My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough. Gene Luen Yang More Quotes by Gene Luen Yang More Quotes From Gene Luen Yang To find your true identity within the will of Tze Yo Tzuh...that is the highest of all freedoms. Gene Luen Yang true-identityhighestidentity Superheroes are also about immigrants. Superman, the prototype of all superheroes, is a prototypical immigrant. His homeland was in crisis, so his parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He has two names, one American, Clark Kent, and the other foreign, Kal-El. He wears two sets of clothes and lives in between two cultures. He loves his new country, but a part of him still longs for his old one. Gene Luen Yang namescountrybook Building a habit of reading leads to all sorts of reading. Gene Luen Yang buildinghabitreading Zombies aren't about zombies. It's not about the dead bodies. I think it's a very hopeful subgenre. It says that regardless of what happens, humanity will get through it. We'll figure out a way to survive. Gene Luen Yang hopefulhumanitythinking It's easy to become anything you wish . . . so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul. Gene Luen Yang soulwishlong In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading. Gene Luen Yang readingteacherenemy I think reading has got so many more enemies now that graphic novels have kind of flipped over to that side. Gene Luen Yang readingenemythinking If you look at our world, we're becoming so much more diverse in every sense of the word. It's not just about culture or identity. It's also about the different ways we communicate. Gene Luen Yang our-worldidentityway What is China but a people and their stories? Gene Luen Yang chinastoriespeople I liked interacting with students. I liked having coworkers. For a long time, I was really worried that sitting at home by myself in front of a computer was going to make me crazy. Gene Luen Yang crazyhomelong One of the ways [racism] pops up is when they turn a comic into a live-action movie and there's this temptation to make Asian characters white. Gene Luen Yang racismwhitecharacter My best teachers, the teachers who had the deepest effect on my reading, combined the two. They would mix required reading with reading where you had some choice, you had some autonomy. There's a place for both. A good teacher will know how to find that balance. Gene Luen Yang readingteachertwo Wait." "So what am I supposed to do now?" "You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from five hundred years' imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey." (222-223) Gene Luen Yang rockswaitingyears Sometimes, a fight you cannot win is still worth fighting. Gene Luen Yang fightingwinningsometimes I think a lot of us who are in books now were nervous children. Gene Luen Yang bookchildrenthinking I was always a slow reader, from the very beginning. I remember in first grade our teacher divided us into groups, and I was definitely in the slow group. She didn't call it that, but everybody in the class knew. But I still loved reading. Being a slow reader affected my grades in school, but it didn't affect my love for reading. I still loved going to the library, and I still loved reading books. Gene Luen Yang readingteacherbook I think a lot of us go through a period where we feel like outsiders, and deal with that by wishing we were insiders. So that was the emotional core of American Born Chinese. Gene Luen Yang chineseemotionalthinking Coming from the world of comics, I was very surprised that writers and illustrators, for the most part, don't talk, and they don't collaborate. Gene Luen Yang illustratorsworld At the very core of what a comic is, time and space are kind of the same thing. When your reader moves her eyes across the page, she should be moving through time in your story. Gene Luen Yang spaceeyemoving As somebody who's kind of a technophile, I'm interested in how traditional and digital publishing connect. Maybe ten years ago they were seen as antagonists, but now they complement each other. There's data that shows digital sales actually drive print sales. And even the ways in which pictures and words, text and image, interact - we're seeing these books that are very hard to categorize. All of that is very exciting to me. Gene Luen Yang databookyears
