By KAREN MacPHERSON
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Gene Luen Wang likes to joke that "I've got two jobs -- just like Batman."
"He's a billionaire by day and a crime fighter by night. I'm a high school teacher by day, and at night, I draw comic books," Wang says.
Wang, 35, may not be a billionaire like Batman, but he's begun to win a measure of fame with his "comic books." This year, Wang's graphic novel, "American Born Chinese" (First Second Books, $16.95) won the Michael Printz Award, the young adult literature equivalent of the Newbery Medal. The book, which Wang both wrote and illustrated, was the first graphic novel to win the Printz.
Published last year, "American Born Chinese" also was the first graphic novel to be a finalist for the National Book Award (young adult category), and it has won a host of other awards: Top Ten List of the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adult, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and Amazon.com's pick for Best Graphic Novel/Comic of the Year.
For Wang, the sudden interest in his work has been a bit dizzying -- in a wonderful way.
"This book kind of turned my life upside down," Wang laughed during a recent speech to the Children's Book Guild in Washington, D.C.
Although Wang had published three previous graphic novels, "American Born Chinese" was the first published by a mainstream publisher, which gave it a much wider distribution.
"There was also a lot more money involved," said Wang, who is married with two children. "They offered me money before the book was published -- that totally surprised me."
In his book, Wang weaves together three very different storylines as a way of illuminating the tensions experienced by Asian Americans as they try to both honor their ethnic identity and fit into American culture.
One storyline tells the story of the Monkey King, who insists he isn't a monkey because he wears shoes. A second storyline looks at Jin Wang, whose quest to fit in leads him to do such things as getting a permanent so he can have curly hair like the popular white boy at school. And the third storyline, which Wang describes as a "sitcom on paper," focuses on Chin-Kee, the ultimate Chinese stereotype character, whose refusal to try to fit in annihilates the efforts of his cousin Danny to blend into white culture.
"Being of one cultural heritage and having to operate in another culture gives you an extraordinary added bit of anxiety," Wang says.
In choosing "American Born Chinese" as the Printz winner this year, the American Library Association selection committee noted: "Yang draws from American pop culture and ancient Chinese mythology in his groundbreaking work. Expertly told in words and pictures, Yang's story in three parts follows a Chinese American teenager's struggle to define himself against racial stereotypes."
Wang knew early on that he wanted to make his living as an artist. At first, he was fixated on the idea of becoming an animator and, as a child, he had a poster of Walt Disney over his bed.
Then, in fifth grade, Wang read his first comic: "Superman and the Atomic Kingdom."
"It really freaked me out -- I stayed up nights, thinking about the atomic bomb," Wang says. "That really demonstrated to me how powerful the combination of words and pictures could be, and it really got comics under my skin."
Wang finally switched his allegiance from animation to comics years later after taking a six-week animation class that resulted in 60 seconds worth of material.
"If you're really interested in stories, comics is really the medium," he says.
In 1997, Wang won the Xeric Grant, a well-known comic industry award, for his first book, "Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks." Over the next few years, Wang published two other books, "Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order," a sequel to "Gordon Yamamoto," and "The Rosary Comic Book," a graphic version of the Catholic rosary tradition that reflects Wang's Catholic faith.
Despite the success of "American Born Chinese," Wang plans to continue combining part-time teaching and creating graphic novels. He's currently working on three different graphic novels while teaching computer science at a San Francisco area high school.
Wang adds that he doesn't relish the idea of sitting home with his drawing board.
"I like being part of a team," he says.
(Karen MacPherson, the children's/teen librarian at the Takoma Park, Md. Library, can be reached at Kam.macpherson(at)gmail.com).
Did you know...
That his name is Gene Yang, not Wang?
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