Paul Gullas has posted a great write up of last Friday’s standing-room-only NYCC Asian American Comics and Creators panel, which was moderated by yours truly and featured Marjorie Liu, Larry Hama, Amy Chu, Janice Chiang, Wendy Xu, and Ethan Young. Here’s an excerpt:

Pak said that he sometimes grappled with whether to use things that could be considered stereotypes in his writing. He said that while he loves Chow Yun-Fat and Jet Li movies, he’s never written an Asian martial arts story because he doesn’t want to feed that trope. “But at the same time, am I foolishly cutting myself off from something I love as a result?“ He asked the other panelists about their thoughts.

Amy Chu said that she is grappling with it right now, with a series that she has been considering writing. She brought up the Strange Fruit controversy, and said that there could be a chance of this story being misinterpreted or coming off wrong. She wants to do the story, but on the other hand, there are so many bad depictions of that culture, and does she, as an Asian-American, want to do that? She also doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as “the Asian doing the Asian stories”.

Liu said that she has almost developed an allergic reaction to certain representations of Asians in media. “There’s always the Chinatown episode. There’s always the Yakuza episode. There’s always the ‘abused, beaten Chinese woman terrorized by the Chinese man’ episode.”

Read the whole thing here!