“How good it is to be a monkey”: Conversion and spiritual formation in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese

Abstract

For me, the most complex and nuanced intersection of theology and spiritual formation written in literature for young people is contained in the work of Gene Luen Yang. The scope of this article is to explore the Christian belief of Yang’s major work to date, American Born Chinese, with the hope that more scholar-teachers will include Yang’s work in their curriculum, and more scholar-parents will include more of Yang’s work on their bookshelves. More specifically, this article argues that a theological approach to the graphic novel reveals spiritual formation to be as much a part of the narrative’s focus on teenage identity as its already recognized and emphasized racial formation.