:16At first, there's a twist on the ancient tale of the powerful yet fallible young monkey king. And then there's Qin Qi, who visits his American cousin, bringing every stereotypical Chinese trait to life in a grotesque way that Jin, as a second grader, could never have imagined. We won't ruin the ending, but these three stories collide at the end of the book. So that's what American More Chinese is. I came up with three different story ideas. I couldn't decide which one I liked the best. And in the end, I realized that, you know, jumping between storylines, jumping between genres, that's kind of how it feels to be maybe an Asian American in particular or an immigrant's kid in general.

6:02Most of us live in in-between worlds, right? We have one world at home and another world at school. And often as we go through our day, it does feel like we're moving in between worlds or we're moving in between genres. Okay, so Gene, take us back to your childhood. How did you even, like, was this just a thing that you were into from the very beginning or did someone introduce you to comics? My parents are both immigrants. And like most immigrant parents, they would tell me stories from the culture that they left when I was a kid. It was their way of keeping that connection alive. So I grew up in this house full of stories.

6:40And I also grew up drawing. I started drawing when I was two years old, my mom tells me, and I basically haven't stopped. Is it true that your mom was the person who bought you your first comic book? That's right. In fifth grade, she took me to our local bookstore. And I don't totally remember why. But what I do remember very clearly was seeing the spinner rack in the corner, a wireframe rack that would carry a month's worth of comics. And I remember her buying a copy of DC Comics Presents number 57, starring Superman and the Atomic Knights. So that was the very first comic of my collection. Were you psyched about Superman?

7:18I was not psyched about Superman. Oh, no. I was not a Superman fan. I had actually wanted this Marvel comic. You know, there was this Marvel two-in-one comic with The Thing, who's this big orange rock monster. And Rom the Space Knight, who's like this. He's kind of a superhero that dresses up like a robot and fights these demons from outer space. But my mom felt like those two characters looked too scary. So she bought me the Superman comic instead. Because Superman is like, you know, he's like a Boy Scout. He's like very safe. Super safe. Super, super safe. Yeah. Kind of reminds me like in sitcoms where you'd see like the bad kid in the back row with the comic book hiding behind the chemistry, you know, textbook.

7:58What was the belief that you had? Where did you see comic books fitting into your world or other kids' worlds? Yeah, it felt a little bit subversive. The way I would get to the comic book shop was I had a best friend named Jeremy in the fifth grade. We would get our parents to drop us off at the local library. and then they would drive away and we would be like, oh, we're going to spend like two hours on this library. And then we would sneak out of the library. We'd walk 20 minutes to the comic book shop. We'd buy as many comics out of the quarter bin as we could. And then we'd take them back to the library and we'd check out these big like oversized books to hide our comics in.

8:36So it always felt very like subversive, like something I wasn't supposed to do. I remember my dad realizing that my comic book collection was growing and he would find these articles. I don't even know where he found them. He would find them where, and they would talk about how, like, the lettering of the comics was so small that it would ruin your eyesight if you read too much. They're dangerous. Yes, so dangerous because of the lettering. So you didn't go, though, straight into comics and graphic novels. You first, as you became an adult, you continued drawing comics, but that was seen as, like, a thing you did on the side.

9:13Was it seen as a hobby? Yeah, I mean, that was part of it. But then as I got older and I started going to comic conventions and exploring what it meant to actually enter the industry, this was the 90s, I realized that it was just a very hard way of making a living. So then my plan was I was going to get a day job and then I was going to do comics on the side. More than a hobby. I thought of it more as like an avocation, you know, like something that was part of my – this is going to sound very highfalutin – but part of my development as a person. And out of that, I came to the decision of becoming a high school teacher and then taking comics more seriously.

9:51So, I don't know, did you incorporate comics into your teaching or the way you taught algebra or computer science? So in the beginning, I just tried to keep them separate. But then they came together. I, maybe about four or five years into my teaching career, I was asked to sub for this Algebra II class. One of my colleagues in the math department had to go on long-term leave. So I said yes, but the problem was I was also the school's educational technologist, which meant every two weeks I would be out of the classroom in some other teacher's classroom helping with some tech-related project. So for this Algebra 2 class, it meant that they would have to have a sub for their sub, which was horrific, right?

10:30It's like one of the worst situations you can have in the classroom. So as a way of kind of providing that continuity, I would draw these comics of myself giving lectures. and those were surprisingly really well received. Some of my students even preferred me, like, in the comic to me in real life. Here's Jean Luen Yang on the TED stage. When I talked to my students about why they liked these comics lectures so much, I began to understand the educational potential of comics. First, unlike their math textbooks, these comics lectures taught visually. Our students grow up in a visual culture, so they're used to taking in information that way.

11:13But unlike other visual narrative, like film or television or animation or video, comics are what I call permanent. In a comic, past, present, and future all sit side by side on the same page. This means that the rate of information flow is firmly in the hands of the reader. When my students didn't understand something in my comics lecture, they could just reread that passage as quickly or slowly as they needed. It was like I was giving them a remote control over the information. So for certain students and certain kinds of information, these two aspects of the comics medium, its visual nature and its permanence, make it an incredibly powerful educational tool.

12:04Actually, this is something I talk about with my kids all the time. You know, my older son just rips through books and he read one of yours last night and stayed up most of the night finishing it. Whereas my daughter, she really has to pace herself and she needs to take her time and she knows it. But tell me more about this idea about the rate of information flow, putting it in the hands of your students, of your readers. Well, I'm a slow reader as well. I read very, very slowly. And I also wonder if that's one of the reasons why I was drawn to comics, because comics are this visual medium that allow you to approach it at your own pace.

12:46it's not like animation, right? It's not like film. If a movie is an hour and a half long, every single person who watches that movie is going to take an hour and a half to watch that movie. But a comic, you can read as quickly or as slowly as you want to or as you need to. In a minute, how Gene Luen Yang took his experience in the classroom and turned it into a book that still feels unusual enough to grab kids' attention over 15 years later. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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15:14So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and on the show today, I am talking to Jean Luen Yang, author and illustrator of the graphic novel American Born Chinese. So during your teaching career, you started working on your graphic novel, American Born Chinese, which you wrote and illustrated yourself. It came out in 2006. And now, you know, here we are over 15 years later and it's required reading in middle schools across the country. And it still feels revelatory.

16:05Well, thanks. Thanks. I I've been doing comics for about five years and I'd always had these Asian American protagonists, but their Asian Americanness was never an important part of the story. It was always like like, you know, they would eat with chopsticks or something. There would be like little hints of their culture throughout the narrative, but it wasn't central to the narrative. I wanted to do some kind of story where that was the center. When I started working on it, I was doing it as mini comics, which meant I would write and draw a chapter. I'd take it to my local Kinko's. I'd run off copies.

16:38I'd staple them by hand. And then I would sell them. I would sell them to local stores. There would be a couple of stores that would carry handmade comics on consignment in the Bay Area. And at the end of the day, I'd moved maybe 20 copies or 25 copies. So I was working at a very, very small scale. And I knew most of the people who were going to read that book. So I think that in a way gave me the courage to do a character like that cousin character. Gene, this cousin character, I mean, he really is every uncomfortable stereotype of Asians and Asian Americans all kind of wrapped up into one. I'm just looking at the page right now, and he has slanted eyes, light yellow skin, teeth like a beaver.

17:25He quotes Confucius a lot. I mean, I am cringing as I turn to this other page in the book where he's at school eating a dead cat and noodles out of a Chinese takeout container for his lunch. Yeah, that cousin character is definitely the most controversial part of the book. My publisher actually sent out a whole bunch of these review copies to different independent bookstores all over America. and more than one Asian American bookstore owner flipped through the book, saw that character and refused to carry the book. So I ended up having to write this essay about what I was trying to do with that character.

18:03My publisher put that up on the web. That convinced those Asian American bookstore owners to actually read the book. And now they're among my most ardent supporters. But it took a little bit. I mean, he is, this character is so ridiculous that I started laughing at his scenes. But then I was like, is that bad that I'm laughing? Like, I don't know. Was that okay? These are the three big reactions that I've gotten from that character. So one is, it's usually from older Asian Americans. they'll tell me that they get to those portions of the book and they find that character so painful that it's hard for them to finish the book and i kind of think that's okay i kind of think that that's sort of what i was going for and then the second uh reaction and this is very rare i would get somebody coming up to me at a a comic book convention and they would say you know that cousin character in your book is so cute do you have like a t-shirt with his face on it and when I would get a reaction like that I'd be like yeah you just did not understand what I was trying to do with that that character the other reaction is usually from younger folks and it's it's sort of like yours it's people tell me you know I found that character really funny but I felt very uncomfortable laughing and I think that's okay too I think that's also kind of what I was going for because because in a lot of ways like if you look at American comedians we just have a lot of race-based humor, but I think the race-based humor comes in two different flavors.

19:39One is people make jokes about race because they think the stereotypes are true. And that's a, I mean, that's just straight up racist humor. The other way I think people make jokes about race is they use jokes to point out the absurdity of the stereotypes. Because deep down inside, we know that it's not right to smush down three-dimensional people into two-dimensional stereotypes. So that is sort of what I was going for with this character as well. Like, I did want him to be absurd, but I wanted him to be absurd because he is the embodiment of absurd ideas about Asians and Asian Americans. I heard that when the book was first published, a couple people in Hollywood also took notice and that you did get an offer, but you didn't take it.

20:35Am I getting this story correct? Yeah, that it was from a major studio. And then when I dug in very lightly, I was told that they were interested in it because it had the word Chinese in the title and they wanted something to coincide with the Chinese Olympics that happened in 2008. Oh, how did that make you feel? I mean, it did not make me feel awesome. Now that I've, you know, dipped my toe into Hollywood, I kind of get how in order for these stories to exist that are told in Hollywood, you do have to ride that line in between art and commerce, right? It's just part of being able to do what they do.

21:12I get that. But I think when I heard that, it felt like they didn't necessarily have an understanding of the spirit underneath the book. And then internally, I was always kind of freaked out about how that cousin character would make the leap from the page to the screen. And this might be like a bias of mine because I'm a book person. But I kind of trust readers a little bit more than I trust viewers. And my biggest fear was that if the story was ever adapted, that scenes with that cousin character would get clipped and show up on YouTube completely decontextualized. And that would be a complete nightmare for me.

21:50Okay, so here we are. An American-born Chinese has been made into a TV show. What changed both for you and for Hollywood? On the Hollywood side, I think they've become much more open to a diversity of stories. Black Panther came out and Crazy Rich Asians came out and both of them made boatloads of money. And I do think that was a watershed year. Folks in Hollywood realized, oh, these stories can actually work. They can work both creatively and financially. I think that was very important. But, Gene, you know, a lot of people don't get a second chance. Like, a book comes out. If you're going to option it, it's got to happen then because people forget what happened.

22:30How did interest spark up? Or was it bubbling along all this time? Yeah, I wouldn't say it was bubbling along. I do think it was after that year, after the Black Panther Crazy Rich Asians year. There was this renewed search for stories that might have been missed simply because the protagonist didn't fit, you know, the standard boxes. And I started getting some interest. The big turning point was meeting Kelvin and Charles Yu, who ended up writing the pilot together. So they're two brothers. They're both incredibly talented. We sat down for a conversation. and their solution to my fear that I had had for years and years and years was to simply put it into the script.

23:14So in the pilot episode, that fear that I had of the cousin character getting clipped and put on YouTube, decontextualized, that actually happens. That's part of the plot. So in a lot of ways, what Kelvin and Charles are doing in that story is sort of teaching the viewer what to think about that. When they walked me through that solution, I was like, okay, I trust these guys. But it's true. As you mentioned, the TV adaptation of the book, it's very different. Was that hard for you to see your baby morph? Or were you okay with that? Like, how do you, was this your first time sort of thinking like, how do I take the essence of my book, but turn it into something that makes sense for someone who maybe has never read anything that I've ever written.

24:02I was okay with it. I felt like before we started working on this, I had made peace with the fact that the adaptation would be very different from the original book. And I think some of that comes from just watching adaptations of other books. Different media have different strengths. And I think in order for you to take advantage of the strength of one medium, you do have to change the storyline. So early on, Kelvin and Charles and I, we had these conversations about boiling the book down into its essence and then letting it re-expand into the shape of an eight-episode season of television. So with the book, it's a 200-page graphic novel.

24:47It has one beginning, middle, and end. Whereas with television, because there's eight episodes, you do need at least eight beginnings, middles, and ends. So how do you get there? How do you get from one place to the other, you know? The other thing we had to talk about was pretty early on we made the decision to move the time period of the story from the late 80s, early 90s which is vaguely when the book is set into the 2020s. The conversation about Asian Americans has changed between then and now. And those changes have to be incorporated into the story as well. In the TV version, Jin is a present-day high school student who just wants to fit in.

25:26How was school? It was good. School was fine. I've got American Lit, Bio 2, Trig, World History, which I think is way too broad, Art. And I also have P.E. this year, which I can sub for a sport. So I was thinking maybe I could do soccer. Not too many activities. Just stay focused, study, work hard. That is enough. So that's Jin with his parents. And the cousin character we talked about now only exists in clips from a cheesy 90s sitcom. When one of the kids at school mocks Jin by comparing him to that old 90s show, we see how old stereotypes die hard. Then there's also the Chinese mythological characters woven in.

26:13The Monkey King and many more, including a goddess played by Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh. But I want you to know it will be difficult and dangerous. And remember, the fate of your world hangs in the balance. Jin is played by Ben Wong, who was born in Beijing and immigrated to Minnesota around age six. He had never read Jin's book until he auditioned for the part. My jaw was on the floor. I had never gotten a material that reminded me so much of my own life before. I called Ben a few weeks ago to talk to him about being in the series. I was in Stanford, Connecticut at the time, shooting another film.

26:59And I had an off day, so I ran to the Stanford Public Library and I found the graphic novel in the children's section in the basement. And like, it was like 7.58 and they closed at 8. And I was like on the floor, like, like crying my eyes out on the carpet. And the janitor was like, sir, you need to leave. And I was like, stop, I can't leave. I feel seen for the first time in my life. Please let me cry on your carpet. I mean, can I just ask you, what was making you cry, do you think? So I didn't realize this really until I had read this book. But for me, growing up, consuming media was always an act of empathy.

27:39It was always about me learning about something else or someone else's life. And for the very first time, maybe in my entire life, I read something that felt like a reflection of my own specific circumstances. In an instant, I felt less alone. Amelia. Uh, Jen, it's nice to meet you, sort of. Sort of? I just meant, because we sort of know each other, because we went to elementary school together, but then you went to Crest Road Intermediate, I went to Dorothy Nichols Middle, and now I'm kind of creeping myself out. I should stop. You know, I think I do remember you. I mean, you kind of stand out, obviously.

28:19I do. Are you trying out for soccer? Yeah, or, you know, I don't know, maybe. Oh, that's cool. I was actually going to try out too, but my mom wants me to do drama, because she did drama in high school, and apparently we have to have all the same interests. Any parents ever like that? I'm not actually sure if my parents have any interests. I mean, at its core, Jin is just a regular American kid trying to do regular American kid things, right? He wants to join the team, and he wants to get the girl, and he wants to go to the dance and do all the things that he saw on TV growing up that, you know, the world tells you a kid's supposed to be doing.