I spent part of the weekend rereading Gene Yang's American Born Chinese, which I think I like even better now than I did when it first came out a couple of years ago. Highly, highly recommended, if you haven't read it yet yourselves.

On Saturday, midway through the reread, I saw a post on Derek Kirk Kim's blog about a short documentary piece done by America.gov about Yang and his book. Well, naturally I was intrigued.



It's a nice little bit, and encapsulates much of the thematic meat of the book. I made a note to blog about it first thing this morning.

This morning, though, before I could blog about it, I saw a post by "Sandy" on the blog I Love Rob Liefeld with a little more detail about the spot, and about others that America.gov has done.

The video was shot and edited by Steven Greenstreet from America.gov, who was nice enough to tell me about it.

America.gov recently has put up a number of articles about comic books and the Asian American experience, including:

• An interview with Adrian Tomine
• An interview with Gene Luen Yang
  
• An interview with Jeff Yang, editor in chief of the new comic book Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology
• A group discussion with editors Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow and Jerry Ma about Secret Identities

What is America.gov, you ask? It is run by the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), which:

engages international audiences on issues of foreign policy, society and values to help create an environment receptive to U.S. national interests.

IIP communicates with foreign opinion makers and other publics through a wide range of print and electronic outreach materials published in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Persian, Russian, and Spanish. IIP also provides information outreach support to U.S. embassies and consulates in more than 140 countries worldwide.

So it's basically America's propaganda unit.

Hey -- if we're showing off America's good side by making documentaries about comic books, I'm all for it.

I'm with Sandy. I have no objection whatsoever to my tax dollars going to this kind of thing.