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50books_poc2. Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is a graphic novel with three stories that gradually become connected in surprising (to me, anyway) ways: the legend of the Monkey King, the story of a second-generation Chinese American boy named Jin Wang, and the story of an American boy named Danny and his cousin Chin-Kee, the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype. The last story thread threw me for a loop at first, but it ends up tying in with the others in the end.
Yang's art (colored by Lark Pien) is fluid and lively; it's kind of what I think of as a "memoir" style, a bit reminiscent in its simplified but expressive appearance of graphic novel memoirs like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Although the story has fantastic elements, the characters feel very emotionally real.
The intertwined stories are all, in the end, about identity, and especially about owning your own identity in a wider society that doesn't approve of it. It's a beautiful graphic novel, and I really enjoyed it.
Yang has some commentary on different aspects of the book here.
Bonus, completely unrelated, recs: I read these last year or the year before, so too long ago to really review, by Dr. Atul Gawande's Complications and Better are both excellent written and fascinating insight into modern U.S. medicine as well as the science of failure and error reduction. Several of Dr. Gawande's essays have been featured in Year's Best Science Writing anthologies, with good reason, and he has a lot of interesting things to say about the U.S. health care system (if you do not care about the U.S. health care system, the medical stories are still interesting). He has a new book out, The Checklist Manifesto, which I will be reviewing after I read it. (Dr. Gawande is Indian American.)
Yang's art (colored by Lark Pien) is fluid and lively; it's kind of what I think of as a "memoir" style, a bit reminiscent in its simplified but expressive appearance of graphic novel memoirs like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Although the story has fantastic elements, the characters feel very emotionally real.
The intertwined stories are all, in the end, about identity, and especially about owning your own identity in a wider society that doesn't approve of it. It's a beautiful graphic novel, and I really enjoyed it.
Yang has some commentary on different aspects of the book here.
Bonus, completely unrelated, recs: I read these last year or the year before, so too long ago to really review, by Dr. Atul Gawande's Complications and Better are both excellent written and fascinating insight into modern U.S. medicine as well as the science of failure and error reduction. Several of Dr. Gawande's essays have been featured in Year's Best Science Writing anthologies, with good reason, and he has a lot of interesting things to say about the U.S. health care system (if you do not care about the U.S. health care system, the medical stories are still interesting). He has a new book out, The Checklist Manifesto, which I will be reviewing after I read it. (Dr. Gawande is Indian American.)
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