It's a magical world

Yang, Gene Luen (art by Gurihiru). Avatar: The Promise Part One. New York: Dark Horse, 2012.

In honor of World Book Day yesterday, I sat down and read a book. This one, in fact! It was so great to just read a book. I should do that more often.

Ahem.

I had the very great pleasure of hearing Gene Yang give a book talk when this, the first of the ATLA sequel comics, was published in February. The story takes place a year after the end of the cartoon, when Fire Lord Zuko revokes his promise to Earth King Kuei and Avatar Aang to support the "Harmony Restoration Movement," which is seeking to repatriate the citizens of the Fire Nation's colonies in the Earth Kingdom to their (ancestral) home. Zuko changes his mind after the daughter of the mayor of the city of Yu Dao, the oldest and richest of the colonies, tries to assassinate him, setting up a conflict with just about everyone, including Aang, who'd promised Zuko that he'd kill him if he ever decided that Zuko was turning into his father, Ozai.

Oh, Zuko.

For a kids' comic book, this is some surprisingly heavy stuff to deal with, and I think Yang, who's clearly done his research, is handling the complexities of these issues well so far. Hybridity and rootedness and foreignness and authenticity are all complicated things, and in the eye of the beholder as often as not. I also thought Yang did a bang-up job of getting the characters' voices right - it sounded just like an episode of the show in my head, and that's high praise. I laughed out loud at multiple points. Indeed, my one complaint is that the book is too short, and the second volume isn't coming until May.

I will say, passe the protestors' signs demanding Harmony now! in characters that are written left to right and have an exclamation point at the end, that to me the hybridity of A:TLA itself - that is an Asian-American, rather than an Asian or an American, show - is itself an example of what the comics are getting into here. Yu Dao was inspired by Qingdao, the German treaty port in northeast China, and Zuko is right when he points to Yu Dao's hybridity as the source of its wealth and advancement, just as Katara is right when she points out that that wealth and advancement aren't parceled out equally within the city. But it's Yu Dao and the cities like it that become the great cities of Korra's time (the Sino-Japanese for "republic", 共和国, literally means something like "together harmony realm"), and that is just one of the painful truths of the world we live in. You wouldn't have the one without the other, injustice and all.

Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006.

I went to the Diversity in YA kick-off event in San Francisco two weekends ago, and Gene Yang's signature on my copy of this book says, "Keep reading comics!" No fear of the opposite happening, Gene.

This book won both the Printz and the Eisner and was the first graphic novel nominated for the National Book Award, which considering that it came out in 2006 says several things at once right there. At the DiYA event Yang mentioned that he basically had no input on the book being submitted for consideration for the Printz, which is also interesting; I wouldn't tag this book YA, though I wouldn't say it's not YA, either. Like the best comics and graphic novels, its appeal defies age.

The story itself is three separate, and then not-so-separate, stories: the first follows the Monkey King, and his rather drastic efforts at self-reinvention after a snub at a party, culminating in his joining the Journey to the West. The second follows young Jin Wang, a student at Oliphant High who has one best friend, Weh-chen, and who wishes he could be someone else. The third seems the most unrelated: it follows Danny, a white high school student whose perfect life is destroyed every year by the arrival of his cousin Chin-kee for his annual visit from China. Only in the final chapter is it revealed that they're all connected, in a brilliant and really unnerving way.

As you might expect from the title, but less so from my summary above, the story is about race and identity and immigration and assimilation and dominant versus minority culture and navigating that matrix. Yang's art is really funny, and so is his text; it took me this entry by esmenet to really register the multilingualness (hybridity? polyvocality?) of the text, but now that I think about it, yeah: it's one of many brilliant touches on Yang's part. There are levels and levels to this book, and I probably should reread it now that I know the ending, which is first devastating (and also a bit like a knife to the kidneys in that it's so smoothly done) and then hopeful.