An Interview With ‘Lunar New Year Love Story’ Creators Gene Luen Yang And LeUyen Pham

Getting excited for Valentine’s Day used to come easy for Valentina. Now she’s not so sure her imaginary friend, Saint V, isn’t right. If you can’t trust your imaginary friend, after all, who can you trust and, according to V, Valentina will never find true love in writer Gene Luen Yang and artist LeUyen Pham‘s graphic novel, Lunar New Year Love Story. For more on how the book came together and depicting lion dancing accurately, check out this interview with Yang and Pham below:

Rachel Bellwoar: From Valentina’s home life to her relationship with her imaginary friend, Saint V, there are so many different components to Lunar New Year Love Story. Was there an idea that came first?

Gene Luen Yang: Lunar New Year Love Story was inspired by my relationship with my wife Theresa. When we first started dating, she hated Valentine’s Day. She thought it was a scam created by corporations to sell us flowers and candy. I, however, really wanted to celebrate Valentine’s Day because I really liked her. My workaround was Lunar New Year.

Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day are on two different calendars, one Eastern and one Western, but they’re almost always within a week of each other. Every now and then they’re even on the same day. So when my wife and I were dating, around the middle of February, I would give her Lunar New Year gifts and I take her out to Lunar New Year dinner. I would draw her these Lunar New Year cards with dragons and phoenixes in the shapes of hearts, lots of pink and red. It worked. We’ve been married for over twenty years now and have four kids.

My editor Mark Siegel and I talked about this project as a collaboration between me and LeUyen Pham from the very beginning. Both Mark and I are huge fans of Uyen. I think she is among the most elite illustrators working in both picture books and graphic novels today. Her ability to convey deep emotion, humor, and the beauty of physical movement is just breathtaking. And it’s not just her drawing abilities. She also helped with the writing, especially when it came to the relationships between the female characters. The authenticity of Val’s friendship with Bernice is because of Uyen.

LeUyen Pham: I’m blushing, seriously. Working with Gene has been SO MUCH FUN.  Comics still feels like a new space for me, something I’m not at all used to yet, so getting to really understand the medium has become a whole new thing with Gene. It’s like taking a master class in the medium with one of the greats of the field. But he’s SO DARN MODEST, on top of it all.  Gene’s quick wit and his approach to story telling and his inherent control of the medium is something I’m still in awe of. He has a way of sensitively and humorously approaching very difficult subjects in a way few others can manage. I’m counting myself hugely lucky to work with him and learn from him.

 

Bellwoar: When we first meet Saint V he’s a cute little cherub. What was it like getting to show his appearance change over the course of the book and explore what happens when Cupid grows up?

Pham: I’m laughing, because it’s like asking when a kid’s imaginary friend becomes a voice in your head. I think I’m the only adult I know who still has imaginary friends that are as cute as they were when I was a kid. Cute Cupid was totally in my wheelhouse, as I’m primarily a picture book person, and cupid could fit right in there with my designs for Princess in Black and Vampirina. I drew the cupid that I remember from my childhood, the one that adorned all those multi-pack Valentines cards that kids gave away at school. Warping him into first the statue of Saint V, to a phantasmagoric version of himself was fun!  I’ve always had a leaning towards the macabre, and you can imagine how rarely that subject gets tapped in picture books. So thank you, Gene, for giving me something to really sink my teeth into! Saint V’s appearance directly mirrors Valentina’s own dire feelings, growing more horrific and broken as her idea of love and romance warp and are tested. Gene had suggested early on that Saint V cracks and crumbles, becoming more real as her misery becomes more real.  I think Gene’s art note was always, “SCARIER!! MAKE IT KIND OF GROSS! MAKE THE EYEBALL DANGLE!”

Yang: What can I say. I think dangly eyeballs can often make a story better.

Bellwoar: Did you always want to include horror elements in this story?

Yang: Yes, because love is scary! Romance has a way of haunting you. Sometimes it’s scars from love gone wrong, sometimes it’s risks you regret not taking. Uyen and I wanted to make all of that visible on the page.

The two forms of Saint V reflect two mistaken notions we sometimes have about love. One is that it’s all fluff and fun. The other is that it’s nothing but pain. What I hope we get across in our story is that real love is much more complex. Real love is more like a skull wearing a crown of bright, beautiful flowers.

Bellwoar: Can you speak more on the meaning behind the different colors used for Val’s narration captions for each chapter?

Pham: We looked at a lot of Eastern symbolism for this book, and the ways to incorporate some ideas rather subtly into the story. Connie [Hsu] (our editor) and I had suggested to Gene early on to break the story into 12 chapters to represent the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. If you look closely at Uncle Yunsang’s art, you can see he uses the Bagua symbols (groups of trigrams representing yin and yang) quite often in his metal works. There are a lot of suggestions of balance being achieved by opposites. So when it came to color, we looked at the Feng Shui wheel closely, and employed the uses of those colors to represent the mood of a particular chapter. For instance, in the second chapter, the colors used are brown and green, which on the wheel represents family. This seemed appropriate for a chapter that has Val reintroduced to her grandmother and learning of her on her family’s doomed romantic history. In chapter 5, the dominant color is blue, representing career and life purpose.  This is the chapter in which she attends her first lion dance class. Each color on the wheel is represented in the chapters.  The one color used multiple times is red, of course. It’s employed in every chapter when Val’s understanding of love grows further. It’s also, of course, the perfect combination of color matching between eastern Lunar New Year and western Valentine’s Day.

Bellwoar: Val’s grandma has such a big personality. Was she inspired by any elders in your life?

Yang: Totally! The character of Val’s grandmother was first inspired by these ladies I knew from church when I was a kid. I grew up in a Chinese Catholic community and there were a lot of aunties who were very caring, but also very opinionated. They always had advice on what I ought to be doing with my life. Val’s grandmother didn’t really get three-dimensional, though, until Uyen started adding to her.

Pham: For me, Val’s grandmother is definitely my mom.  She jumped off the page at me and simply WAS my mother. Everything about her – her ’90s clothing with shoulder pads, her blown back hair, her showy jewellery, dangling crucifix, jade bracelet – all of these were tell-tale signs of being  a Vietnamese immigrant of a certain age.  She was, of all the characters, the easiest for me to draw and required no examination. My mother, with her failing eyesight and lack of interest in anything other than gambling and her bible, in fact believes the story to be about her. She has a copy and has touted to her friends, saying her daughter wrote a book about her love story.  She will likely never read it, but does that matter when she’s so proud of it?

Bellwoar: Where did the idea to have Valentina train as a lion dancer come from?

Yang: Centering a story about Lunar New Year on lion dancing is such an obvious idea because so many Asian cultures celebrate the holiday with lion dancing. However, lion dancing didn’t enter into my outlines until I’d been working on the project for a few months. This was probably because I didn’t know much at all about the artform.

Once lion dancing became a part of the story, everything just clicked. There‘s something about it that just lends itself to romance. Maybe because it’s usually two young people sweating under a sheet? Ha ha. I have a friend whose daughter is a lion dancer at UCLA. She says that couples form all the time on her team. Dancing together as one animal can be incredibly bonding.

Uyen and I were also very lucky. We had a lot of help getting the details right. We would specifically like to thank Shifu Mimi Chan and Shifu Richard Ow for their time and generosity.

Pham: YES! These two Shifus were invaluable as a resource. Mimi was always on hand to send over videos of what the lion dancers’ positions were under the costume, which was incredibly helpful when trying to draw the shape of the lion dancers on the page. The dancer always had to be sketched lightly under the costume to make sure it made sense. That’s not something you can find a lot of reference for online, so we truly needed dancers to be generous enough with us to show what those motions are. And Richard Ow gave us an entire afternoon with his dancers, allowing the asking of questions of how the costumes came up, what each element on the lion head represented, the blessing of each costume, the decoration on the shoes, even the number of ruffles on the front and back lions’ pants. The greatest part was when they performed a lion dance just for me! Amazing.

Bellwoar: Val’s best friend, Bernice, and Val’s father are very cynical about love. What was it like getting to show that perspective from two different generations?

Pham: I have come to observe that this new generation – what are we at, alpha? Gen Z? I’m confused – has many similar traits to our Gen X. There’s a lot of early cynicism there that I’m noticing among my son’s friends.  The difference is that Val’s dad gets his cynicism from his own romantic arrested development with Val’s mother.  Bernice has yet to find hers, and her creative outlets – baking, shoe painting, crocheting – all seem to come from the pent-up fears of truly engaging. We know both these characters, because they all exist in our own social circles.  I think Gene and I simply lifted people from our own lives and just put them into the book.

Bellwoar: Technology is an unavoidable part of modern living, but (given that movies and TV shows still haven’t reached a consensus on how to depict text messages onscreen) not always visually pleasing. That being said, I feel like cell phones were incorporated into this story very well. Was that a challenge?

Yang: Thank you for noticing! Cell phones absolutely make a storyteller’s job more difficult because they make our lives so easy! A good story is about a protagonist overcoming obstacles to get what they want– or the case of a rom-com, who they want. If they can simply text the person they want, it deflates much of the drama. Uyen and I had to get creative.

Pham: I don’t mind admitting that those cell phone conversations were tough!  They are literally speech bubbles, lifted from comics.  How surreal to use text speech bubbles for real speech bubbles!

Bellwoar: This question is specific, but I was wondering if there was a story behind the movie poster for Drunken Master in Val’s apartment?

Pham: HAH! You’re the second person to note that poster! I feel like it’s a litmus test to tell if you’re Gen X or not. Everyone I knew in art school was watching all the Jackie Chan movies on cycle, with the same reverence often accorded to Star Wars or Indiana Jones. It was a calling card for my people – come unto me, you children of the nineties Kung Fu Theater!  I understand, and acknowledge you…

Bellwoar: In the same spirit as those ensemble movies that revolve around holidays (like Love Actually and New Year’s Eve), why do you think it’s time a romance was set on the Lunar New Year?

Yang: Lunar New Year is about fresh starts, but it’s also old traditions. It’s about spending time with the people who are most important to you. And it’s about gratitude. To me, all that seems like the perfect time for romance!

Bellwoar: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Gene and LeUyen!

Lunar New Year Love Story goes on sale January 9th from First Second.