Well, This Is Spectacular News
Almost the first book review we at Fleen¹ ever ran was for Gene Luen Yang‘s American Born Chinese, at a time when it was possible for me to write I don’t know much about Gene Yang. We all know about Gene Yang now, of course — two-time National Book Award finalist, multiple winner of every award comics has to offer, MacArthur Fellow, National Ambassador for Children’s Literature, and supremely skilled writer of comics.
But American Born Chinese was, as much as anything, the thesis statement for his outlook on life and the work he would use to express it. It is, as near as damn, a perfect piece of comics work — smart, funny, insightful, bringing together disparate threads into a single whole, with a grounding in both the Chinese classics and Yang’s Catholic faith.
And now the way too many people — five would be too many — who aren’t familiar with American Born Chinese will have another opportunity to become familiar:
I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS!!! I can’t believe I get to work with such an amazingly talented team!
That, in reference to this:
Disney+ Greenlights ‘American Born Chinese’ Series From Melvin Mar, Kelvin Yu & Jake Kasdan; ‘Shang-Chi’s Destin Daniel Cretton To Direct
[Note to self: subscribe to Disney+ when this releases.]
I really hope they find some way to make Cousin Chin-Kee obviously nonhuman; animate him, some kind of visual effect to drop him into the uncanny valley, make a college mascot costume, something like that.
Just the idea of a series meant to explore the notions of identity, racism, and living at a disadvantage in a white world that doesn’t recognize its casual biases is going to make the right heads explode; I am looking forward to their bad-faith shrieking that Yang and the creative team are the real racists with fervor.
In the meantime, tell everybody you know. This is going to be something special, maybe even a landmark in the culture. It’s a good time for the story to be told, and we are all going to be lucky to see it.
Spam of the day:
I have Donation For You
This is from a spam that variously mentions a charity project, a lost zillionaire with a will that for some reason names me, and also a tremendously large lottery win that for some reason requires my banking information. Yeahno.
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¹ Well, it was number eighteen, but we’ve been at this for maybe 600 or so reviews, and the ones before then weren’t actually as analytic. Sort of how Chris Onstad regards Achewood as starting some four month after the debut, with the introduction of Ray, Pat, and Roast Beef.
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