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.

DonorsChoose.org is an awesome charity that allows you to contribute directly to public school teachers and programs. And now an awesome proposal at the site is requested funding to teach Gene Yang's "American Born Chinese" to public school students in Tonawanda, New York. Here's an excerpt from the proposal:

Although my students live in a city, the student body is primarily Caucasian. Recently, there has been an influx of new students moving to the district from other parts of the United States or other countries all together (i.e. Chechnya, Bosnia, Kenya, Vietnam). The Caucasian students don't understand the cultures of the new students, and often times this ignorance causes them to discriminate against these other kids and mistreat them. When I read the graphic novel "American Born Chinese" by Gene Yang, I saw it as a golden opportunity to spark their interest in reading and teach tolerance of other cultures at the same time. The problem is, graphic novels tend to be more expensive than a typical paperback novel, and my school district does not have the funds for me to purchase a class set of these novels for use in my classroom.

Asian Pacific Arts has published a meaty article in which "American Born Chinese" writer and illustrator Gene Yang plugs comics as an art form, talks up his fellow Asian American comics creators, and drops tantalizing hints about what's next on the docket. Check it out:

Currently, Gene Yang is writing and illustrating a comic book about the Boxer Rebellion, a Chinese uprising at the turn of the century in 1900. "There was a paragraph in your World History textbook when you were in ninth grade, and that's probably all many people know about it," says Yang," but it's a big, big thing. It was the first war of the 20th century, even though it's not officially called a war. It's officially called a rebellion."