In the opening chapter of Susumu Higa’s manga, Okinawa, a group of Japanese soldiers land on a Ryukyuan island to prepare for World War II’s Battle of Okinawa. A child asks her principal whether the soldiers will occupy their island forever. “Until they know all of us are safe,” he replies. His words are an ominous beginning for readers who know anything about the next seventy years of Okinawa’s history.
Graphic novel
In June 2020, Christina Wong and Daniel Innes started an Instagram account to document Toronto’s disappearing Chinatown. Innes would draw a building or a street scene and Wong would pair it with text. Toronto’s Chinatown enjoys a long history and it had been one of the largest in North America before gentrification and redevelopment started in the 1950s. And like most Chinatowns, the language spoken on the street and at home was originally Toisanese. Family association halls, grocery stores, bakeries, banks, and public libraries catered to Chinatown residents and gave them a sense of community.
A half-century and more ago, when I was growing up, there was a comic book series in the United States called “Classics Illustrated” which retold novels, myths and—my own favorites—history in a format normally reserved for Spiderman. These were probably not the most accurate introductions to Marco Polo or Caesar, but they stirred the imagination.
Laura Gao was born in Wuhan and spent her first four years with grandparents in China while her mother and father studied in the US. When she reunites with her parents, she finds herself in the strange land of Texas where teachers and new classmates can not pronounce her Chinese name, the only name she knows. Gao writes about culture shock and identity in her engaging new book, Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American, a story nicely accompanied by vivid drawings.
Bangkok, as Thailand’s largest and most economically-important cities, attracts migrants from all over the country. Drawn to its economic opportunities, migrants eke a living working in informal jobs, with few protections—yet they build a community among their fellow migrants and workers.
Trust China to turn white privilege on its head and make a business of it. A decade or two ago, one way expats at loose ends could make a living there, albeit somewhat precariously and less-than-entirely-honestly, was to be “hired by a Chinese company to pose as a professional at events where a Western face lends the company extra credibility in its own market.” These are known as doing “face jobs”.
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s mother became separated from her sister back in 1950 and has not seen her since. Her mother is one of more than 130,000 people who have applied through the Red Cross to locate a missing sibling, child, or spouse left behind in North Korea. Stories of these separations are the subjects of Gendry-Kim’s new graphic novel, The Waiting, translated by Janet Hong. Hong also translated Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel Grass, which told about Korean girls and women who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese during WWII. The Waiting is just as informative—and distressing—as Grass.
Graphic novels are taken more seriously in Europe than in the English-speaking world, and so it is perhaps not surprising that The King of Bangkok, a socio-political-historical narrative based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Claudio Sopranzetti, first appeared in Italian. Although a “novel” in the sense it’s fictionalized, the elements (say the authors) are based on real people and real events: the result is a sort of distillation of recent Thai social history.
It’s Livy’s first day of sixth grade at her new school and Livy is understandably apprehensive. There are worries about new friends, about fitting in, about making her parents (who have sacrificed to send their only daughter to a school in a better district) proud. But Livy has more than nerves; following Livy to school is Viola, Livy’s anxiety brought to life as a violet-hued shadow that constantly rattles and second-guesses Livy’s thoughts and actions.
Edison Hark, the star of The Good Asian, the new comic series written by Pornsak Pichetshote and illustrated by Alexandre Tefenkgi, never signed up to investigate a murder in Chinatown. As the only Chinese-American law enforcement officer in the United States, he travels to San Francisco in 1936 to help find a Chinese maid who has run away from the household of the man who raised him. But he stumbles upon a crime scene that hearkens back to an old crime legend: a hitman for the old Tongs, back for revenge.
You must be logged in to post a comment.