American Born Chinese

American Born Chinese is a graphic novel about a boy's journey in learning to deal with his cultural background.  It's one of the few graphic novels that's as much a novel as it is graphic.  A "graphic novel" is really just a more grown-up way a saying 'long comic book'.  As a boy, I never really got into comic books, but I was into comic book superheroes.  I watched the after-school cartoons, played with the action figures, and even had them on my Underoos.

It's easy to see why these costume crusaders are so well loved by kids.  Their superpowers, costumes, and alter egos are just the beginning.  They're always there when they're needed, they always make things right, and they always win in the end.  They show us what we could be if we could be anything we wanted.

There's this website called Growing Up Heroes, it's a collection of pictures of our childhood love of superheroes (1, 2, 3), back when we believed that anything was possible and telling the difference between the good guys and the bad guys was an easy thing to do.  Superheroes are fictionalized versions of the real heroes in our then young lives, the firefighters, teachers, and parents, all the people we wanted to grow up and become.  But once we do grow up those heroes many times fade away, or rather we don't view them in the same way.

It's hard to have heroes as adults.  We may feel we no longer need them.  Maybe they've disappointed us, or we've discovered all their unheroic flaws, but it is when we are grown-ups that we need to have heroes the most.  Having heroes is acknowledging that you are still a work in progress.  They are examples of who we'd like to be.  Heroes give us a goal to reach for.  And it's when we're adults that, in some capacity, someone in our lives is looking for us to be their hero.  We may not be able to teach that someone how to fly but hopefully we can show what to do when we fall.