Funny excerpt:

... it was surprising when Gene Yang's graphic novel, "American Born Chinese" was nominated for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2006.

And nobody was more surprised than Yang.

"When I first started publishing 'American Born Chinese,' it was a mini comic," he said. "I would finish a chapter, take it to Kinko's and Xerox it and sell it at different comic book conventions. My big plan was to just get it collected as a graphic novel and that would be it."

"I do get some reactions to the Cousin Chin-Kee that worry me a little bit," said Yang, who will be discussing and signing "American Born Chinese" and his other books at Big Planet Comics in Bethesda on Wednesday. "There's some people that come up and tell me, 'He's so cute, so funny, endearing.' That's definitely not what I was going for,"

Yang believes that most people understood the purpose of a character like Chin-Kee -- acting as the juxtaposition against his popular, assimilated cousin.

"I think the vast majority of the responses are positive, but I have had some Asian-Americans and come up and tell me I was perpetuating the stereotype by explicitly showing it," he said.