For many Asian Americans, graphic novels are way to explore history, fight racism

Thank you my friend PO1 William "Chip" Nagel for making us aware that for many Asian Americans graphic novels are ways to explore history and "fight racism'

By Claire Wang

In “The Legend of Auntie Po,” Shing Yin Khor uses watercolors and folklore to bring alive a late-19th century Sierra Nevada logging camp, where some of the country’s earliest Chinese immigrants lived and worked.

Centered on the 13-year-old daughter of a Chinese cook, Khor’s middle-grade graphic novel, a finalist in this year’s National Book Awards, explores the hardships Chinese laborers experienced in the tumultuous years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

But rather than dwelling on the pain and setbacks the group faced, Khor offers hope and whimsy by focusing on the gains, like how Chinese workers developed friendships with Black and Indigenous loggers.

“When you start to examine the history of marginalized groups, it’s never just about trauma,” Khor told NBC Asian America. “We wouldn’t have ended up with generation upon generation of Chinese Americans in this country if it were complete and utter misery every single moment of the time.”

Graphic novels, with their powerful blend of images and words, have grown in popularity as a literary genre to explore the legacy of racism and the complexity of the immigrant experience. And in recent years, Asian American writers are increasingly publishing works that reckon with the country’s racial injustices, past and present.

Illustrated memoirs in particular surged during the Trump years. Thi Bui’s “The Best We Could Do,” which won an American Book Award in 2018, recounts her family’s flight from war-torn Vietnam to the United States. In her 2018 book “Good Talk,” Indian American writer Mira Jacob documents sobering conversations about race she has with her 6-year-old biracial son, including her own coming of age post 9/11 and her struggle to accept his Jewish grandparents’ support for then-President Donald Trump. And George Takei’s 2019 memoir, “They Called Us Enemy,” chronicles his childhood years in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II.

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My reading The Diary of Ann Frank was one of the most moving things of my life. We can not allow it to happen here.

There seems to be lots of good ways to learn, we just need to be able to know what we are learning to be true or Conspiracy these days.