A Review of Laura Gao’s Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American (Balzer + Bray, 2022).
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uttararangarajan
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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan
As I gear up for my introduction to Asian American studies course, I’ve been reading up on as many new offerings I can! One is Laura Gao’s Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American (Balzer + Bray 2022), which is yet another excellent addition to the Asian American graphic narrative canon. This area/ genre is simply bursting with so many excellent offerings now that you could easily teach a course on Asian American graphic narrative and continue to swap out texts occasionally just for parity. Gao’s graphic novel opens with a kind of frame narrative, which begins in the period that COVID first emerges. From that point forward, Gao’s memoir moves back in time, detailing her upbringing in Wuhan and her difficult acculturation in the United States, where she grows up in a region with few other Asian immigrants or Asian Americans. Gao eventually begins to suffer from forms of internalized racism, attempting to shed any relationship to her Asian background in order to fit in: she adopts an American name, attempts to dye her hair, and she promotes American acculturation in her family through the celebration of holiday traditions like Christmas. In order to remove herself from assumptions that she is model minority, she pursues basketball as a sport. Yet, this desire for American inclusion is of course a kind of fantasy, one that begins to be deconstructed as Laura ages. She returns to Wuhan to visit extended family members, realizing that she has more connections with her roots than she might want to admit. When Laura goes to college, and she begins to explore her sexuality and her racial identity, she naturally finds community amongst fellow people of color and other queer individuals. In this respect, the novel is ultimately a bildungsroman, with Laura realizing that she must embrace the multifaceted nature of identity over and above the external validation she earlier sought via the desire to conform. The graphic narrative is ultimately a very teachable text, and I will certainly add this one to my future course offerings.
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uttararangarajan
[image error]
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan
As I gear up for my introduction to Asian American studies course, I’ve been reading up on as many new offerings I can! One is Laura Gao’s Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American (Balzer + Bray 2022), which is yet another excellent addition to the Asian American graphic narrative canon. This area/ genre is simply bursting with so many excellent offerings now that you could easily teach a course on Asian American graphic narrative and continue to swap out texts occasionally just for parity. Gao’s graphic novel opens with a kind of frame narrative, which begins in the period that COVID first emerges. From that point forward, Gao’s memoir moves back in time, detailing her upbringing in Wuhan and her difficult acculturation in the United States, where she grows up in a region with few other Asian immigrants or Asian Americans. Gao eventually begins to suffer from forms of internalized racism, attempting to shed any relationship to her Asian background in order to fit in: she adopts an American name, attempts to dye her hair, and she promotes American acculturation in her family through the celebration of holiday traditions like Christmas. In order to remove herself from assumptions that she is model minority, she pursues basketball as a sport. Yet, this desire for American inclusion is of course a kind of fantasy, one that begins to be deconstructed as Laura ages. She returns to Wuhan to visit extended family members, realizing that she has more connections with her roots than she might want to admit. When Laura goes to college, and she begins to explore her sexuality and her racial identity, she naturally finds community amongst fellow people of color and other queer individuals. In this respect, the novel is ultimately a bildungsroman, with Laura realizing that she must embrace the multifaceted nature of identity over and above the external validation she earlier sought via the desire to conform. The graphic narrative is ultimately a very teachable text, and I will certainly add this one to my future course offerings.
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