American Born Chinese is very different from the book, and that’s great

polygon.com:

American Born Chinese, the graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, is a near-universally lauded, surreal graphic novel about a Chinese American kid who’s deeply embarrassed to be Chinese. So it’s not surprising if fans — myself included — were a little skeptical of trailers for American Born Chinese, the television show on Disney Plus.

Footage from the show has fronted action scenes and a battle between the mortal world and heaven, seeming to play on the enormous success of Everything Everywhere All at Once (to be fair, the show does borrow almost the entire cast of the Best Picture winner). It’s a choice that feels disconnected from the story of Jin Wang, high schooler with a lot to learn about himself and the racist discomfort he’s both trapped by and clinging to. American Born Chinese, the graphic novel, has elements of the fantastical, but they’re… actually, what they are is kind of complicated. They’re not a kung fu action fight for the fate of the world, that’s for sure.

But having seen a few episodes of American Born Chinese, the TV show, ahead of its debut, I can say confidently that there’s more to the adaptation than meets the eye. And what I’ve seen so far is more than enough to get excited about.

The most “challenging” aspect of American Born Chinese, the graphic novel, is also what has made it so thought-provoking a read. It’s not simply the story of Jin Wang, high schooler, tanking his relationship with his best friend in order to gain in-group status with the white kids. Yang’s graphic novel presents two other stories simultaneously: one about the early life of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and one that is a fictionalized American sitcom about a white American teenager and his embarrassing cousin, Chin-Kee, a