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 novel
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.
Jeremy Holt is a Korean adoptee and one of three identical triplets. In Made in Korea, Holt’s new comic series along with illustrator George Schall, the concept of identity has new meaning as artificial intelligence abounds and some children are no longer made of flesh and bone.
During the Cultural Revolution, many young Chinese in the cities were encouraged—if not ordered—to move to the countryside. Millions of young Chinese in high school and university moved to rural China ostensibly to “receive re-education from the poorest lower and middle peasants to understand what China really is” (to quote Mao Zedong, at the time). Many students remained in the countryside until the end of the Cultural Revolution almost a decade later.
The scene is Turkey in the mid-to-late 70s. A young male college student hops onto a bus. He sits next to a cute female student from his class, but before they can strike up a conversation, they see a right-wing passenger, walk up to another passenger and hit him on the head with a hammer. The young woman screams. The two students get off the bus, only for the female student to call the male student a “disgusting fascist” and leave in anger.
Academic texts don’t usually manifest themselves as graphic novels.
It’s 1936 and Chinese-Hawaiian detective Edison Hark is enduring his tenth day at Angel Island, awaiting his release. He’s traveling to San Francisco to help the police there figure out the disappearance of a maid named Ivy Chen and it takes more than a week for the Angel Island jailors to figure out Hark’s importance.
We Served the People is Emei Burell’s graphic novel treatment of her mother’s stories from the time of the Cultural Revolution in China, in effect a biography covering the time she was a 15 or 16 year old student in Beijing until she left China for Sweden 19 years later.
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