It’s been a big year for graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang.

He was named the national ambassador for young people’s literature by the Library of Congress and has begun writing for the DC Comics’ “New Super-Man” series drawn by Viktor Bogdanovic, which features a new character named Kenan Kong.

“He’s not a replacement for Clark Kent; Clark Kent is still around,” Yang said of Kong. “It’s just taking the idea of Superman and seeing how it will play out in modern Chinese culture in today’s China.”

Modern Asian-American identity and culture is something Yang has thought a lot about. He will lead a discussion of these issues and more during the conference Altered Egos: Gospel, Pop Culture & Asian American Identity, at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena May 21. Registration for the event closes at midnight on May 15.

Yang will be joined by “Angry Asian Man” blogger Phil Yu, Tim Be Told vocalist and keyboardist Tim Ouyan, the national executive director of Epic Movement Margaret Yu and Orange County area director of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Jerome Mammen.

“The idea was, ‘How do we talk about Asian-American identity?’ ” said Daniel Lee, Asian-American Initiative program director and adjunct professor of Asian-American ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary. “If we talk about it directly, sometimes it becomes somewhat academic or staid, so the idea was to make it more dynamic and find an entry point where we could talk about Asian-American identity and how it impacts our sense of being and our sense of faith, because those often don’t intersect as much.”

The conference is broken into three sections, beginning with The Clutches of Orientalism: Negative Portrayals of Asian-American Identity.

“Orientalism is when you make Eastern culture something exotic, grotesque, something so strange, something opposite of who we are, what the West is,” Lee said.

The second session is called Becoming the Hero in Your Own Story: Pop Culture and Asian American Identity and Faith, which centers on learning how to be comfortable with who you are and making it a strength.

“Superheroes in general have an alter ego and we riffed off that. They have this heroic self they present in certain circumstances and then they have this secret identity,” Ken Fong, executive director of the Asian American Initiative and assistant professor of Asian-American church studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, said. “In our own sort of way Asian-Americans have an alter ego. We learn to be a certain way in certain settings and then a different way when we’re with our family. And then we add the Christian piece. We would like to think that being a Christian and knowing that your worth is in God and God made you in his image whoever you are could bridge those two identities, but we don’t necessarily see that happening.”

Fong, also the senior pastor at Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles in Rosemead and the host of the “Asian America” podcast, notes that in America Christianity, especially in evangelical denominations, is still presented as very “white,” so being Christian takes Asians further away from their ethnicity.

Selecting Yang to lead Altered Egos was obvious to Fong and Lee, as he is well known for his book “American Born Chinese,” which is about the experiences of many Asian-Americans.

“It’s something I’ve thought about a really long time,” Yang said. “It’s such a big part of how I find my place in the world, my cultural heritage. What I’ve found is that the folks I connect with best are the children of immigrants. It doesn’t really even matter where their parents are from. I think a lot of us, especially if you grew up with one culture at home and another one at school or in the outside world, we go through this negotiation, we have to figure out what parts of our parents’ culture are we going to keep and how they fit with the culture that we find in the outside world.”

The San Jose author’s “American Born Chinese” explores Asian-American identity through three story lines, one of which focuses on Chin-Kee, a character who is an embodiment of Asian-American stereotypes.

“Stereotypes have this way of embedding themselves in you even when you know they’re not true, even when you know there’s really no substance behind them, they can find a way of lodging themselves into your mind and affect how you see yourself and how you interact with others,” Yang said.

Another facet of Altered Egos is faith. Yang grew up in the Chinese Catholic community just outside San Francisco and later went through a period of doubt until he decided to embrace the Catholic religion as his own.

“Faith is central to my life. It is another one of those pieces that helps me figure out my place in the world, and I do think there is also intention between culture and faith, especially for Asian-American Christians,” Yang said. “When I was growing up, any time they were talking about God or Jesus they were doing it in Chinese, so it feels like they went hand in hand. It wasn’t until I got a lot older that I realized that this wasn’t the case.”

In 2013, Yang released “Boxers and Saints,” two companion graphic novels about the Boxer Rebellion. Yang became interested in the subject in 2000 when Pope John Paul II canonized a group of Chinese saints who had been martyred during the Boxer Rebellion.

“They were martyred specifically because back then if you embraced Western faith, you were looked at as someone who had turned their back on their culture. That historical tension between Western faith and Eastern culture sometimes plays itself out in the lives of Asian-American Christians,” Yang said.

Along with his work on Superman, which will launch in July, Yang has new volumes of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “Super Decoders” coming out and is “slowly working” on a graphic novel about basketball.

“I think people are becoming more cross-cultural,” Yang said. “More and more we have people growing up in one culture and eventually establishing themselves as adults in another for a variety of different reasons. It’s not longer just that you’re trying to get away from something bad. Sometimes it’s opportunity-driven. I think that Asian-Americans have a vital role in fostering understanding between cultures.”