cracks
A Graphic Novel Reimagination of Chinese-Exclusion Era Family Stories
The Chinese-American side of my family has lived in California since the days of the Transcontinental Railroad’s construction in the mid-1860s. Since then, each generation has had to fortify and rebuild itself in an American landscape haunted by living legacies of past oppression, hostility and destruction against communities considered “alien,” and the ongoing push and pull between assimilation and resistance caused by the ever-looming shadow of Chinese Exclusion Laws. I’ve dedicated the past three years to learning these family stories from my Poh-Poh, Connie Young Yu, and writing the script for a graphic novel adaptation of these stories, illustrating them as magical realist ghost tales. They are grounded in true oral narratives of Chinese-American immigration, poetry of former detainees on Angel Island, and the folklore of hungry ghosts, monsters, and other “strange tales” in Chinese folklore and literature.
The graphic novel script is told in two timelines - the “Wong Shee” timeline (the story of my great-great-grandmother Wong Shee’s 16-month detainment on Angel Island) and the “Connie” timeline (the story of how Connie, Wong Shee’s granddaughter and my Poh-Poh, learned her family’s true stories and preserved the history of Angel Island in the 1960s and 1970s), with a short prologue that tells the story of my family’s escape and survival from violence of the 1906 earthquake. The creative decision that I made with synthesizing these two timelines is to connect them through the existence of a “ghost world” that is revealed to them through “cracks” in their perceived reality. The story follows their relationship to that ghost world, and to each other, over the course of their respective lives. I utilized the complex and rich artistic tradition of Chinese ghost lore to adapt it: for example, on Angel Island I represented the brutal interrogation and appeals system through iconography of the Ten Courts of Hell that courts must pass through, and the ghosts of past atrocities themselves speak through “ghost poetry” – a longstanding tradition of ghost mediation that has been a source of ghost agency in Chinese literature for centuries.
My choice to use ghost folklore to adapt these family stories was intentional. The creation myths of my Chinese-American family are myths of violence, unrest, and, above all, in-betweenness - the repeated, real experience of being uprooted. Furthermore, each of these instances has had a continuous and ever-shifting afterlife. To me they are ghost stories, stories about those members of our family who have inhabited the in-between place from which there can be no complete recovery: Angel Island, refugee camps, fiery ruins. Yet through a tradition of passing these stories down, we grandmothers and granddaughters keep the spiral of time going by honoring our ancestors, our ghosts, and making space for them in whatever capacity we can in our present landscape. We might not be able to fix the brokenness from the past, or heal our ghosts, but we make our present landscape hospitable to them. We take them on our journey - at times repurposing, reinterpreting and reviving them, but reliving them nonetheless, carrying them forward, daughter upon granddaughter.
This is what I hope the graphic novel will do for others: that it will give us a narrative world where we can expand our ways of interacting with a painful, incomplete past, and make our American landscape hospitable to it.
