‘American Born Chinese’ joins the conversation on bullying and stereotypes
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Gene Luen Yang graduated from the same California high school as Steven Spielberg. So when he recently watched “The Fabelmans,” Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale that at one point re-creates the look of their alma mater, he was stirred by strange feelings. It wasn’t just the eerily familiar walls and hallways. On a deeper level, the movie also churned up the memories of prejudice.
In that Oscar-nominated 2022 drama, the young future filmmaker endures antisemitic bullying in the ’60s. Yang attended Saratoga High a quarter-century later, by which time such physical attacks were not as common, Yang says during a video interview this month from his native Bay Area. Instead, he sometimes experienced racist language and this “weird, vague exclusion” of Asian American students such as himself.
It was within that campus culture that Yang read Jonathan Swift’s classic “A Modest Proposal.” He became so struck by the power of its devastating satire that he tried his hand at crafting his own literary humor — but from an Asian American perspective.
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That writing exercise became a seed for Yang’s trailblazing 2006 book, “American Born Chinese,” the first graphic novel to be named a National Book Award finalist. “I think I wanted to talk about the racism that wasn’t called out as racism,” during a time when “American culture was just much more tolerant of using Asians and Asian Americans as comedic punching bags,” Yang says. He also wanted to present people of Asian descent “as three-dimensional human beings.”
The novel, which focuses on student life and the immigrant experience, and which also features a fantasy narrative inspired by the 16th-century Chinese epic “Journey to the West,” gained popularity for how it artfully tackled cultural perceptions. Now, in the streaming series “American Born Chinese,” which just arrived on Disney Plus, Yang’s characters spotlight social challenges faced by Asian Americans amid a shifting national conversation over identity, representation and racism.
Like the book, the action comedy-drama will blend the group dynamics at a largely White high school with martial arts and Chinese mythology — plus all the endearing awkwardness of a sophomore named Jin (played by Ben Wang) navigating social media, sports tryouts and the expectations of his Chinese immigrant parents, while also befriending the son (Jimmy Liu) of a supernatural Monkey King (Daniel Wu) and nurturing his please-let-this-become-more-than friendship with his new crush (Sydney Taylor).
Showrunner Kelvin Yu has teasingly called Wang “the Asian American Michael J. Fox” for Gen Z because of his high likability factor, notes Yang, an executive producer on the show. The show also reunites recently minted “Everything Everywhere All At Once” Oscar winners Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan and nominated castmate Stephanie Hsu.
Some of the show’s talent say the series arrives at an opportune time for such stories to be widely appreciated, following such high-profile projects as “Crazy Rich Asians, “Parasite” and “Squid Game,” as well as “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” whose director, Destin Daniel Cretton, is an executive producer and one of the directors of “American Born Chinese.”
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“The timing is perfect,” says Wu, the Bay Area-born superstar in Asian cinema who is better known to some U.S. viewers for his AMC martial-arts drama, “Into the Badlands.” “Five years ago would’ve been too early.”
Plus, some titles popular on streaming services have helped prove “that Americans are willing to read subtitles,” Yang says, and “are willing to watch shows with a diverse cast, as long as the story is good.”
Early this month, stars and producers from the show were celebrated during a White House screening of “American Born Chinese.” Yang says one of President Biden’s statements particularly resonated with him.
“He talked about how America is not organized around land and is not organized around blood. It’s organized around an idea, and how Asian Americans are a part of expressing that idea,” Yang says. “I really appreciated that, because it flies in the face of, and runs counter to, the perpetual ‘foreigner’ myth we generally face.”
Long before Yang became a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and a national ambassador for young people’s literature, the former Bay Area schoolteacher began drawing the “American Born Chinese” novel with a mission to address such pernicious myths and illuminate his truth.
“I first read the graphic novel when I got the audition” in 2021, says Wang, who is in his 20s, “and it was deeply emotional for me, because I had never once before, in my entire life, read seen or heard any piece of media that felt like it so specifically reflected my own experiences growing up.”
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Wu discovered the book about a decade ago and identified with it: “A lot of things Jin experiences are things that I grew up with, being a child of the ’70s and ’80s, growing up where it wasn’t as diverse and when I wasn’t seeing myself on-screen.”
Yang, who began writing the book in his 20s, says he is part of an emerging Asian American culture that’s individual from “the culture that our parents or grandparents came from. It’s an expression of America, but it’s distinctively our own.”
Yang had used the book’s comic art and dialogue as a precise tool to satirize harmful Chinese stereotypes through a broadly sketched character named “Chin-Kee.” “One reason I was very, very reluctant to pursue any sort of [screen] adaptation opportunity was, I was always kind of freaked out that clips of that character would show up on YouTube completely decontextualized,” Yang says. “I told this to [showrunner] Kelvin, and he said: ‘Just put that in the first episode. Whatever you’re afraid of, put that in the first episode.’ It was his way of making it so that he could teach the [viewer] how to think about that.”
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For the medium of live-action, the show’s creative leaders decided such broad satire would work better if they concocted a show within the show. They created a character named Freddy Wong (Quan), whose retro-sitcom antics spoof the Asian stereotypes depicted in such Hollywood fare as John Hughes’s “Sixteen Candles.”
At first, Quan turned down the role flat, but he came aboard after a Zoom meeting with the show’s team. “I’m so glad he came around,” Yang says, “because I honestly can’t think of another person who could’ve pulled that off.”
The book spends scant time on the protagonist’s parents, while the show embraces their pursuit of the American Dream. And while the book is set several decades ago, the show is set in the present day, partly to address how the conversation about Asian Americans has changed. “Some things that happen in the book you can’t really imagine happening in the 2020s in a California high school,” Yang says. “It was the more overt racism that was just a part of my childhood. It would not fly in the age of social media and cellphones.”
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Yang hopes the show is embraced by multiple generations of viewers, including Asian Americans who can appreciate what Yang views as a bifurcated experience. “In certain communities, we as Asian Americans are experiencing a level of progress that we would not have imagined we would experience, … but in other communities, our elders are getting beaten up in the streets, which was also unimaginable, [where] it feels like we’re falling backwards in time.”
Yang is optimistic that more shows, including “American Born Chinese,” can signal to viewers that everyone’s experience can be “story-worthy”: “I hope that people just realize that the feeling of being an outsider is incredibly universal.”
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Source: The Washington Post
