And early on, people would come up to Gene at Comic-Cons: “Hey, my favorite character is Cousin Chin-Kee.” He didn’t know how to take it - if they were in on the joke or if they were completely missing the context. That was his biggest quandary in adapting it. Gene Luen Yang, who wrote the book, was reflecting metaphorically on what it feels like to live in multiple worlds with these three storylines - a mythological figure, a teenage American kid and this controversial character whose name is a racial slur, Cousin Chin-Kee.

There must have been previous attempts to adapt it. Some of us still have a healthy level of anxiety of how long it’s going to be here and in what form.

Sometimes you think about diversity as something that’s here to stay, and I sure hope so, but this idea of capital-D diversity has only been around for a few years. “But we’d told everybody early on, ‘If you can try to win an Academy Award in the next year, please do.’ “Īmerican Born Chinese is a beloved graphic novel. “It became this tractor beam where it felt inevitable,” says Yu, who cast and shot his series’ eight-episode first season before the film premiered. Premiering in a crowded TV corridor, the series has already scored a jolt of buzz by having four castmembers who also appeared in juggernaut Everything Everywhere All at Once, including newly minted Oscar winners Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan.

A founding staff writer on Bob’s Burgers, Yu has been a producer on the Fox series since 2014.

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