One morning this past September, Gene Luen Yang was backing out of his driveway in San Jose, California, to go to his writing studio—a nearby Panera Bread—when he got a call. Someone from the MacArthur Foundation was on the other end, informing him that he was among 23 winners of the $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship. Also known as “genius grants” (a term the foundation dislikes), the annual award recognizes innovative, creative leaders in any industry who are American citizens or residents.
“I eventually made it to Panera,” the Chinese American graphic novelist, writer, and cartoonist told Vulture. “But I didn’t get much work done.”
Read graphic artist Seth Hahne's tribute, "Gene Luen Yang Means a Lot to Me":
The ‘Theology’ Of George HarrisonThe Beatles, an extension of the heady pragmatic materialism of the late fifties, claimed they were more popular than Jesus Christ. Their song “Eleanor Rigby” sees the church as an irrelevant symbol, “Father McKenzie preparing sermons that no one will hear.” In an early press release George Harrison says, “There’s nothing better, for me, than a bit of peace and quiet. Sitting around a big fire with your slippers on and watching the telly. That’s the life!”This narrow approach to reality gave way to a drug period. But eventually drugs offered too limited a vision. Allen Ginsberg put it this way: “The Beatles satiated every fantasy in relation to the material universe and realized that in order to go any further they would have to go into inner space.”George Harrison prepared the way for this inner journey by traveling to India in 1965 to buy a sitar. He met Ravi Shankar and spent a few months meditating. The first effects of this study became apparent on the album “Revolver” and especially in the song “Norwegian Wood.” Overnight the sitar became a popular instrument, and Indian culture became fascinating to Westerners. This came to a head in the promotion of a kind of Hinduism by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and in its acceptance by the Beatles. In a TV interview Harrison asserted, “I believe in reincarnation.… You keep coming back until you have got it straight. The ultimate thing is to manifest divinity and become one with the Creator.”The Beatles aided the meteoric rise of the Guru Maharishi, though later they separated themselves from his commercialism. “We have not broken with the thoughts of meditation,” said George Harrison. “We have only broken with the Maharishi and his ideas of making the whole thing subject to mass media.”The synthesis of the drug interest and the growing awareness of religion was expressed in the Beatles’ unified work called “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” In “Within You Without You,” George Harrison expresses the desire for true spiritual values:When you’ve seen beyond yourself,Then you may find peace of mindIs waiting there;And the time will comeWhen you see we are all one.This interest in religion shown by the Beatles at the end of the sixties totally left out Christianity. The trend toward Jesus got a gradual start with “Let It Be,” which was a hymn to the Virgin Mary. At about this time Harrison said in an interview:The only reason for being here is to have full understanding of the spiritual aspect of life. Eastern religion taught me that the ideal is to become one with God through living-work, self-control, meditation and yoga. If you sweep roads then you should do it for whoever you have chosen as your deity. If you work for him then he will do his work for you.The inner tensions and developing personal positions of the individual Beatles ultimately led to their breakup. This is expressly seen in the album “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,” which stands in contrast to George Harrison’s single-minded “All Things Must Pass.” It’s a collection of songs about Lennon’s feelings—personal rather than cosmic, emotional rather than meditative, cathartic rather than persuasive, and disillusioned with religion.“All Things Must Pass,” released in 1970, and “Living in the Material World,” released in 1973, give an overall picture of George Harrison’s religious development. Although religion is a major theme in “All Things Must Pass,” it is love viewed as religion: Love is God rather than God is love. Harrison becomes the preacher of love. In “Living in the Material World” love is still present, but Krishna is the central point. There is a marked ambiguity about “My Sweet Lord.” Jesus is just one avatar or descent of god among many, Krishna and Rama being others. The “Hallelujah” switches to “Hare Krishna” as Harrison reduces incarnation to a mere emanation of the One. By the time of the Bangladesh Concert, George Harrison was prefixing “My Sweet Lord” with Hare Krishna, making clear the direction of his thought. Billy Preston appears by the grace of God, but the whole project is presented to Sri Krishna.When “Living in the Material World” appeared it was evident that George Harrison had thrown off all connections with his Christian heritage. Again we read, “All Glories to Sri Krishna.” The Lord of George Harrison’s life is Krishna, emanation of Vishnu. George Harrison wants us to be under no illusions—he is a Hindu. In the song “The Light that has Lighted the World” Harrison gives his personal testimony, thanking all who have helped him:I’m grateful to anyone,That is happy or freeFor giving me hopeWhile I’m looking to seeThe Light that has lighted the world.In “Awaiting on You All” Harrison sings:You don’t need a love-in,You don’t need a bed pan,You don’t need a horoscopeOr a microscope to seeThe mess that you’re in.…You’ve been polluted so long … andYou don’t need no church houseAnd you don’t need no TempleAnd you don’t need no rosaryBeads or those books you readTo know that you have fallen.In a prayer, “Hear me, Lord,” he implores forgiveness for his neglect of God. Here he seems to be addressing the Jesus of his youth, but placed in a Hindu context. Repentance offers escape from material existence, viewed as evil in itself. Man has a native “Jesus” consciousness just waiting to be realized. In “Awaiting on You All” it is spelled out:You don’t need a passport,You don’t need no visas,You don’t need to designateOr to emigrateBefore you can see Jesus;If you open up your heart,Then you willSee He’s right there.He always was and will be.This is not a matter of atonement with God through the one incarnation of the Personal-Infinite I AM. No, by merely “chanting” the names of the Lord one is free. “The Lord is awaiting on you all to awaken and see.…” The Lord of Harrison’s lyrics waits for sleeping men to wake up; the Lord of the Bible reaches down to dead men and gives them resurrection life. In Harrison’s view, then, Jesus is reduced to an emanation of the absolute soul.In “Living in the Material World” George Harrison tells us his material history—his meeting the other Beatles, his absorption with success, and his general sense of frustration.Senses never gratified,Only swelling like a tideThat could drown me in the material world.Harrison views the world as evil and, giving the proceeds of the album to charity, suggests that he views making music as getting soiled by the world.Got a lot of work to do,Try to get a message throughAnd get back out of this material world.Is this charity merely tokenism? Harrison’s palatial home shown in a picture on the album jacket certainly seems very much a part of the material world.George Harrison treats Krishna as a personal god. It is certainly true that the ordinary Hindu views the gods as personal. This Bhakti or devotional Hinduism teaches the need for a personal approach to religion. The main thinker of this school was the twelfth-century teacher Rāmānuta. He believed in a pulsating universe, and he thought that God creates ad infinitum. He saw the soul as like God but not identical to God. He definitely believed in a personal god. However, Rāmānuta never showed how the idea of an infinite universe and the idea of reincarnation could be thought not to lead one back to the impersonal origin of all things.The dominant Hindu view is expressed in the eighth- or ninth-century Unity School of Sankara. He believed in One Reality and no dualism. He taught that a “lower” and a “higher” truth exist. As long as man believes in the reality of the multiple world, it exists for him through the cooperation of soul and matter that has arisen from the personal god who directs everything. When through meditation one attains the insight that all diversity is only maya, an illusory appearance, then the person seeking salvation becomes conscious of his identity with the All-in-One—the only true actual deity possessing the impersonal Absolute, the Brahma. Sankara elucidates the contradiction between the naïve realism of the childish man, who holds the world to be real and personal in origin, and the idealism of the Enlightened One, who realizes the absolute impersonality of all. Francis Schaeffer writes in He Is There and He Is Not Silent, “To the pantheist, the final wrong or tension … the final Karma, if you will, is the fact that he will not accept his impersonality. In other words, he will not accept who he is.”This tension is manifest in George Harrison’s work. First it is seen in the idea of reincarnation. In the “Art of Dying” he sings:There’ll come a timeWhen all of us must leave here;Then nothing Sister Mary can doWill keep me here with you.There’ll come a timeWhen most of us returnBrought back by the desireTo be a perfect entity.Or in “Give Me Love”: “Keep me free from birth.” Reincarnation is not me returning as personal but eternal soul manifesting itself in material forms.In “Beware of Darkness,” we are told to beware of maya, illusion. In reality Krishna is not personal but only maya: an illusory personification of the impersonal. Perhaps in “Be Here Now” George Harrison is expressing this:Now, is, here nowAnd it’s not what it was before;Remember, now be here nowAs it’s not like it was before—it was.“It was” is the basis of all—the final impersonal; yet Harrison says, “I hope to get out of this place by the Lord Sri Krishna’s grace/My salvation from the material world.” Or in “That Is All”:Silence often says much moreThan trying to say what’s been said before;But that is all I want to doTo give my love to,That’s all I’m living for,Please let me love you more—and That is all.The introduction of the “you” by Harrison is understandable but unwarranted if one takes Hinduism seriously. We have already seen George Harrison’s search for a personal deity expressed in his songs about love:The Lord loves the oneThat loves the LordAnd the law says if you don’t giveThen you don’t get loving.But Hinduism, being impersonal at heart, cannot provide a consistent basis for a personal relationship between finite man and infinite God. It is only through God the Son, the Second person of the Trinity, in his incarnation as God and man, that the I-You relationship Harrison seeks can be found. Harrison’s “theology” is fragmentary and self-deceived, looking to Hinduism for the fulfillment of a longing that is an unconscious remainder of rejected and largely forgotten Christianity.MICHAEL GARDEMichael Garde, a Baptist, is a student at the Pontifical University, Maynooth, Ireland.
A MacArthur Foundation statement said that Yang was recognized for “bringing diverse people and cultures to children’s and young adult literature and confirming comics’ place as an important and creative force within literature, art, and education.”
As our news sources, social media feeds, and even our churches are increasingly siloed, many Christians feel disconnected from their neighbors and the world. Yang’s work counteracts this trend, nudging us to explore the different and the unfamiliar to better understand—and love—perspectives that are not our own.
Yang is among a distinguished slate of Americans who have been awarded the no-strings-attached prize, including paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, activist Marian Wright Edelman, sociologist William Julius Wilson, and writers George Saunders and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yang, 43, is only the third graphic novelist to receive the honor in its 35-year history.
“I don’t know if it will ever actually sink in,” Yang admitted to me in an interview two weeks after the announcement. “It feels really crazy. It’s beyond anything I could have expected for my life.”
According to Mark Siegel, his longtime editor at First Second Books, such an unassuming response is classic Gene Yang. “I’ve never seen anything go to his head. I’ve never seen him take anything for granted. If anything, it makes him work harder.”
Siegel would know better than anyone. “When I first signed up Gene, he was pretty much photocopying and stapling his mini comics and losing money on them at Comic-Con,” Siegel said. “And then 18 months later we were in Times Square at the National Book Awards in our tuxedos. We were looking at each other, going, ‘Did something just happen?’ ”
A remarkable number of things have happened since Yang’s breakout graphic novel, American Born Chinese, was published in 2006. It was the first book in its genre ever to be named a National Book Award finalist and to win the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. His next major solo graphic novel, the two-volume Boxers & Saints (First Second, 2013), also won a raft of awards. Yang has collaborated with other artists on award-winning stories and graphic novels and has written for the popular Avatar: The Last Airbender and Superman comic book series. In 2016, he was named an Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the US Library of Congress and made his debut as the writer of DC Comics’s New Super-Man comic series, whose hero is a Chinese man living in modern Shanghai.
Despite Yang’s impressive resume, every individual I interviewed started with something like: “He is one of my favorite people,” or “He is one of the best human beings I know,” or simply “I love Gene!” They are fans not just of his work, but of the man himself.
Christian author Matt Mikalatos, who has known Yang for several years, told CT, “He’s humble, kind and generous to people around him. He’s a lot like his work: deep, intelligent, thoughtful, but also full of life and funny.” Jason Jensen, a longtime friend and mentor, called Yang a “goofball. Gene is a person of lighthearted joy, mixed with deep, thoughtful faith.”
Living In Tension
The person of Gene Luen Yang—a modest, lovable goofball—seems incongruent with the artist who explores weighty topics like ethnic identity, racism, and religious fundamentalism in his stories. But Yang has always been a person of contradictions, caught in between different worlds.
This “tension,” as Yang calls it, is probably the greatest force shaping his art, his identity as a follower of Jesus, and the growing impact of his work, which extends far beyond the Asian American community.
Yang’s father is a Christian engineer from Taiwan. His mother, a programmer from Taiwan and Hong Kong, converted to Catholicism after immigrating to the United States. Yang grew up attending a Chinese Catholic Church in the San Francisco Bay Area.
At school, Yang was one of a few Asian students and was regularly mocked by his classmates. His faith also made him an outsider, as some aspects of Christianity have been viewed by some as incompatible with Eastern traditions. And even among Chinese American Christians, who lean heavily Protestant (over two-thirds according to a 2012 Pew Research study), Yang is an anomaly as a Catholic.
Despite Yang’s impressive resume, every individual I interviewed said some version of “He is one of my favorite people.” They are fans not just of his work but of the man himself.
Yang wanted to pursue art and animation since childhood; his parents preferred that he become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. As Yang was preparing to attend college, his father insisted, “Do something practical. After graduation, I’ll leave you alone.” (They ended up compromising: Yang majored in computer science and minored in creative writing.)
While a student at the University of California–Berkeley, Yang found himself in a majority Asian American population for the first time in his life. “I think that was when I started being able to explain and understand the discomfort I had had since I was a kid,” he said in a 2013 interview.
Even as Yang came to a deeper understanding of his ethnic identity, he entered a period of serious doubt about his faith. These two processes were very much related, Yang told me. “So much of college is about figuring out where you fit in the world, who you are, how you’re going to build your identity. Faith and culture both play into that. They overlap.”
He found a spiritual home in UC Berkeley’s InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter. “That was the first time I saw people my age actually live out a metaphysical reality. I saw people treat church and faith seriously,” said Yang. But the tensions remained. “I remember most of the people around me were Protestant, and there were a handful of Catholics. We would get together from time to time to talk about things. It pushed me to think and to wrestle a little bit more.”
Exploring Empathy
Yang admits these tensions were not always easy for him to navigate, but his perspective on not fitting in has changed over time. “Now, when I look back, I feel really grateful and appreciative of being an outsider,” Yang told me. “When you are in a place of comfort, there are things you end up taking for granted.” While his upbringing and education were privileged in many ways, Yang is familiar with the feeling of cultural discomfort.
Spurred on by the complex tensions between his Chinese-Christian and Western-American heritage, Yang’s work represents an ongoing quest to better understand himself, his faith, and the world around him. He often takes his characters on similar journeys of exploring identity, place, and purpose—something that readers of any cultural and faith background can connect with.
“There are universal themes that jump out from his stories that a lot of people can relate to,” explained Phil Yu, a leading advocate for Asian American representation in arts and media, and founder of the Angry Asian Man blog. “He writes with such empathy. His stories have such a sense of humanness that really speaks to us. And he delivers it in such an entertaining, approachable way.”
Take Yang’s breakout graphic novel, American Born Chinese, which explores identity and self-acceptance. The story centers on a Chinese American boy struggling to fit in at school, who goes so far as to imagine himself as a blond Caucasian. Though the narrative details are specific to the Asian American experience and speak particularly to those readers, American Born Chinese has been embraced across American society and has become a literary staple in classrooms nationwide.
“Gene’s characters are always people in two worlds,” Mikalatos said. “They’re navigating the differences between themselves and the conflicting worlds around them. Those people tend to be able to see people as individuals and, once they embrace their own identity, to be able to reach out and help others.”
This empathy is best exemplified by Yang’s Boxers & Saints, which explores the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China from two distinct and equally sympathetic perspectives: a young Chinese girl, rejected by her own family, who is taken in by Christian missionaries and converts; and a young leader of ragtag peasants determined not to let Western colonialism destroy Chinese traditions.
When he was researching for Boxers & Saints, Yang was desperately looking for one central protagonist. “I wanted a hero, but I couldn’t find one that was complete. I felt like there were heroes on both sides.”
This is a surprising statement, given the complex and violent history of the Boxer Rebellion. The violent, anti-foreign, anti-Christian uprising occurred between 1899 and 1901, precipitated by oppressive colonial rule. In addition to a long siege against Beijing (then called Peking), Boxers murdered some 32,000 Chinese Christians, many of them children. A coalition of Western armies eventually quelled the rebellion, in turn plundering the capital and countryside, and summarily executing suspected Boxers.
For Yang, though, the point of Boxers & Saints is not who won or who was most at fault. Instead, it’s about how the Christian missionaries and the Boxers both wanted to protect Chinese culture—their motives were the same, even if their methods were vastly different.
This illustrates another unique facet of Yang’s work: He explores cross-cultural stories from a perspective of faith, allowing for ambiguity and for questions to remain unanswered. “Christian-themed fiction for kids and teens can sometimes feel like after-school specials,” blogger Grace Hwang Lynch told CT. Lynch frequently writes about Asian American culture and mixed-race identity. “The protagonists are usually white and there’s a clear-cut moral at the end. Yang’s stories often don’t have happy or tidy endings.”
“Now, when I look back, I feel really grateful and appreciative of being of being an outsider.”
For Yang, this complexity is perfectly consistent with his Christian faith. “The older I get, the more value I find in tension,” he explained. “That’s reflected in my faith, in the person of Christ. It only makes sense in tension. Jesus is both man and God. The last shall be first.” Rather than something to be feared, these paradoxes have catalyzed deeper growth in Yang’s faith and character—as well as the narratives he tells.
Yang seamlessly integrates his faith into his graphic novels and comics through biblical allusions, Christ or Christ-like figures, and story arcs that bend toward grace and redemption. And yet it’s his reflection of the world as we experience it—with more questions than answers, with multiple sides to the same story, with people who are capable of good and evil—that makes his work so compelling to Christians and non-Christians alike.
This broad appeal is intentional on Yang’s part, whose team of editors and beta readers includes atheists. “I think that even regardless of whether you consider yourself religious or not, there is always a search for meaning. How you arrive at that meaning depends pretty heavily on how you answer certain metaphysical questions.”
Yang’s humorous, thoughtful, and empathic exploration of our shared struggles as humans is particularly poignant in a time often characterized by deep political and social divides.
When I ask Yang about the current political climate in the United States, his response goes even further than empathy. He argues that we need people who are different from us. “I believe that if you have two poles, if they’re both healthy, the tension between them ought to lead somewhere good. If we play different roles, even if it seems like we’re in opposition to one another, ultimately what comes out is good.”
We needn’t worry that he’ll lose that sense of tension anytime soon. When I asked Yang how his parents responded to his winning the MacArthur Fellowship, he says they were really happy for him. A few days later, though, his father texted him these words: “I don’t regret making you major in something technical.”
“That was it. That was the whole thing,” Yang said, laughing.
Dorcas Cheng-Tozun is a writer and editor who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her book on how to survive marriage to an entrepreneur, Start, Love, Repeat, is forthcoming from Hachette Center Street later this year.
