Reader's Place: May 2, 2022
THE ASIAN DISAPORIC EXPERIENCE IN GRAPHIC NOVELS
Like the terms Europe and Africa, Asia encompasses a complex variety of cultures, ethnicities, languages and religion, spread over a huge geographic region. Here are some titles focusing on the experience of living in diaspora.
Shadow life ,by Hiromi Goto, 2021. (Library Catalog)
When Kumiko's well-meaning adult daughters place her in an assisted living home in Vancouver, Canada, the seventy-six-year-old widow goes on the lam instead and finds a cozy bachelor apartment, reveling in small, daily pleasures: decorating as she pleases, eating what she wants, and swimming in the community pool. But something has followed her from her former residence--Death's shadow. Kumiko, with the help of friends new and old, is prepared for the fight of her life.
We hereby refuse: Japanese American resistance to wartime incarceration, by Frank Abe, 2021. (Library Catalog)
Three Japanese American individuals with different beliefs and backgrounds decided to resist imprisonment by the United States government during World War II in different ways. Their stories show the devastating effects of the imprisonment, but also how widespread and varied the resistance was.
Feelings: A story in seasons, by Manjit Thapp, 2021. (Library Catalog)
Thapp carries us along as she experiences various emotions throughout the year, working her way through the six seasons of the Indian calendar. From the spark of possibility and jolt of creativity in High Summer to the desolation and numbness of Winter, Thapp implores us to consider the seasons of our own emotional journeys and the moods that can change as quickly as the weather, allowing us to take stock and take comfort.
They called us enemy, by George Takei, 2019. (Library Catalog, Hoopla)
Long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, Takei woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
Apsara engine, by Bishakh Som, 2020. (Library Catalog)
In Bishakh Som's debut work of fiction, questions of gender, the body, and existential conformity are explored over the course of eight speculative and graphic short stories.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau