American Born Chinese

Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese came out from First Second Books in 2006, with colouring by the cartoonist Lark Pien. It reached the shortlist for that year's National Book Awards in the young people's literature category, and it won the Michael L. Printz Award and an Eisner Award for best new graphic album in 2007.

The book is built from three stories that appear to have nothing to do with one another until they are drawn together at the end. The first of them retells the Chinese story of the Monkey King of Flower-Fruit Mountain, a character out of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, and in Yang's version the Monkey King is miserable about being a monkey and keeps trying to turn himself into something else.

Pien's colour work on the book brought her a Harvey Award for best colourist in 2007, and the novel has been widely used in schools and libraries. It also appeared on a number of best-of-the-year lists, and it is usually discussed alongside the graphic novels that established the form for younger readers during the 2000s.