Inherited Confucian values can leave them feeling caught between honoring their parents and pursuing their dreams, contributing to their sense of alienation.Īnother tension emerges in Boxers & Saints. Yang’s conflict is one that many children of Asian immigrants know well. He now supplements his art with a part-time job managing databases for a Catholic high school in Oakland-an arrangement his father has accepted, if reluctantly. He eventually quit his job to work on his comics. Yang dutifully majored in computer science and found a job as a software programmer. “It definitely rubbed me the wrong way,” Yang says. Like many immigrant parents, Yang’s father wanted a stable career for his son instead of the life of a struggling artist. Although he was interested in comics growing up, his father, an electrical engineer from Taiwan, told him to choose a “practical” major-meaning the sciences. More remarkable is that Yang almost didn’t become a cartoonist. It also caught on as a favorite in libraries and schools.Ī graphic novel winning these awards is remarkable. Weaving humor with themes of race and identity, American Born Chinese was the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award and the first to win the American Library Association’s Printz Award. He first found mainstream success with his 2006 book American Born Chinese (First Second Books), a graphic novel that draws on his childhood experiences of feeling like an outsider at school due to his ethnicity. Yang, 40, has become an ambassador for this thoughtful brand of comics. They are the fastest-growing section in many bookstores and libraries, and many critics have come to regard them as serious literature. Graphic novels, which tell a full-length story using the art and storytelling format of comic books, are currently enjoying newfound respectability. In 2013 he published a two-volume epic based on the events of the Boxer Rebellion, Boxers & Saints (First Second Books). For Yang, the son of Chinese immigrants to California, the canonization spurred a strong interest in learning about this historical event.

Many of those saints died in the Boxer Rebellion, the late-19th-century peasant uprising in China against the foreign and Christian presence there. “It was the first time the Catholic Church had acknowledged Chinese Catholics in this way,” he says.

Graphic novel author Gene Luen Yang recalls his parish’s elation that 88 of the new saints were ethnically Chinese. When Pope John Paul II canonized 120 Catholics from China in 2000, a Chinese American Catholic community celebrated in San Jose, California. An epic quest for cultural identity unfolds in the pages of Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novels.

Boxers and saints graphic novel