Gene Luen Yang: Hello, my name is Gene Luen Yang. Gene Luen Yang is actually a transliteration of my Chinese name, which is Yang Ging Luen. That middle character Gene was eventually made into my English first name. When I was born, my parents named me Ging, which means splendid, but my mom tells me that by the time I was two, she noticed that I had a really terrible habit of hitting my head on the furniture. So she actually ended up changing my middle character in my Chinese name to Geng, which is a homonym of my original middle character. But instead of meaning splendid, it meant careful. So now my name has gone from "splendid" to "careful," but it all transliterates the same in English. It's all Gene.