Making of ‘American Born Chinese’: Lively roundtable with author Gene Luen Yang, actor Daniel Wu and crafts artisans [Exclusive Video Interview]
At first author Gene Luen Yang was “very hesitant” about his graphic novel “American Born Chinese” being adapted for the screen. “The book came out in 2006, so it’s been about 15 years — 17 years actually — since it came out. And … I was dealing with some very sensitive themes in the graphic novel and I was worried about how those would translate onto the screen specifically.” But now Yang is an executive producer of the TV series version now streaming on Disney+. We talked to him as part of our special “Making Of” panel series along with actor Daniel Wu, costume designer Joy Cretton and stunt coordinator Peng Zhang. Watch our roundtable discussion above.
“American Born Chinese” is the story of teenager Jin Wang (Ben Wang), whose new classmate Wei-Chen (Jimmy Liu) turns out to be the son of the Monkey King (Daniel Wu). Wei-Chen has come down to Earth to find the mythical Fourth Scroll in the hopes that it will stop an uprising by Bull Demon (Leonard Wu).
But what really concerned Yang about the adaptation was “one character who was kind of the embodiment of all of the negative Asian and Asian-American stereotypes that I grew up with.” Might that character be taken out of context and used in precisely the wrong way? “Kelvin Yu, our showrunner, came up with what I thought was a really brilliant solution. He took that fear that I had and instead of telling me that it wasn’t gonna happen, he was like, let’s just make it a plot point.” That became the Ke Huy Quan character Jamie Yao, an actor ambivalent about an Asian caricature he once played on a popular sitcom.
Daniel Wu also had a “complex” character to navigate: “The Monkey King character is so iconic in Asian culture,” the actor explains. “The ‘Journey to the West’ story is one of the four pillars of Chinese literature, so it’s a very important literary source.” However, “what I’m playing is a slightly different version of that character. He’s a bit older now, so we’re taking a little bit of liberties and kind of going, what if Monkey King was a father? What if he was older and he’s got these responsibilities now? And what does he do with all the responsibility in terms of how does he raise his son?” Wu could relate to those themes because “I’m actually dealing with that in my real life right now with my daughter. Try not to be a tiger dad and try to let her grow and be her own self.”
Cretton was also bringing a unique interpretation to iconic characters. “We watched a lot of versions that have been done and tried to pull references that are memorable to people,” she says about keeping these iconic figures recognizable to the audience. She then wanted to add “modern takes on it and do something new that people haven’t seen yet because there’s been so many versions … A high-fashion take on these characters was something that I don’t know has ever been done.”
The action sequences were also “quite a challenge,” according to Zhang. “Monkey King and the ‘Journey to the West,’ the story — we all watched so many different versions,” but in “our show, the story is very different. After I talked to [director and executive producer Destin Daniel Cretton], I said, ‘Wow, what are we gonna do?'” They had to take the traditional Monkey King tale and make the action “much more grounded and also happening in the modern time,” which required them to come up with “new ideas … We had to do a lot of tests to make sure the action fits to the story.”
“American Born Chinese” is also noteworthy for the prominence of Asian and Asian-American voices both in front of and behind the camera as writers, directors, producers and more. Wu “worked in Asia for 20 years and so I knew what it was like to work on a fully Asian project,” but “then coming back to the States, working on other non-Asian projects, I’d be the only Asian person on set.” But Yang had never worked on a Hollywood production before this, so “I don’t know what it’s like anywhere else. When I close my eyes and imagine Hollywood now, I just imagine Asians everywhere.”
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