Behind the Contextual Meaning of ‘American Born Chinese’: A Conversation with Creator Kelvin Yu

This interview was conducted in April 2023.

Based on Gene Luen Yang’s groundbreaking graphic novel that chronicles the trials and tribulations of a regular American teenager whose life is forever changed when he befriends the son of a mythological god. This is the story of a young man’s battle for his own identity, told through family, comedy, and action-packed Kung-Fu.

A Chinese mythological genre-bending action-comedy with a heart of gold at the center of it all. With a nice hint of nostalgia for anime and quintessential action figures, most of us had in our backpacks during our adolescent years. That's what you get with Kelvin Yu's adaption, American Born Chinese. Kelvin is a writer's writer, through and through. And it may be all thanks to his journey as an actor to writing on a little show called Bob's Burger that has made him really appreciate the meaning behind the written word on the page. 

Before we got into the nitty gritty talking about writing, we fondly spoke about music, the life of a musician, and the importance of supporting your friends. Kelvin was that friend that showed up to every friend's band's show in the LA basin during his college years - we all need that friend. And I think, that is one of the many qualities that Kelvin brings to the table - he shows up. He cares. And he loves the arts. And you see that in this show.

Kelvin shared with Script his journey in getting American Born Chinese made, how his crisis of confidence fed into writing the characters and their arcs, how his TV animation background influenced running his own show, the intersection of the hero's journey and MacGuffin's, and so much more!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: What initially hooked you or inspired you to adapt this into a live-action rather than an animated TV series?

Kelvin Yu: Yeah, good question. Well, a lot of it had to do like all things with the moment. The truth is, especially with comedy, but I would say with everything, things have their particular context, and for better or for worse, like something that is really funny in 1975, may not be so funny in 2025. And so, at the same time, something that doesn't work just a few years earlier suddenly takes on kind of a contextual meaning. And the marketplace changes as well. We don't always like to think about that or talk about that. It's true.

When we first developed the show, in 2019, Disney+ didn't exist. And we were living in kind of an interesting peak TV moment. So, the first iteration of the show was much more kind of anthological and intellectual and almost mature. There were a lot of four-letter words in that script. And that's all good and fine. I would love to make a more adult show in that way. But the actual IP American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang doesn't feel that way. So, we were kind of trying to make somewhat of a carbon copy of things like Atlanta or Master of None or things that were hip at that time.

And so, we were passed on at FX, and then a bunch of things happened. First, Disney+ comes along - I also think just that slow kind of arc of viewer education and viewer interest starts to move closer toward what we were doing. And then Shang-Chi comes along. And Destin [Daniel Cretton] is able to put together a team, a group of people that was sort of not far off from what we wanted to do with the show and its next iteration. A lot of planets aligned; Disney+ is looking for new content, I'm getting, hopefully, better and stronger as a writer as the years go on, and then Ke Huy Quan decides to become an actor, again, after a 20-something-year layoff. So just so many things kind of fell into place for it to be right at that moment.

And in 2019, when you're passed on, it doesn't feel like that's in your future. And yet, you sort of have to believe and you sort of have to have faith that that's either going to happen or it's not going to happen.

Last thing I'll say is, I saw it happen with Bob's Burgers in 2010. The show we were writing in 2009-2010, felt a little soft, a little too nice, because you have to remember the context was South Park and Family Guy and Cleveland. But then lo and behold, as the years went on, the world shifted toward us in a way that we couldn't have expected. So, when I say faith, to some extent, it is an exercise in just writing what is right to you and writing what is true to you. And knowing that if you did that, you can sleep at night.

Sadie: It's definitely all about timing, right? And when it felt like the world was kind of burning down and just seeing that glimmer of hope. [laughs]

Kelvin: [laughs] And to answer that question about the live-action, I think that's a sub-answer of what I say about audiences, like genre-hopping, and the book itself genre hops as a metaphor for the American Born Chinese experience. TV shows are more and more like that, and audiences are more and more open to that. And along with things like Squid Game. So, you're seeing sort of an opening of the audience's acceptance in mind as we're trying things and so a lot of the wheels started to get more and more greased than they were in 2019.

Sadie: Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the aesthetics of the show, it's very stylistic, but it's also very consistent. You’re bridging so many worlds and genres together. Did you come to the table with influences you wanted to touch on in this show, from Chinese cinema to any other works from art to music for your creative team?

Kelvin: Yeah, one thing that's been beneficial about working on Bob's Burgers is Loren Bouchard, makes his shows soup to nuts. And not all showrunners do that. But here's what I like to call an artisanal creator. He's about every single piece of the puzzle. And you can call it micromanaging, but his taste is so impeccable, and he knows exactly what he wants, because he comes from Adult Swim. And so, he comes from a place where you had to make it by yourself, because nobody else is going to help you and you had no money. I've heard him fidget with the trumpet sound in a song that we wrote in the back of his office one night, for months. And so that's always been the ethos I've taken into what it means - it's a curse, because when you get that late night email about a character's shoes, you care and you want to look at it.

The good thing about this show is the subject matter is the theming chaos of what it means to bring your cultures together. And what it means to engage in identity formation in the current day as a 15-year-old or 16-year-old, with different cultures in mind, with different influences. And so, in some ways, if two things didn't make sense, or if a song hit in a visually weird way, then we were kind of cooking with gas. That's what you wanted in the show. So, we could take a Teresa Teng song, who's an 80s pop star in Asia. And then we could also take a Rich Brian song or a modern-day pop song. That kind of counterintuitive garnishing played into the writing, played into the shooting, played into the thematic point of why we're doing it. The collectiveness and bringing people to the table to just pitch kind of wacky ideas, I think was a virtue rather than an obstacle for us.

But yes, 80s Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema. We thought about early Amblin things like ET and Goonies, and those kinds of movies. And a lot of credit to Destin Cretton, who I learned just so much from about taking all of those things, that at the end of the day, every beat, every moment on set, every moment of looking at the monitor, what you're really looking for is truth. You're really looking for as a real moment between two people. And the other stuff really kind of falls into place. But if you let that fall out, then you've lost your True North. So yeah, a lot of influences.

Sadie: This series really is the exploration of the hero’s journey. And you’re having some writerly fun with the use of the MacGuffin, which is the fourth scroll, and doing this fun dance of how they play off of one another for story. And especially with Episode Seven, I think it's just so pivotal on so many levels for the series. How do you straddle that line without giving too much away or going over the top and knowing when and where to hold back in terms of that hero's journey and implementing the fourth scroll?

Kelvin: Boy, you're giving me sort of PTSD just talking about it. [laughs] Because we were writing while we were shooting.

Sadie: Oh, wow.

Kelvin: So, because of the schedule, because of our desire to squeeze this into everyone's schedule; Destin's schedule, Michelle’s schedule, or cast's schedule - we started shooting while I was writing Episode Five, I believe. And so, by the time we're shooting Episode Four, I was writing Episode Eight. The truth is, I had the season broken to some extent, but not written. And things did shift and change.

I was running the set and then running back to my trailer to write. And the room was on Zoom, and then the room broke in the middle of shooting. So, at one point, I was just out there by myself, [laughs] like wandering the earth, walking around the Fox lot with my laptop and latte at like two o'clock in the morning. And I think that this show is difficult, in the sense that not those other shows aren't difficult, but the business model of a certain kind of genre show like, ‘These two dudes, and these two gals owned this bar, and they're gonna go through some high jinks every week,’ or ‘This guy and this guy, there's gonna be a murder at the top of every episode, and they're gonna figure it out by episode page 53.’

This show owes a lot of boxes ticked; like you owe the fourth scroll trope and the hero's journey, and that's something that matters to a lot of our viewers. You also owe, because of the nature of the novel, some level of cultural commentary between the parents and the son, and Wei-Chen, and Jin and how that interfaces with TikTok, etcetera, etcetera. You also owe an action sequence about once an episode. And you want that action sequence to push story and to matter not just to be to people who decide to fight on page 15. And so, there's just a lot of boxes to tick.

So, I think the way I thought of it, and maybe this is coming through in this interview, is I was going through a crisis of confidence at being a staff writer for over a decade. And I had showrun another show, but it didn't create it. So, this was my first chance. My secret weapon was I took that crisis of confidence, and I put it in the show. And so everything I was feeling at two o'clock in the morning with my latte on the Fox lot by myself, I just decided Jin is feeling, right, and the supernatural level of anxiety and impostor syndrome that I was feeling Jin is feeling. And so, whatever dragons or I guess Bull Demons I had to slay metaphorically, Wei-Chen would slay them, literally on the show. And so that allowed my problem to be my therapy, if that makes sense. And I think I just trusted that. And I actually didn't know that I trusted that. If I could get through this therapy, then the final episode would get written too. If I could believe that I could do something heroic here, then Jin is going to do something heroic here.

You see it in that band, their first album is, not to pander, but their first album is about being poor, and then it's a hit, and they can't write any more albums about being poor, because it's not true anymore. [laughs] And so their second album is about the struggles of touring, or the struggles of fame, or whatever it is. And for me, this first album was about finding the strength within me to believe in myself. And to believe that this would get done.

Sadie: Clever to use your own inner emotional turmoil as your superpower, rather than letting it defeat you. And as it's stated more than once in the show, ‘Your failure will get you to your destiny.’ It's how do you take your failure and your mistakes and learn from them and grow? But you see it with all these characters and their journeys. The character work on this show is really phenomenal.

In terms of your animation background, and I'm curious, because this is your first show as a showrunner that you created, how much of that background has influenced or just helped you navigate this type of show?

Kelvin: Yeah, some of it I think…it's faith in the process, because animation is very process based. Not that other things aren't. But in animation, it's really in your face. From the beginning of an idea, let's say you and I decide what if Bob decides to run a marathon, or something like that, to that airing on Fox Sunday night, it would be over 12 months. And so, in the process of animation; we go write an outline, go write the script, and you read the script, then you rewrite the script. And then you get to the animatic, which is basically black and white sketches with crosses on the character's face, just like blocking. And then you get to, what we call thematic, then you get to color, then a color rewrite. And then there's just so many iterations, and then you're laying in music.

I think, because I saw that process at Bob's Burgers 250 times and counting, and because I myself had written over 20 episodes of Bob's Burgers, I think that kind of, Malcolm Gladwell-ed in my 10,000 hours of I know where I am in the grand scheme of this process. I'm somewhere in the middle. And granted, it's a different process on a show like American Born Chinese or any live-action show. But having done that over and over and over again and also having seen the science experiment of sometimes a knockout script turning into a problematic episode, or sometimes a really, really horrible, terrible script turning into people's favorite episode, you have an inherent and empirical belief that like this too shall pass. Like, ‘Hey, the studio loved the script. This too shall pass.’ ‘Hey, the studio hated the script. This too shall pass.’ [laughs] You just stay in the process. And I think that's important for everything from animation to probably poetry to basketball, you can't skip any steps. And you have to have faith that these steps are here for a reason. So, I think that's, to some extent, what animation has really taught me.

And everybody has a different process, obviously. But in television, you really rely on the machinery of the production and of the production designer coming in, and the music coming in, and in the DP coming in, and you better hire well, because in success, what each of those people do is they put out fires, they solve problems for you. And so, if you're having an issue, and the actors, obviously, as well, if you have an issue, this character doesn't quite make sense, and in comes an actress who just makes it work, you just go, ‘I guess we're not rewriting that, because she found a way to make that work’ or ‘That shot is so gorgeous. I don't think anybody's worrying about the line being a little chunky.’ You end up having a tremendous amount of gratitude toward your team for going through this fire with you.

Sadie: And speaking of your team, from Lucy Liu and Dustin Cretton directing, to your cinematographer Brett Pawlak, the tonal consistency of the show is fantastic. What kind of conversations were you having before day one, in terms of color schemes, framing, etcetera?

Kelvin: I really could get emotional thinking about the people that came on board on this journey with us, because I genuinely do think that everybody had skin in the game, if you know what I mean - beyond the job, beyond the paycheck. It just seemed like, our production designers, they had a story to tell about their own upbringing they want to show people - they're off to a Marvel show now, they want to show people that they're ready for the next level.

Some of our directors, Johnson Cheng, for instance, the director of 105 was sort of an untested TV director that wanted to earn his stripes. We had a lot of that. We had a lot of people with something more important to prove. When almost any Asian American person walked onto the set of the family home, for instance, they had to take a moment because that house, you wouldn't even believe it's a set, you almost assume it's a real house. It was so well done and so detailed to a tee and done with so much love and tenderness - you found that a lot. Wendy Wang, our composer, elevated every scene. Created an audio vocabulary for what the show feels like. Gave Jin a theme. Gave Wei-Chin a theme. It’s just so incredible.

You know how a dog can see another dog from a mile away? And they're like, ‘There's a dog!’ [laughs] I think humans can do that in art. I think they can sense when there's something human in something. And we'll see if ChatGPT and these bots can prove me wrong for the next five minutes, but they can sense when somebody is putting themselves into a piece. And I think you can hear it in the production, you can hear it in the music, you can see it in the costumes. I wish I could say like,’ Oh, I had this North star, and I told them about it. And I gave this Independence Day speech, and everybody rallied around my mantra.’ But what I really think is that...we hired well, and people came in saying, ‘I want to tell my parent's story,’ or ‘I know a character like this,’ or ‘I went through something vaguely like this, and I'm going to infuse it into my costume, my music or my sets.’ And so that's how I feel. I'm so honestly like gushing with namaste for everybody that worked on this show. [laughs]

Sadie: You can tell that from everyone in front of the camera and behind the scenes of the show, they really put themselves into every frame – they are the minutiae of everything in this show.

Kelvin: I would say one thing that really helps is Gene. Gene's book - that was our Bible. It had so much heart, it had so much humor, and it has that human X factor that I think just makes you want to do it justice.

Sadie: Were a lot of you guys carrying that in your back pocket for reassurance?

Kelvin: Yeah, I read it for 10-15 minutes sometimes just to recalibrate my brain, not because we're doing a literal adaptation of anything, just because I wanted to soak my brain and marinate it with Gene's tone.

Sadie: Tell us about your writer's journey. What got you into this crazy business and made you go from actor to writer and work in animation and now to this point with your own show?

Kelvin: The truth is, my acting career was and is, but in the early aughts was a great example of a sort of ‘take what you can get’ career. This is certainly before I did Master of None and things like that. But, you're just excited that somebody was going to pay you currency, [laughs] valid tender for your acting services. I was a theater major at UCLA. I was a drama geek in high school. I was the kid driving around listening to like “Jesus Christ Superstar” in the car [laughs} - which still holds up by the way.

Sadie Dean: Oh yeah, it's a stellar album.

Kelvin: Incredible vocals, the guitars are great. And then I was really happy to be a working actor in my 20s. And there was kind of a moment and a day where it's not that that became less satisfying, but it started to dawn on me that it wasn't a good business model. Like, I was basically waking up every day hoping that somebody somewhere was writing something that I might be right for and that I got an audition for it. And the day I went in, I did a good job, and they weren't eating a sandwich or something and missed it, and I got the job. I crunched the numbers, [laughs] it wasn't a great way for me to do what I wanted to do, ultimately, which is be part of good storytelling in film, television, theatre, and work with people that inspired me on a daily basis. How was that the right way? I felt to some extent, like I was waiting on a velvet rope in a long, long line.

And so partially, because I wanted to life hack the system, I guess you could say, and partially just for mental health, I started sort of writing terribly. And I call it Starbucks writing, you know, like anybody at Starbucks with a laptop. And so, I was just Starbucks writing for a couple of years. And I bumped into a guy named Steven Davis, who ultimately became my writing partner at Bob's Burgers. And we started writing together. And at the very, very least, it was a mental health choice, because suddenly now you're not waking up wondering if somebody's thinking about you, and writing something for you. You're waking up wondering, ‘Is today the day that I crack the code? Is today the day that I come up with that great idea?’ And that puts so much agency back in your own life, and your day takes on a totally different inertia and it improved everything. It improved my acting, improved my relationships, improved my health. Definitely improved my schedule, because I would wake up early, I’d make a pot of coffee, and I would start writing.

I forget his name…Pressman, what he calls ‘hard hat lunch pail writing.’ You clock in, you write from eight to noon, you eat a sandwich, you write from one to three, and then you go live your life or whatever. And that just, I think, energized me, and lo and behold, we got a meeting after a couple of years of bouncing around and looking for work, at 20th Century Fox Animation, which we thought was for a Family Guy position. They quickly told us that that was taken, but they had this new show called Bob's Burgers. We thought that would be a really fun six months. And then it turned into…now we're going onto season 14.

And Bob's Burgers was a great combination of sort of veteran King of the Hill writers and a lot of Starbucks writers. A lot of us were very green. And that was like lightning in a bottle, that was skin in the game. That was a great example of skin in the game. We didn't know how to do it wrong. You don't I mean, we just were excited to be working and we knew that Loren was on to something really rare and special with those characters in that world.

And then I did the thing where you go and you sell pilots for a couple of years and this and that. And I was also acting, at times, like Master of None or After Party. I just sort of became an adult on Bob's Burgers. And I had never felt like I found my people. That's such an important thing for anybody. And it's just not inherent in acting. I think it's inherent in some other art forms, but Bob's Burgers staff was my people, and they made me so much smarter and so much funnier. Like, by the day, just being around people that smart and funny…you can't help it. And so, by the time American Born Chinese comes around, it's still a big step, as I talked about my crisis of confidence, but you want to feel on the edge all the time, but you don't want to feel like sort of ripped apart. So, it felt like an edge worth trying. But I still write Bob's Burgers, I'm still technically part of the staff. So, that's been my journey.

Sadie: It’s a good journey. Once the show comes out, and everyone binges it a couple of times, what do hope audiences take away after watching this first season?

Kelvin: I mean, my hope is really similar to what I think people's experience with the book is, which is that it's really enjoyable. That's number one. You know what I mean? The last thing I want, not the last, but what you don't want is somebody to finish your work, and like, nose laugh, [laughs] or go like, ‘Hmm, that was really intellectual. That stirred my intelligence.’ [laughs] Because the reality is, the things that hit you only above the neck, they kind of fall out of your ear pretty quickly. You want things to hit you sort of somewhere in your chest or somewhere - not that I don't want people to think about the show and think about any of the things we're saying - but I don't think that's ultimately anybody's goal.

Obviously, I still sort of come from an acting ethos, the last thing you want people to think when they watched you act, is you're a good actor. You want them to think about how much they love their grandma, or their puppy that died when they were young, or what it feels like to fall in love. That’s why we do this. And so as much as we talk, and I do these interviews, and we talk about sort of the intellectual heft and the cultural moment of the show and all that, the reality is, I want people to watch it and go like, ‘That was great. Let's watch it again. That was really fun. I'm going to tell people to watch this.’

And the rest of that stuff that's in there, is sort of part of the recipe. But I don't think that anybody's goal is to like, educate through the television, it's also not a great place to get your education. [laughs] But I think there's educational elements, intellectual elements of the show. I also hope that it, to some extent, opens doors to a broader sense of the genre; like fantasy and mythological genre, because it is coming from a slightly different angle. There's characters that you might not recognize if you're not from Asia. And so, I like the idea that there's a little bit of expansion in the show as well.

Sadie: I like what you said in that you want people to feel. Doing a full circle back to the beginning of our chat and talking about music - you write music, it’s an emotion, a feeling you’re conveying. You want to get lost in that feeling and those emotions. And I feel like that's exactly what you guys are doing on this show.

Kelvin: You guys in music do it the best, because most people don't understand music. People are just like, ‘I don't know, that song makes me want to dance.’ They're not thinking about some time signature - it's pure - kind of like a non-linguistic groove, or 'that song makes me want to cry.' Musicians are magical in that way. But I think all good art sort of should push you out of craft. It's our job to think about craft, not the audience's job to think about craft. And if they're thinking about craft, we might be not succeeding.

Sadie: Right, exactly. They lost me in that second act. How dare they. [laughs]

Kelvin: [laughs] I feel like the stakes really fell out in the mid-point. [laughs]

American Born Chinese premieres on Disney+ on May 24, 2023.