At one point, I was just so grateful for Asian-American representation that almost any story would do. Thankfully, these days, with creators and media that are “East Asian things everywhere all at once,” we can dispense with the tired tropes that obscured the differences and vitality within our communities. Does the romantic notion of “following your heart” always have to involve denying family, defying tradition, and… going west?!?
As a writer and cartoonist, Gene Luen Yang has often faced off against those tropes. In “Lunar New Year Love Story,” brought to life by illustrator LeUyen Pham’s artwork that pulsates with soul, breath, and mood, a love story finds its wings not via the betrayal of kinship, tradition, and piety, but through those values. It’s a charming and eminently readable romance tale told in graphic novel form, complete with love triangles, attracting opposites, and holiday-themed motifs and interludes. But even while Yang and Pham lean on familiar tropes of the romantic comedy genre, they eschew other cultural clichés that make “Lunar New Year Love Story” a refreshingly original and love-affirming tale, with treasures for young readers and cynical older ones too.
Written by Gene Luen Yang
Illustrated by LeUyen Pham.Graphic novel superstars Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham join forces in this heartwarming rom-com about fate, family, and falling in love.
She was destined for heartbreak. Then fate handed her love.
Val is ready to give up on love. It’s led to nothing but secrets and heartbreak, and she’s pretty sure she’s cursed―no one in her family, for generations, has ever had any luck with love.
But then a chance encounter with a pair of cute lion dancers sparks something in Val. Is it real love? Could this be her chance to break the family curse? Or is she destined to live with a broken heart forever?
Yang and Pham’s story follows Vietnamese-American high school student Valentina’s journey to find reconciliation with her disillusionment with love. As a precocious child, Valentina has a playful relationship with an imaginary friend, her namesake St. Valentine, who takes the form of Cupid-like baby. But both the universal hard knocks of adolescence and the specific grief of Valentina’s missing mother sour her sentiments… and her bond with the St. Valentine figure, who grows as old and ghostly and gaunt as shriveled naivete can become.
The characters surrounding Valentina have such striking visual life and convincing characterizations that LeUyen Pham seems to do the job of a whole team of Pixar animators. Pham’s illustration work has adorned so many of the great children’s books my daughter grew up reading, and her comics artistry was already proven with the “Best Friends” graphic novel series with frequent collaborator Shannon Hale.
In “Lunar New Year Love Story,” though, Pham shows a versatility that actually makes me a little sad that this art has stayed at the kids table for so long. No disrespect to the “kids table” of arts or books– those works are my academic focus and dear to me. But Pham and Yang render Uncle YunSang or Valentina’s quirky grandmother or bereft dad Đạt Trần or best friend Emma sparkle with the exuberance of distinctly human people and the complicated layers that hold the depths of true-to-life maturity.
A pivotal example for all I have said above: Valentina’s heartache at family truths (I’ll leave you to discover them in the book yourself) leads her to join a traditional lion dance troop, as well as into a friendship *ahem* with charismatic Leslie and his… less charismatic cousin Jae. From a mile away, the rom-com tropes signal that Jae will be Val’s romantic fate. (Tropes, or maybe the cover of the book.)
When those familiar Hallmark movie beats came along, and the book started telegraphing its plot, I must admit I started arching my one left eyebrow. I’m glad I didn’t write it off too quickly, though, especially since at that point, only a third of the story had been told.
What kept me turning pages was not wondering about Valentina’s romantic destiny, but the fate of an omnipresent player in the entire story: culture. Indeed, St. Valentine himself plays a role, and in a fashion I recognize from Gene Yang’s other work, deities and divines are ever only on a pedestal so they can be quickly taken off it. “St. V.” soon starts to feel like an inconvenient uncle, a specter of semi-sane weirdness that might be wisdom but might also be dangerous or cruel. A little like Love to the teenage heart. Or Faith.
Continued belowAnd then there’s the culture. The story points out that in the U.S., coincidences of the Lunar calendar’s New Year (a central celebration in the story’s Asian heritages) and February’s Valentine’s Day can create a strange push-pull, or maybe a nice chemistry. Valentina is Vietnamese-American, and characters in the story have Korean, Chinese, and other heritages that coexist with both distinctiveness and diffusion. The lions of the lion dance are tied to the yin and yang of Asian philosophies, and the dance itself is sometimes fluid and sometimes clashing, depicted with jubilation and chaos, simultaneously a reflection and a source of making sense out of the tensions the characters live in.
The story does dish some unsavoriness at older folks who shame others for their lack of the heritage language or their adherence to traditional marital expectations. But unlike many Asian-American stories of yesteryears or Disney-fied versions of Asian folklore, “Lunar New Year Love Story” does not portray the cultural lives of its characters as vain traditions to be transcended or backward myths to begrudgingly tolerate. Valentina finds love, and ultimately finds herself.
But what made me feel such joy sharing the book with a lot of teen readers who have gobbled the book up– one student said, “Do you have more books like this???”– is their resonance with the positive triangulation of culture, aspirations for selfhood, and the search for connections with others, romantic, friendship, familial, or whatever. Gene Yang and LeUyen Pham paint a tale full of yearning, disappointment, and the compelling hope of love.
Best of all, the love doesn’t feel the need to flee from the clash and gongs of kin, culture, and community. No, in fact, that’s where the love is found. It’s that beautiful balance that makes “Lunar New Year Love Story” a rare and wonderful tribute to love, not just the budding love between Val and Jae, but within families of many stripes, dance troops and church groups, best buddies and patron saints.
