A Review of Shaun Tan’s the Arrival (Arthur A. Levine Books).

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

A Review of Shaun Tan’s the Arrival (Arthur A. Levine Books).



I taught a graphic novel this quarter that was reviewed on this blog by pylduck called Shortcomings. Tomine was interesting because he didn’t use captions frequently (only in the first couple of pages) and didn’t use thought bubbles at all. Many of his panels were minimalist and didn’t even include dialogue. Because I’ve been teaching a course on narrative and narrative theory, I’d have to think a little bit outside of the box when there is almost a complete absence of text within the pictorial and representational terrain. If there is a rough narrative to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, it is this: a man travels to a new country or land in order to find work and provide for his family. The discourse of race, ethnicity, nationality and culture is presented in interesting ways because the cover has a set of portraits in the interior that gives us a sense of the diversity and range of phenotypes and cultural attire. Tan keys us into different personal histories from the very first pictorial representation.

For the narratologist, the question that Tan’s The Arrival brings up is whether or not pictures alone can present a form of narration. Monika Fludernik’s narrative typology relies on the assumption of an anthropomorphic voice-centered approach. With Tan’s The Arrival, there is no voice, just absolutely STUNNING panels. There is a gothic and sublime feel to The Arrival, telling us that the immigrant’s experience is as much about horror and beauty at the same time. There is one particular scene where the main “immigrant” character arrives by boat to what is a new city and what we see is this extreme density observed on a scale that would be akin to what this figure might have seen. The focalized perspective gives us a sense of what the immigrant figure might have been thinking, even without the use of the direct thought bubble. Another amazing scene is when the immigrant is finally able to find a place to stay for the night. The room is clearly a very basic set-up, but at one point, we see him observed from outside a window, and then the panels scan back and we see that there are multitudes of people like him within the frames of other windows as well, all housed in what seem to be tenement-type buildings. There is also a magical realist element to the work as various characters are surrounded by creatures that look about the size of dogs and cats, but are definitely not dogs or cats. The extremely pithy use of text is interesting, too, because it seems to be a transfiguration of some sort of language. If one spends time trying to “translate” the text, one is confused, and Tan is obviously playing with the sense of disorientation that the experience feels in coming to a new land. The text is never used in dialogue bubbles but only observed in things that seem to be postcards, passports, and other such documents. Tan also makes very effective use of grayscale and sepia-tints in order to convey different temporal periods and flashbacks. It’s further interesting to think about the categorization of this book; some have positioned it as a children’s book, but The Arrival could certainly be aimed at a variety of different age groups.

Tan lives in Australia so his status as an “Asian American” writer per se is not without a small amount of controversy, but we see that the contexts of the graphic novel are still extremely relevant to field concerns in thematics that relate to loss, displacement, and trauma. It is clear though that there is a whole crop of Asian American graphic novelists (Belle Yang was also reviewed on this blog) now that would make a whole course on this very topic a very attractive, fun, and rigorous possibility. I have been thinking though about the relative lack of Asian “American” graphic novelists from South Asian and Southeast Asian “regions” and was wondering if any of you had any leads there?

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Arrival-Shaun-Tan/dp/0439895294/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1291571525&sr=8-1

Margaret Dilloway's How to Be an American Housewife

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I saw Margaret Dilloway's How to Be an American Housewife (Putnam 2010) at the bookstore a couple months ago and was intrigued by the cover and title.



At first, I thought it might be a book like Memoirs of a Geisha, a narrative by a white American about the exotic Japanese woman. The author bio in the back flap of the book, however, revealed that Dilloway's mother is a Japanese woman who married a white American soldier after WWII. The novel, while telling a fictional story of a Japanese war bride, was thus inspired by the story of Dilloway's mother and the cultural divide that she faced as a Japanese woman relocated to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. More importantly, the novel traces the multi-generational legacy of such a Japanese woman and her mixed-race daughter and granddaughter. In this regard, the story has resonances with Taniguchi's The Ocean in the Closet.

Dilloway's novel centers on Shokko, the Japanese woman who marries an American soldier, and their daughter Suiko/Sue. The first half of the novel is told in Shokko's point of view, and the second in Suiko's (with a final third section alternating between the two women's perspectives). We find out that Shokko has suffered from a weak heart for much of her life, and in the present moment is finding it increasingly difficult to accomplish even the simplest daily tasks like cleaning and grocery shopping. As she faces the failure of her body and possible death, she reflects on the choices that have led to this point in her life, particularly the ones that led to her marriage to Charlie and her departure from Japan. She remembers her family back in Japan and the rupture that has resulted in her lack of communication or visit to Japan in the four-plus decades since she left. Sue's story picks up with her decision to make a trip to Japan with her daughter Helena on behalf of her ailing mother, to find her long lost uncle Taro to deliver a letter from Shokko. Their reunion with relatives they had never met (or even known about) sets the stage for their introduction to Japan as an ancestral land and culture.

The title of the novel comes from a fictional handbook that Dilloway "quotes" from at the beginning of each passage. The handbook instructs Japanese war brides on how to be good American housewives. It is a fascinating text, one that would be even more interesting if it were in fact a real document. The perspective is from that of Japanese women who are more experienced as American housewives, having made the cultural transition earlier. There is a real-life text that inspired Dilloway's creation. Apparently, her father had given her mother a book titled The American Way of Housekeeping that was a handbook for Japanese women working American (military) households. Dilloway's version is at once shocking in the kinds of statements it offers as instruction as well as incredibly revealing in the cultural and gendered assumptions of the time. The expectations of assimilation as well as docility to white male American authority seem antiquated for the contemporary, post-'60s feminist-movement reader, but nevertheless are indicative of the way Americans continue to perceive Japanese (and other) women in the domestic sphere.

This novel is a welcome addition to work by mixed-race Asian American writers like Nora Okja Keller, Susan Choi, Brian Leung, and Alexander Chee that examines the historical and familial forces behind the formation of multiracial families.