I developed and produced several short essays presented as digestable graphic memoirs for The Lily. When comics editor Rachel Orr first approached me, I was thrilled to be invited to tell my stories. I knew that as a gender-defiant midwestern Asian American, telling my ordinary, everyday tales could help expand the largely white American feminist narrative.
Background and Influences
At that point, my experience with making comics was limited to drawing My Life is a Joke, a humorous “relatable” autobiographical comic strip. This was around the time that Hannah Gadsby’s “comedy special” Nannette, was released, and I myself—for quite some time—had also felt burdened with that millennial zeitgeist of using comedy as a shield. I had, unconsciously, been using it to safeguard myself from exploring the depths of my Otherness. Nanette combined with Rachel’s direction really pushed me to tell deeper stories. Adding to that, I knew that I wanted my Lily comics to be relatable not in the haha, I feel called out way, but in the sense that anyone could see a reflection of themselves in these vignettes.
I really took to heart songwriter Emily Haines’ philosophy of creating art that serves as a prism, in which people can interpret your very personal work of art based on their own experiences. It’s this idea that there’s a singular connected human experience that we all share despite having wildly disparate individual experiences. This school of thought is also mirrored in MUJI creative director Kenya Hara’s concept that emptiness and whiteness is the “possibility yet to be filled.”
This plays out in my Lily comics in that the goal was to write words and draw pictures that are extremely specific to me, yet vague enough to the audience that they can put themselves in my shoes—my “white, empty” vessel. In addition, I wanted to do this without ever actually revealing personal details that I did not feel comfortable with sharing at the time of publication.
