Cartoonist Gene Luen Yang follows his critically acclaimed graphic novels Prime Baby, The Eternal Smile and the Pritzker Award-winning and 2006 National Book Award finalist, American Born Chinese, with Level Up, written by Yang with art by Thien Pham, to be published this month by First Second.
Level Up is the tale of Dennis, a young Asian-American struggling with living up to his parents’ expectations in the wake of his father’s death. In this familiar story with a magical realism twist, Dennis works towards finding the balance between his passion for playing video games and his father’s dreams for him to be a gastroenterologist with a little help from four cute but ominous guardian angels.
PW Comics World chatted with Yang about the influence of videogames in his own life, his working relationship with Thien Pham in creating the new book; and the power of parental expectations in the lives of immigrant children as they grow-up to become new Americans.
PW Comics World: In your short comic The Secret Origins of Level Up, you talk about the inspiration you drew from the conflict with your father over happiness versus practicality. Ultimately Dennis achieves a balance between the two, while still honoring his father’s wishes. Did you ever consider him finding true happiness outside of his father’s dream?
Gene Yang: I think that that story has actually been told a lot. I think that almost all the time in stories whenever this conflict is dealt with, the protagonist always finds happiness by just following his heart and ignoring his parents or ignoring practicality or ignoring whatever it is that’s pulling him away from the desires of his heart. But I just think that in real life it isn’t always like that. In real life you have to think about practicality and you will always be a part of your family, and in real life it’s more about a negotiation between what you want and the community you’re a part of, and the family you’re a part of and the practical parts of life.
PWCW: Were you ever a gamer yourself or was Dennis’ passion simply a generational expression?
GY: Well, I think pretty much like everyone around my age I grew up playing those classic video games. I wouldn’t say I was addicted to them, but I definitely liked them. They don’t even have arcades anymore because everyone has an arcade at their own house. But when I was growing up I did go to the arcade. We had a neighborhood arcade and my friends and I would go fairly regularly.
PWCW: You’ve also said the book was partially inspired by your brother. Did he go through a similar crisis?
GY: It’s inspired by my brother in a different way. It’s not necessarily the tension underneath this book. I didn’t pull that from my brother. But he is a medical doctor now. He didn’t end up being a gastroenterologist but he did consider it for a while. But when he was going through med school he would come home and he would tell me all these crazy stories about his class assignments. And they were gross and they were visual and they were really compelling. So I knew I wanted to put all that into a graphic novel, and that’s what Level Up is.
He would tell me these stories, but the problem was, they never had any sort of cohesion. It was just one gross thing happened this week, and then another gross thing happened the next week and then another disgusting thing happened the next week. So eventually he called me up and he told me, “I’m thinking about doing gastroenterology.” And I asked him, “Why would you do gastroenterology!?” It’s the study of the digestive tract and you do a lot with poop. And my brother’s a pretty squeamish guy, especially when we were little kids. I remember we would see dog poop on the street and he just wouldn’t be able to handle it. “Out of all the people I know, you are the most squeamish,” I said. “Why would you want to do gastroenterology?” And he said, “Well the other day I did a colonoscopy and it was like playing video games on somebody’s ass.”
When he said that I felt like it tied all of these things together. It tied in medicine, which is a really practical profession, with video games, which is a passion. And then also the fact that it’s gastroenterology, it tied in an Asian-American issue. A lot of Asians and Asian-Americans have liver problems. If you basically ask anybody who is Asian, they or one of their relatives will have some sort of a liver issue, and the liver actually falls into the jurisdiction of the gastroenterologist. So it just felt like it tied all of those things together. That one comment, it was silly, but it really tied it all together and I wanted to explore that.
PWCW: Where did the idea for the angels come from?
GY: Level Up was a rough project because I started it right after I finished American Born Chinese. And then when American Born Chinese started getting a lot of attention, I freaked out a little bit because I realized that up until then I had just been doing comics by following my gut. I didn’t really know much about plot structure or anything; I kind of just followed my gut. And I freaked out a little bit. So I checked out all these books about story structure, and writing and foreshadowing and all this stuff. And then I wrote a version of Level Up for Thien to draw.
We got through almost the whole project. It took about a year and a half or two years and we got through almost the whole project, finished art and everything, and then my editor calls me up and says, “You know, I hate to do this to you, but your story’s not working and I think you should start over.” So we did. We totally started over. So the whole thing must have taken four or five years to complete.
The first two years were spent on the first version and the rest of the time on the second version. But the angels were always in it from the beginning. I think they meant something different in the first version than in the final book. In the first one, they were meaner. They didn’t look like little Kewpie dolls. They were adult angels. And at that time I wanted them to be like a haunting presence in Dennis’ life. And now I think they end up being a haunting presence at the end, because they turn into ghosts, but in the beginning they sort of more represent his dad watching over him. They come from a card that his dad gave him, so they start off representing parental protection, like guardian angel, and they end up becoming these ghosts that haunt him. They’re his connection to his dad from the very beginning.
PWCW: How do you think our reliance on our parents’ expectations change after they pass away, like Dennis’ father does in the story?
GY: Well I don’t have direct experience with that yet because both of my parents are still living. But from what I’ve observed in my friends or my extended family that have gone through that, the fact that you can’t argue with them anymore is a big deal. Your relationship becomes set in memory and set in stone. The fact that they’re not living anymore and you can’t have back and forth with them can make their wishes and their presence even more compelling.
PWCW: Many people will be able to relate to the story in this book, even outside of the Asian-American community, but how do you feel your Asian heritage influenced your view of parental expectations when writing Level Up?
GY: This is something the artist of the book, Thien, and I talk about a lot. It’s specifically Asian-American in that the characters are Asian-American, but I definitely don’t think this experience of dealing with parental expectation is particularly Asian-American. I think it’s a pretty universal experience. Especially among immigrants’ kids, I would say, from all parts of the world. I just think that for the children of immigrants, we’re very aware of the sacrifices that our parents made for us in order to give us the life that we’re living now. And even if they don’t talk about it, there is this unspoken feeling of debt that we feel, that we sort of need to use our lives to pay off this debt that we owe them.
So I think that a lot of Asian-Americans, a lot of immigrants’ kids in general end up rebelling against that. And that’s why this idea of just following your heart and ignoring everything else feels so good to us. But then I think a lot of us end up, especially as we get older, realizing that following your heart to the exclusion of everything else doesn’t necessarily get us everything we want in life and that, ultimately, as a way of integrating our American identity with the identity that we got from our parents, we have to find a way of combining these two ways of looking at our world and looking at our destinies.
PWCW: Do you find writing semi-autobiographical works like American Born Chinese and Level Up easier or harder than your other stories?
GY: I think I put a little bit of myself in all the stories. It’s just that the easiest thing to research is yourself, right? You don’t have to look anything up on the Internet. You just have to sit down and think and remember. So I think, yeah, that might be a big part of it. The information is already there in my brain. I don’t have to do any research, so it makes it easier for me to write like that.
PWCW: Thien Pham’s art is wonderful. How did you two decide on the style and color choices? Why not go with a more traditional comic book style?
GY: I pretty much gave Thien free range on the art. He and I are very different cartoonists. I am a planner. I like having an outline before I start writing a story. When he writes his own stories he just kind of goes. And when I’m drawing I like doing blue pencils first, then doing regular pencil, and then doing the inks and then cleaning it up on computers. So I have these multiple stages to fix my own mistakes. He likes to just throw it down. He just likes to slap it right down on the paper.
So when I gave him my script, I think he felt like the script itself was already so rigid that he wanted to do something extra-loose, to offset the rigidity of the script. So all those artistic choices about not really sketching things out and using watercolor, which is a less controlled medium, that was all in response to what he saw as the rigidity of my script. He wanted to loosen it up a little bit. I don’t think he ever did a comic book in watercolor before this one. He usually uses ink and pen.
