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Publishers Weekly vol. 268 no. 19 May 10, 2021, review of The Legend of Auntie Po. p. 71.
School Library Journal vol. 65 no. 6 June, 2019. Riemer, Carla. , “KHOR, Shing Yin. The American Dream?: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Burrito.”.
Kirkus Reviews June 1, 2019, , “Khor, Shing Yin: THE AMERICAN DREAM?”.
Booklist vol. 115 no. 21 July 1, 2019, Hong, Terry. , “The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito.”. p. 46.
Kirkus Reviews May 1, 2021, , “Khor, Shing Yin: THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO.”. p. NA.
ABOUT
I'm an installation artist, cartoonist and experience designer exploring mythic Americana, new human rituals, and collaborative worldbuilding. I am the author of The American Dream?, a graphic novel memoir about driving Route 66, which was one of NPR’s best books of 2019, and The Legend of Auntie Po, a historical fiction graphic novel about a young logging camp cook in the Sierra Nevadas telling Paul Bunyan tales.
My immersive and narrative haunted house art installations, The Last Outpost and The Last Apothecary, both built in collaboration with my installation art crew(Three Eyed Rat), received grants from Burning Man for their 2014 and 2016 festivals. I also completed another large scale science fiction-themed site specific installation, Salvage Station No. 8, in conjunction with Beam Camp in New Hampshire.
My experience and game design work is rooted in my work as a builder and artist - keepsake games centered on the bridge between physical making and traditional tabletop RPGs, kind and awkward emotional connections, and new traditions and rituals. I am the designer and creator of the embroidery and map-marking keepsake game A Mending, the ongoing mail-LARP Space Gnome Space, the Space Hobo Divination Board, The Gentle Oraclebird (presented at Indiecade 2019 and 2020) and co-designer(with Jeeyon Shim) of the solo journaling keepsake game Field Guide to Memory.
As a cartoonist, my work has been published in The Toast, Catapult, The Nib, Electric Literature, Upworthy, and Bitch Magazine. I create comics at the intersection of race, gender, immigrant stories, and queerness.
HIRE
I'm sometimes available for paying illustration and writing work.
With Three Eyed Rat, I am interested in designing site specific immersive installation work and strange narrative experiences. Let us know if you have a space you want us to fill, your timeframe, and your budget.
I am often available for writing, speaking and teaching engagements. I have taught workshops and spoken at Bryn Mawr University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College and UIUC, and been a National Park Service Artist-In-Residence twice.
TOPICS AND WORKSHOPS I ENJOY TEACHING AND SPEAKING ABOUT:
Zine and Cartooning Workshops
Writing Memoir and Autobio Comics
Collaborative Worldbuilding
Building Object-Narratives (storytelling + prop building)
Invitations to Play: Designing Interaction Cues for Immersive Installations and Experiences.
Route 66 (especially about race, and solo travel)
Paul Bunyan history.
My comics work is represented by DongWon Song at Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. You can email me about the rest at shingkhor at gmail.com.
Shing Yin Khor
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Shing Yin Khor is a Malaysian-American artist and cartoonist. They are the creator of the comics The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66, The Center for Otherworld Science and Say it with Noodles, the latter of which won them an Ignatz Award.
Contents
1 Biography
2 Works
2.1 The Center for Otherworld Science
2.2 Say it with Noodles
2.3 The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66
2.4 Other work
3 References
Biography
Khor grew up in Malaysia and later moved to the United States of America. They have lived in the US for over a decade and they are an American citizen.[1]
Works
The Center for Otherworld Science
Shing Yin Khor is the creator of the webcomic The Center for Otherworld Science, in which scientists are experimenting on flora and fauna of a place called the Otherworld. These experiments have led to advances, such as eradicating Sickle cell anemia, but are morally dubious. After an incident leads to the death of one worker, the survivors must deal with the fallout of the accident and face the emotional and existential consequences.[2]
A review of the webcomic for The Beat said that it "combines otherworldly creatures and fantastic settings with the mundane details of working in a professional setting and the small moments shared between three coworkers. The result is a comic that feels both familiar and ethereal simultaneously, a sense that is only underscored by the simple and extremely effective art.[2]
Say it with Noodles
Say it with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food was a standalone comic about Khor's relationship with their grandmother and how cooking for someone can be a love language. It won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Minicomic in 2018.[3]
The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66
The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66: Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito is an autobiographical graphic novel by Shing Yin Khor. It described a road trip they took along U.S. Route 66, in part to discover themselves and the other America (outside of their home of Los Angeles) they knew little about. The novel covers the history of Route 66 and the boom and bust its populations have faced, while visiting and drawing kitschy tourist traps, giant sculptures and abandoned roadside attractions.[1][4]
A reviewer for The A.V. Club said of the novel, "If not for Khor’s art, the book might have still been a bit of a dry read. But rich with water colors and visible sketch lines under finished shapes, it feels organic and alive. It’s rich with texture and soft shapes, smiling faces that are simple without being overly cartoonish. There are several double-page spreads that capture the incredible vistas and remarkable secrets Route 66 holds for travelers... Khor’s awe and frustration and joy as they encounter new things are all palpable. It makes clear how Khor’s own experiences and needs shaped their trip and the book itself, which leads gracefully into exploration of Khor’s complicated relationship with America as an immigrant... It’s a journey made up of the weird and wonderful, as well as the deeply concerning ways that people leave their mark on the world."[4] Kirkus Reviews said, "Through bright, expressive watercolor illustrations, Khor portrays the memorable locations they pass through... They detail both the amusing (going to the bathroom outdoors) and emotional (loneliness and exhaustion) challenges of being a traveler. Khor’s pilgrimage is as much an exploration of themself as it is of nostalgic Americana. Their travels inspire them to share insights into their path to atheism, their anger with xenophobia and racism—which are provoked when they find a motel labeled “American owned”—and the meaning of “home.” Many of Khor's observations will resonate with those who have questioned national identity and the sense of belonging."[5]
Other work
Khor has produced work for HuffPost, The Nib and The Toast.[6] They also contributed to the comics anthology Elements: Earth.[7] They have also created installation art and sculpture,[2][6] and received coverage from the Smithsonian for recreating other artworks in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.[8]
“I THINK I HAVE A BIT OF AN ANTAGONISTIC RELATIONSHIP TO NATURE”: AN INTERVIEW WITH SHING YIN KHOR
Tiffany Babb | August 23, 2021 | 0 comments
Photo courtesy of the author.
Shing Yin Khor is a cartoonist, game designer, and installation artist. They won the Ignatz Award for their minicomic Say it With Noodles in 2018, and their graphic memoir The American Dream? was one of NPR’s best books of 2019. Khor’s new middle grade graphic novel The Legend of Auntie Po tells the story of a young woman named Mei who works with her father as a cook at an American logging camp during the late 1800s. In this interview, Khor speaks about the influence of nature on their work, researching tools and architecture from a century ago, and writing about death for a young audience.
Tiffany Babb: I first came across your work as short comics and illustrations. Can you talk about how you began to create short comics?
Shing Yin Khor: I was a comics dilettante for a long time before I was a comics professional. Comics was a fun hobby, but also one of the things that just felt truest to how I’m naturally led to tell stories. I think I got into making comics the same way most of us do these days. I put up short things on the internet to amuse myself and my friends, and eventually I submitted to some websites and anthologies, and at some point you look back on a decade of work and realize that wow, you’ve been making comics for a while now.
You spend a lot of time focusing on nature in your work. Can you talk to me about your experiences with nature and how nature influences your work?
Weirdly, I think I have a bit of an antagonistic relationship to nature because it is always trying to kill me. But maybe that’s why I find it compelling. It’s hard to take something for granted when it is busy enveloping your state in wildfires and sending out tiny bugs to drink your blood.
But I think that relationship is also true for anyone that is connected to nature - it is a feeling of awe and irritation and helplessness and fear and grandeur and all encompassing beauty. It is clear to me that we have to be stewards of nature, that we have to be conscious of what we do to and with it, but it is also clear to me that nature is far more resilient than man is, and it is out of our own self interest that we should care about how we’ve fucked up our climate, because we are going to die first.
I think the nature experience that most influenced my work were the nights I spent alone in the backcountry of the Petrified Forest National Park while I was an Artist in Residence there. I would walk out into the desert in the late evening with just my backpack and water (the Petrified Forest backcountry is especially special because there is a visitor center on top of the ridge you begin from, so you can almost always see it and it would take some effort to get lost). I slept outside under the stars, and I knew I was the only human for a mile in one direction, and twenty seven miles in the other direction. I think that experience shaped my work because it made me so interested in the tension between human and nature, the things we get to think about when we are not surrounded by other people, the smallness of humans in the vastness of the nature space that can surround us.
One thing that stands out to me about your work is the way you lean into the fantastic and extraordinary. What does it mean to add the larger than life to the world we normally see?
I’ve actually never thought about this before! I feel like I was raised steeped in the intersection of fantasy and the real world because of all the books I specifically imprinted on - books like Gnomes (Huygen and Poortvielt) and Lady Cottington’s Pressed Faerie Book (Brian Froud), and the Griffin and Sabine (Nick Bantock) series - those are all books that sit in this very comfortable space of lending magic and weirdness to our existing world that aren’t interested in creating entirely new worlds, just focusing on the unseen and adding this additional layer of otherworldliness to our own experiences. I think a lot of my work leans to that lineage, it is both very much rooted in what we can actually see and touch, but also what we simply might not have noticed.
I particularly enjoy the maps you draw. The Legend of Auntie Po has a map at its beginning too. What interests you about maps and world building?
I think my brain is actually more practical than poetic. I like maps, infographics, things that explicate and categorize and convey information clearly and concisely. And I think that as storytelling mechanisms, they establish place and geography much clearer than exposition can, but I also think they lend a certain scale to a story, whether it is a grand scale like Tolkien’s world maps or just a logging camp as in my book. They establish that “yes, this story is going to take place here, specifically” even if that space never really expands past the boundaries of a logging camp.
I don’t think I think about worldbuilding quite as much as I just do it. I have a natural curiosity for the way people choose to live and the things they build and the rituals and traditions they embrace, and that feels like a natural compulsion towards worldbuilding, because you can’t be interested in those things without it.
Tradition seems to be a strong thorough line The Legend of Auntie Po, whether it is the tradition of telling tall tales or pushing to have a traditional New Year feast. Can you tell me about your interest in rituals?
I am interested in how humans try to understand the world they exist in, and I think tradition and ritual is a constant in that attempt at understanding. I think that humans are naturally led to categorize things and to do things that help them to understand the world around them, and ritual is one of those things that help us cope with our universes. I use the term “ritual” very generally - I don’t just mean city parades or church services, I also mean our personal rituals, like morning affirmations in the mirror, or having a favorite coffee mug, or preferring to tie our shoelaces a certain way. In my book, ritual spans from tall tales and funerary rites to just the girls always saving pie for each other.
The Legend of Auntie Po is based in a historical setting and you include facts about logging throughout. Can you tell me about your research process for this book?
Researching tools and architecture was pretty straightforward - there is a fair amount of pictorial documentation of this era of buildings and objects. I was an artist in residence at Homestead National Monument in Nebraska (which is on the first plot of land homesteaded under the Homestead Act) a few years ago, and many of the kitchen tools and other tools are drawn from reference sketches I made while I was there. I read an entire book about building a log cabin, but I am unclear if it actually helped me draw them.
The same can’t really be said about people. Personal working class Chinese histories from this era are not documented well at all. We have extremely few letters, largely from merchants and Chinese businesspeople, but mostly just census records, many of which do not correspond to a traceable individual. We do have a reasonable archeological record of what working class Chinese people used and left behind. That’s how we know that Chinese workers often had porcelain bowls and used chopsticks and had access to imported Chinese goods through merchants working in Chinatowns. We have some photographs, which is how we know that some of them wore more Chinese clothing, while many more would wear western styles.
A lot of these histories are glossed over in the popular American narrative. The popular conception of early American history, and especially that of Old West heroism is one full of white heroes and white individualism, which is more a matter of myth-building than historical fact. Often, marginalized groups are spoken of as a monolith, as a people rather than a collection of individual people, living a diversity of lives. This is not true now, and it wasn’t then either.
Auntie Po features characters who care about each other, but don’t necessarily fully understand each other, especially on subjects regarding privilege. What was important to you in setting up character dynamics like the ones between Mister Andersen and Mei’s father or between Mei and Bee?
I think people who do not often experience prejudice or a lack of privilege tend to write it in very distinct ways - where racism is like an on-off switch, where you can learn to be not racist because you have a friend who isn’t white. But in my life, and the life of many marginalized people navigating white-adjacency, most conflicts of privilege are not explosive. They don’t come to a boiling point. They remain simmering and awkward and subtly resentful, and I think this dynamic ended up in the book a lot.
Ultimately, this is a book about navigating whiteness - not necessarily an intentionally malicious whiteness, but just the simple ways that when you grow up in a society built to coddle whiteness, it becomes something that every non-white person learns to navigate in different ways. In the book, the vast majority of white characters in this book really do mean well. But there is a vast chasm between having good intentions and acting in solidarity with the marginalized people in your life. There are many intersections of privilege and even Mei does not understand all of them. Martha, who is a Black woman, is extremely cautious (for good reason!) when Mei tries to make her son feel safe, because she does not feel comfortable making that promise to her children. In a sense, Mei does live in a reasonably sheltered and privileged environment that her dad has tried to build for her out of the privilege of white proximity by leveraging his white friendships, and the book is very much a book about both Mei and her dad beginning to understand that that is not sustainable.
Your book includes talk of death as a day-to-day event in the world of logging, but you also show the personal aspect of it by showing its impact. Can you talk about how you approached this sort of death for a young audience?
I was actually talked down to one death in the book from about twenty during the pitch process, although I don’t remember exactly which editor I spoke to about it (I think more than one was a bit dubious about me killing off half a logging camp). It was never really a question in my mind that young audiences could handle tragedy and death. Young readers today were born into a world of endless war, capitalism run rampant with no social safety net, and a level of unprecedented connectivity with the news cycle. They are very aware of what death is.
That said, it was extremely important to me to not inflict more trauma on marginalized groups. Even though the major incidence of violence happens to a Chinese man (Ah Sam), he is okay, and while he should never have been in that position in the first place, he isn’t actually harmed. The death in the book does not happen to a particularly sympathetic character, but it is nevertheless a death that affects other characters in the book deeply. Grief is complicated. It was really important to me to show Mei grappling with the death not because she is intensely affected by it, but because her best friend is. All deaths reverberate, through the people most in grief, to the networks supporting those people, and to people who have to navigate the grief and trauma in their extended circles.
There seems to be a lot of parallels between making food and telling stories, how both nourish and create community. Can you speak more to Mei’s ability to cook and tell stories and how that contrasts with her dad, who no longer tells stories?
I feel like I write about food and community and stories a fair amount, it’s definitely in Say It With Noodles, and in some of my “Curiosity Americana” comics. I think of food as a language, not specifically a love language, but just a language with a large range of emotions and tensions that can be associated with it.
Mei’s dad no longer tells stories, but that’s a reflection of how his immigrant life has been centered around work and building a better life for his daughter, while also trying to inure her to the violence and racism she will face outside the fairly comfortable borders of the insular logging camp. He is a realistic man - it’s not that he doesn’t believe in Auntie Po, it’s that he does not think that Auntie Po is a practical strategy for dealing with racial violence. He thinks that Auntie Po is a fantasy for children, and he is right, but he can’t bring himself to deny Mei whatever vestiges of a childhood she still wants to hold on to. But he expresses care through food, he expresses care by cooking for the Chinese workers every night, he expresses care by saving a piece of pie for Mr. Andersen, he expresses care by cooking all day so that Mei might have the opportunity for a better life.
You mentioned at the end of Auntie Po that your mother helped write the Chinese characters used in your dialogue. How did that work?
I don’t actually read or write Chinese, to my parents’ consternation but also their intention, since they did want me to be proficient in English and raised me with English as my (mostly) first language, even when I wasn’t living in America.
To translate the phrases I needed in the book, I would just write them in English, and then my mom and I read the pages together for context. Working closely together, we were able to decide on when we wanted idiomatic translations - some Cantonese phrases in the book are not literal translations of the English. For instance, there’s a place where the English translation for Ah Sam is “I’m fine,” but the actual Cantonese characters translate to something like “no holes, no tears.” After that, she would just write the phrases down in her own handwriting, and I would scan them and edit them into the book! If you look closely, you can tell the difference between characters she wrote and characters I wrote - hers are elegant, mine look like they are written by someone who never got past a year of Chinese school.
Can you talk about your tools and how they influence your work?
I’m not sure if you mean my woodworking tools or the drawing and painting ones! I think that my choice of watercolor as my primary medium really lends itself to my ability to establish a sense of time and place. It feels really correct for historical fiction, and I enjoy how it looks. This book was my first book where I used an iPad for digital pencils, and I’m not sure that was a significant influence, but it certainly made me much more efficient.
As for woodworking, I’ve been a carpenter for much longer than I’ve been a cartoonist, although at this point I have probably accomplished more as a cartoonist than as a carpenter. I build lots of things, which I think has sort of given me this more natural understanding of the way things fit together. It makes it a little bit easier to draw log cabins, of course, but I think it has also helped me a lot when I’m trying to figure out how a story or a panel layout fits together.
I don’t think that being a carpenter led me to being curious about the entire lumber manufacturing pipeline, but I do feel pretty at-home writing about the labor class and about forests and hard work, so it might be at least a little bit related. One of the things I love most is teaching kids that tools are just tools, and the capacity and ability to make things is absolutely something they can do. In the book, Beatrice and Mei are competent with simple tools (even if they obviously have adult supervision and help) and that was something I really wanted in the book.
I saw on Instagram that you’ve also been carving marionettes. What draws you to making puppets?
Well, right now I’m into puppets. I’m really into a lot of things, and I tend to get intensely obsessed over them for a period of time. Puppets have been a pretty consistent interest, but now I’ve been expanding into carving marionettes which is extremely hard, but a great challenge. I’m sure that I will eventually have a great answer when I’ve been carving marionettes for a bit, but right now, I just find them absolutely delightful.
What is your favorite kind of pie?
It changes frequently, but I am usually into berry fruit pies. Cherry, blueberry, strawberry and the like.
I like most pies with ice cream on the side, and I like apple pie with cheddar cheese on it.
INTERVIEW: Dig into THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO with SHING YIN KHOR
The gorgeous, thought-provoking graphic novel arrives on June 15th, 2021.
By Avery Kaplan -06/03/2021 11:00 am0
The Legend of Auntie Po
In The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor, available from Penguin Random House imprint Kokila beginning on June 15th, 2021, readers will be introduced to a new and unforgettable American myth. While the graphic novel builds on their previous work, like The American Dream?, this gorgeously rendered comic soon strikes out for uncharted territory.
The Beat caught up with Khor over email to find out more about what went into crafting the 1885 Sierra Nevada Mining Camp setting, what it was like having their Chinese handwriting mocked by their mother, and to discover what they named the giant skeleton they dressed up like a lumberjack!
Can you tell us about the genesis of this graphic novel?
This is going to be an extremely practical and technical answer. I’ve been really into logging history and Paul Bunyan for a while – I wasn’t trying to actually write this book in particular, I was hoping to eventually write a non-fiction graphic novel about the evolution of the Paul Bunyan mythos. But that book’s a bigger project, and I didn’t really have a clear sense of how to approach it yet, and I was flailing around a little bit about what to do with my career. I’d finished my first graphic novel, but it was in publishing limbo and I had no idea if it would be published (it has been now, but I didn’t know that at the time). I had a lot of freelance and self-directed work, but I wanted to work on a longer project and frankly, I was craving some publishing industry legitimacy and income. It is probably worth mentioning that the most motivating thing for me is a contract and deadline, and it is extremely hard for me to complete a long project without some external forces bearing down on me.
Anyway, I decided to challenge myself to just write one new pitch a month, and query agents, and see if any of my ideas were actually things other people might want to read. I am not a person of few ideas, so writing pitches is just not the hard part for me. I can write a lot of things, I love writing lots of things, I was just unclear about which things other people wanted to buy. I was continuing to do Bunyan and logging camp research, and I was reading an academic book, Sue Fawn Chung’s Chinese in the Woods. Some details I had gleaned from other research and was comfortably familiar, but one specific detail stood out to me – that some Chinese cooks were paid more than white cooks. Many Chinese cooks were known for being excellent, and often a mark of a good logging camp that could draw the best and most reliable loggers had Chinese-run kitchens. This book sort of…popped into my head in fairly fully fledged form – I wrote the synopsis in just two days during the X-mas holiday while home with my parents. Even though it is my first middle-grade graphic novel, this book is very much a combination of things I already loved and thought a lot about – Paul Bunyan, logging camps, the Chinese working class in the Old West, food, ritual and tradition – so the writing came easily.
At the same time I was querying some agents in January, a comic of mine called Say It With Noodles was making the rounds after being published on Catapult (it later won an Ignatz) and DongWon Song slipped into my DMs asking if I’d be interested in writing longer work. We were already Twitter friends, and I really enjoyed his thoughts, publishing philosophy, and woodworking – I only hadn’t queried him because he didn’t represent graphic novels. Anyway, now he represents graphic novels and I have an awesome agent, and the pitch for Auntie Po went out to publishers just a couple weeks afterwards in February, and we sold the book to Namrata Tripathi at Kokila, who has been an incredible editor that I feel so lucky to work with.
Working on this book has been a dream with them – the editorial team at Kokila is staffed with the most brilliant women of color, all of whom are thoughtful and incisive and philosophically devoted to centering stories like these in publishing.
The Legend of Auntie Po
One cornerstone of The Legend of Auntie Po story is food, with appearances made by many dishes, including pie, egg tarts, and chop suey. Why was it important to include food in this story?
A lot of my writing is about food because I like food. Many of my own relationships are forged around a dinner table or in the kitchen. I love drawing food, and I wanted to make a book I wanted to draw.
But I also wanted to tell a story about people of color excelling at their craft, and in this case, we have actual historical records that say Chinese people were extremely good camp cooks. I shaped a lot of the book around the scraps of historical fact that we actually have – that in some railroad camps, the Chinese workers would host a multi-course Chinese New Year dinner for all the workers, that some Chinese cooks were paid more as white cooks, and that logging camps needed to have good food to retain the best workers.
One of the central event-conflicts of this story, Ah Hao’s firing, is based on an actual incident that happened at about the same time, although in Washington. An anti-Chinese mob resulted in The Puget Mill Company firing their Chinese cooks and replacing them with white cooks. The white cooks were asked to make a hundred pies daily, as well as the regular meals. They only lasted a week. The Chinese cooks, who were easily making a hundred pies a day, were rehired.
I played a bit with history, of course – there isn’t any evidence of egg tarts being prevalent in Chinese communities in America at this time, and the story of chop suey being invented by Transcontinental Railroad cooks is mostly apocryphal (but it’s also just stir fried leftovers, so the general concept should be fairly common, regardless of what it’s called).
The Legend of Auntie Po
Much of The Legend of Auntie Po takes place in the Sierra Nevada Mountains at a logging camp in 1885. What went into researching this historical setting? Why is it important to tell stories about these historical circumstances?
Researching tools and architecture was pretty straightforward – there is a fair amount of pictorial documentation of this era of buildings and objects. I was an artist in residence at Homestead National Monument in Nebraska (which is on the first plot of land homesteaded under the Homestead Act) a few years ago, and many of the kitchen tools and other tools are drawn from reference sketches I made while I was there. I read an entire book about building a log cabin, but I am unclear if it actually helped me draw them.
The same can’t really be said about people. Personal working class Chinese histories from this era are not documented well at all. We have extremely few letters, largely from merchants and Chinese businesspeople, but mostly just census records, many of which do not correspond to a traceable individual. We do have a reasonable archeological record of what working class Chinese people used and left behind. That’s how we know that Chinese workers often had porcelain bowls and used chopsticks and had access to imported Chinese goods through merchants working in Chinatowns. We have some photographs, which is how we know that some of them wore more Chinese clothing, while many more would wear western styles.
A lot of these histories are glossed over in the popular American narrative. The popular conception of early American history, and especially that of Old West heroism is one full of white heroes and white individualism, which is more a matter of myth-building than historical fact. Often, marginalized groups are spoken of as a monolith, as a people rather than a collection of individual people, living a diversity of lives. This is not true now, and it wasn’t then either.
Because of the nature of Asian immigration and the laws that prevented Asian immigration for a very long time, I think a lot of us think of this time as something that we weren’t present for. And a lot of the current discourse is about Asian exceptionalism and representation, but our successes are hollow if they have to be built on the backs of others, the same way America as a country was built on the backs of many marginalized laborers, many of them us. Acknowledging the diversity of and learning the histories of people that were present in this era, and being able to trace that direct emotional and actual lineage to the past, even if it is not a precise ancestry, is something that can shape how we see ourselves and how we move through the world, politically and emotionally. We can contend with our role as settlers on unceded indigenous land, and work towards righting these wrongs, because people like us occupied, worked, and even thrived on indigenous land, at a time of indigenous genocide. We can feel proud of what our forbearers achieved in the 1800s, in America. We can also address our history of anti-Blackness within our communities. We can also lay claim our own American-ness at a time where Asian people are still being othered, because people like us built America. We can understand that the histories that we were taught were politicized histories, because the histories of marginalized people were actively suppressed, destroyed, or reinterpreted, often to set us against each other which only benefited our oppressors. By knowing our own histories, we make room for other histories as well. We were part of farmworker labor movements, part of civil rights movements, and so much more. Our histories are much more intertwined with other marginalized groups than the stereotypical Asian-American narratives suggest, and solidarity backed by solidarity action is our only way out of the model minority myth. Our Asian-American history is flawed, and difficult, but we can accept both complicity and credit when our American history is known to us.
The Legend of Auntie Po
The Legend of Auntie Po
In previous work like The American Dream?, you have alluded to your affection for Paul Bunyan. Was there a reason you choose to foreground the legend in this graphic novel? FOLLOW UP: Can you tell us about the time you dressed a giant skeleton like a lumberjack?
Ah yes, his name is Paul Boneyan. I dressed my 12’ Home Depot skeleton up like a lumberjack because I couldn’t resist that pun. Could you? I think not.
I find American myth-building extremely compelling, and Paul Bunyan is probably the biggest American mythological figure, although probably a less generally destructive one than the myth we have made our “founding fathers” out to be. The American mythology dehumanizes and caricatures us. It tells us that indigenous people were “savages,” or healers, with no nuance for the individual, it tells us that enslaved people were “treated well,” it ignores the labor and death that this entire country was predicated on, and yes, some of the early Paul Bunyan stories are racist. At the center of this book is the simple question – what were the stories that we lost, because of the person that told them?
I’ve been immersing myself in Paul Bunyan stories and the history of the evolution of this myth for years now, and this book actually came out of that, so Paul Bunyan stories were always part of this book from the very beginning. I actually wanted to write a non-fiction graphic novel about Paul Bunyan and how those stories evolved over time, and this book is what it became instead.
I got really into the Paul Bunyan mythos when a friend and I started a silly competition to visit as many Paul Bunyan statues as we could in two years. I genuinely do not remember why now. I have a custom Google Map that logs the location of Paul Bunyan statues in the continental United States (defined as an oversized lumberjack statue), and I’ve visited over twenty of them, but I did not win the competition.
One of the interesting elements of this narrative is the dynamic that emerges between privileged characters and marginalized characters. What was involved in dramatizing this kind of conflict, which may be familiar to many readers, but which many have never seen represented on the page?
The vast majority of white characters in this book really do mean well. But there is a vast chasm between having good intentions and acting in solidarity with the marginalized people in your life. There are many intersections of privilege and even Mei does not understand all of them. Martha, who is a Black woman, is extremely cautious (for good reason!) when Mei tries to make her son feel safe, because she does not feel comfortable making that promise to her children. In a sense, Mei does live in a reasonably sheltered and privileged environment that her dad has tried to build for her out of the privilege of white proximity by leveraging his white friendships, and the book is very much a book about both Mei and her dad beginning to understand that that is not sustainable.
In my life, most conflicts of privilege are not explosive. They don’t come to a boiling point. They remain simmering and awkward and subtly resentful, and I think this dynamic ended up in the book a lot. I have a lot of moments where characters do not know what to say to each other. I also often do not know what to say. Nothing gets solved in this book.
The Legend of Auntie Po
The Legend of Auntie Po
I noticed that The Legend of Auntie Po is intergenerational, including the perspective of both Mei and her father (as well as other similarly intergenerational perspectives). Why is it so important for this graphic novel to include the perspectives of several generations?
I’m sort of caught between these two generational perspectives, and I couldn’t pick one. I haven’t been a 13 year old girl for a long time, and I’m not a parent of one. The entire story was written from just Mei’s perspective at first, but it was impossible to not mirror the dynamics between Mei and Bee with their fathers as well. The story came together when I did.
The Legend of Auntie Po
The Legend of Auntie Po
As credited in the acknowledgements section, your parents not only helped review drafts of The Legend of Auntie Po, but the majority of the Chinese characters included in the book are in your mother’s handwriting. What was it like working with your parents on this project?
It was extremely weird and nerve-wracking. But it was also fun! I didn’t actually let them (or anyone besides the editorial team) review the book until a near-final draft because I do not work well in the presence of too many opinions, but it was wonderful to be able to show them my work and to tell them that it was going to be a real book. They were helpful in helping me refine the way Ah Hao speaks – I wanted him to speak like English was his second language, even if he does speak English fluently. He does not speak incorrectly, just differently. I obviously patterned it after my own parents, who are both fluent in English (my mother additionally speaks three Chinese dialects and Bahasa Malaysia), but whose accents and phrasing choices have also shifted and changed over the decades we’ve spent in America.
I don’t think they fully understood my intended career at the time I quit my stable corporate job to make comics, but they are proud of me now (they’ve bought 25 copies of the book).
The translation process was fun – I’d send my mom a list of phrases I need translation for, she’d consult with some of her Cantonese friends to get idiomatic expressions correct, and then she’d handwrite these phrases in her own handwriting. In some cases, we left an idiomatic expression written in Chinese, and a more literal translation in English. She’d mail them to me, and I’d scan them in and use them in the book. We repeated this process a couple times. In some cases, I had to write some phrases myself, and those were opportunities for her to mock my Chinese handwriting (which I haven’t done in decades, and I cried my way through Chinese school, so…I can’t write Chinese even though I still seem to mostly have stroke order in my muscle memory when I have to). This particular dynamic is also in the book – Ah Hao makes Mei learn English so she’ll be able to adapt to American life, but still makes fun for her for being bad at Cantonese. Yes, parents, you wanted me to learn English as my first language, and I did, and now I am a published author in English who needs you to translate Chinese for me.
Have there been any comics (or any other kind of stories) that have been especially inspirational for you lately?
I just read Trung Le Nguyen’s The Magic Fish, which I’d put off because I knew I’d cry through it and I was right. It is also a story about telling stories, although it is an entirely different one from mine – it is thoughtful and empathetic and I loved it.
I’ve been brushing up a lot on my graphic storytelling fundamentals, honestly. I came unto this from doing mostly indie comics, and without any formal art education, so I feel like I have a lot to catch up on. I am really in awe of Gale Galligan’s clear and extremely competent storytelling. Pseudonym Jones is doing some absolutely incredible panelling and captures brief emotional beats like none other. I’m kind of obsessed with Jon Klassen children’s books, his storytelling is so weird and economical and visually distinct.
Is there anything else that you would like me to be sure and include?
Every time I was stressed when drawing the book, I added a drawing of a cat or chicken to it. I think there are seven cats and four chickens, if you’d like to take a stab at finding them all.
The Legend of Auntie Po will be available at your local book store or public library beginning on June 15th, 2021.
WNDMG Wednesday – Author Shing Yin Khor
We Need Diverse MG
Artwork by Aixa Perez-Prado
WNDMG Author Interview with Shing Yin Khor
Featured in today’s WNDMG Wednesday, a WNDMG author interview with Shing Yin Khor about their graphic novel, THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO. (Penguin Random House, June 2021)
Shing Yin Khor Interview
About THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO
Part historical fiction, part magical realism, and 100 percent adventure. Thirteen-year-old Mei reimagines the myths of Paul Bunyan as starring a Chinese heroine while she works in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in 1885.
Aware of the racial tumult in the years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mei tries to remain blissfully focused on her job, her close friendship with the camp foreman’s daughter, and telling stories about Paul Bunyan–reinvented as Po Pan Yin (Auntie Po), an elderly Chinese matriarch. Anchoring herself with stories of Auntie Po, Mei navigates the difficulty and politics of lumber camp work and her growing romantic feelings for her friend Bee. The Legend of Auntie Po is about who gets to own a myth, and about immigrant families and communities holding on to rituals and traditions while staking out their own place in America.
(From Penguin Random House website)
Shing Yin Khor Interview
MUF: Thanks so much for doing this interview with me – I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO. And I have to tell you, both my 9-year-old daughter and I enjoyed it immensely – she’s already reading it again! We’re grateful to you for bringing such a vibrant, creative book into the world.
What is the origin story for THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO? What is the significance of your decision to incorporate the Blue Ox?
SYK: My interest in the Paul Bunyan mythos goes back many years – it started with a fairly straightforward interest in logging history and this American myth, but as I learned more about early American history, especially in the Wild West, I realised how much history I didn’t know, or that was left deliberately untaught to me. A lot of these histories are glossed over in the popular American narrative. The popular conception of early American history, and especially that of Old West heroism is one full of white heroes and white individualism, which is more a matter of myth-building than historical fact. Often, marginalized groups are spoken of as a monolith, as a people rather than a collection of individual people, living a diversity of lives. This is not true now, and it wasn’t then either.
Shing Yin Khor Illustration
Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox
SYK: The evolution of the Paul Bunyan myth feels like a microcosm of this history to me – it has become a story of individual strength, while the stories in the oral tradition are often far more about collective labor. Including Pei Pei(as the stand-in for Babe the Blue Ox) felt pretty compulsory to me, he’s just such a signifier of the Paul Bunyan myth, and I also just wanted a big goofy ox in the book.
I find American myth-building extremely compelling, and Paul Bunyan is probably the biggest American mythological figure, although probably a less generally destructive one than the myth we have made our “founding fathers” out to be. The American mythology dehumanizes and caricatures us. It tells us that indigenous people were “savages,” or healers, with no nuance for the individual, it tells us that enslaved people were “treated well,” it ignores the labor and death that this entire country was predicated on, and yes, some of the early Paul Bunyan stories are racist.
Shing Yin Khor Illustration
And to also know that these logging camps were filled with immigrants, and Black and Indigenous workers, that they had tons of Chinese and Japanese workers in them – at the center of this book is the simple question – what were the stories that we lost, because of the person that told them?
MUF: Why did you decide to set this story in a logging camp?
SYK: I am specifically interested in logging and forest history, and in the evolution of the Paul Bunyan mythos – a logging camp was the obvious choice.
The Power of Myth
MUF: A major theme of your book is the reclaiming of the power of myth and who gets to own it. How do you hope to empower your readers with this message?
SYK: I’m writing quite indulgently here – the reader I’m trying to write for is the 12 year old version for myself, not anyone else. I wrote this book to restore something to the young version of me, who only found books about brave imaginative kind white girls. I hope that young readers today won’t need to have that futile search because my fellow authors have already been writing them into history. I hope there are more books like this, especially those that center Black and Indigenous perspectives, but I am heartened that this book is coming out at a time where marginalized voices are centered more, even though I think the traditional publishing industry still has a very long way to go. I hope that this book assures young readers from marginalized communities that they can tell their own stories too, and I hope that the collective work of my elders and my peers and the work that I try my best to do now and in the coming years, will help to ease the path for them to center their own voices as storytellers and be their own protagonists.
The Chinese Story in Logging Camp History
MUF: One of the most painful moments in the book is drawn from the racial tension that followed the Chinese Exclusion Act—can you describe the experience of writing and researching that period?
SYK: The thing about doing research about any marginalized peoples, and especially if you are from the same group, is that you often get bogged down by the grief and trauma of the research. It is difficult, because a lot of the history is not well documented, and what is documented is often the violence of the time period against Chinese workers.
Part of my impetus for writing Auntie Po was actually learning how Chinese people were, in some ways, valued by the world beyond their own Chinese communities. The plot point where Ah Hao finds out that he was paid more than the white cook is a historical fact, that I encountered in Sue Fawn Chung’s Chinese in the Woods, which is just about the only academic book about working-class Chinese in the lumber industry in this era. This story of logging camp cooks sprang basically fully formed into my head when I read it – I already knew a lot about the Paul Bunyan mythos, and I knew a lot about the early American logging industry, but this book so clearly placed Chinese people in this history I was already interested in and made it feel like it was something I deserved to claim.
((Enjoying this WNDMG interview? Read this guest post from author Christina Li))
Today’s Bias
MUF: How do you feel that history connects to today’s awful bias against the Asian
community?
SYK: I don’t really feel like I have the ability to form complete thoughts about this yet. But it is clear to me that the only way we move forward is in solidarity with other marginalized peoples, especially Black and Indigenous people, and other people of color. Anti-Asian racism is not just a current issue, it is an ongoing pattern of institutional racism that this country has engaged in, rooted in white supremacy, that seeks to pit marginalized people against each other, which does not ever benefit any marginalized group, and only benefits white supremacy. A large part of my book is about Chinese people forced into navigating whiteness for their survival and comfort, and realizing the limits of what white-adjacency can bring them. Our histories are much more intertwined with other marginalized groups than the stereotypical Asian-American narratives suggest, and solidarity backed by solidarity action is our only way out of the model minority myth.
Personal Resonance
MUF: What is the most meaningful part of the book for you personally?
SYK: Mei’s relationship with her dad is really important to me, because it’s really similar to my relationship with my own dad. We immigrated to the United States when I was 16, and even though we are a much more privileged family than a logging camp cook, it is so clear to me the sacrifices he made to give me a life where I could make art for a living. He was the first person in his family to go to college, his brothers and sisters pooled their money so he could go, being an artist was never an option for him.
I also loved being able to write a queer character while not necessarily needing to make it a major part of the book! Mei is a queer character that exists in many intersections of experiences, just like many other queer people. Not every experience foregrounds queerness, it is just part of who she is as a person.
Publishing Team of Color
MUF: As a creator of color in the graphic novel space, what was your experience on your path to publication? In your Acknowledgements page, you note that this book was finished in collaboration with a team that was entirely made up of people of color. Can you talk a little bit about what that means to you?
SYK: I was already doing a lot of my own work, both self published and shorter works with online publishers, so the path to publication for this book was fairly straightforward. I had some early experiences in my early days as a writer, where I was often made to feel that the stories that were wanted from me in traditional publishing were about trauma, or confessional memoirs about even more trauma, and I was unenthusiastic about that. But because I was doing my own work, and had established enough of my own voice, my entire publication journey for The Legend of Auntie Po was with a team that was always on the same page about the sort of story that I was going to be telling. And of course, my book is coming out after so many other incredible marginalized authors and bloggers and editors have done the work of making publishing a more inclusive and welcoming space for a range of voices. I am extremely lucky, I am writing books about parts of the Asian American experience ten years after I first read MariNaomi Kiss and Tell, after Gene Luen Yang’s been making graphic novels for decades, after Kazu Kibushi’s Avatar series is wildly beloved.
Working with a team that is entirely composed of people of color(my agent, editor, art director – all of Kokila, my publisher), meant that while I had a lot of work to do on this book, the work that I did not have to do included things like “explaining racism” or “being nicer to the white characters.” Authors of color deserve to work with publishers and editors who understand their lived experiences. Working on this book has been a dream with them – the editorial team at Kokila is staffed with the most brilliant women of color, all of whom are thoughtful and incisive and philosophically devoted to centering stories like these in publishing.
MUF: What do you hope readers will take away from THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO?
I hope they will feel even more agency and urgency to tell their own stories.
Chickens and Cats
MUF: Is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to share with our readers?
Every time I was stressed when drawing the book, I added a drawing of a cat or chicken to it. I think there are seven cats and four chickens, if you’d like to take a stab at finding them all.
MUF: I love that. Headed now to look for the cats and chickens. Thanks again, Shing, and congratulations!
Shing Yin Khor Bio PIcture
Photo Credit: Shing Yin Khor
Shing Yin Khor is a cartoonist and installation artist exploring the Americana mythos and new human rituals. A Malaysian-Chinese immigrant, and an American citizen since 2011, they are also the author of The American Dream?, a graphic novel about travelling Route 66.
Connect with Shing:
Shing Talks a Lot.
by brandtpetersMay 10, 2013
One of the new additions to the Circus Posterus artist roster, Shing Yin Khor or Sawdust Bear, has a show opening this weekend at Leanna Lin’s Wonderland, and we(Kathie and Brandt) took the opportunity to throw some questions at her.
We’ve seen her hungry, we’ve seen her drunk, and now we all get to see her talk a lot!
(editor’s note: Shing also edits the Circus Posterus blog; all self deprecating comments are her own. er, this is Shing’s own note. Ugh, third person.)
CP: Please tell us about your educational background and creative journey. Did your parents talk you into getting a real job or were you smart enough at a young age to figure out how to best fund your creative alter ego?
Shing: Well, it’s… diverse. My degrees are in Technical Theatre and English, where I focused on scenic design and medieval literature. Then I went to grad school for scenic design, which I quit halfway through in a blaze of “artistic differences.” I learned how to sculpt, paint, draft, build, weld, mold, cast in theatre; I can fabricate all sorts of weird things, but the hard part was getting things together cohesively enough to have any sort of an artist’s statement. That part came organically, as I started to pursue a varied slate of interests and went through a quarter-life crisis state of trying to figure out who I was. Basically, I just didn’t have anything to say, until I did, and now I won’t shut up.
My parents – they’re very supportive. They just wanted me to be good at something, even though they have never hesitated to tell me when my work sucks. If I had been a lousy artist, I am certain they would have insisted I go into computer engineering. We compromised on the English major, which was an “at least you can teach high school” option. They are both artists too (Mom’s always been, she works with clay and bronze. Dad took up painting and woodworking in retirement). I very clearly get my love of experimenting from them. My mom randomly texts me things like “I built a gas kiln in the backyard today!” Fortunately, they’re a bit more competent and safer than I tend to be; I haven’t gotten a message like “your mom blew up the garden with her gas kiln” yet.
CP: Did the Center for Otherworld Science come to you in a dream or were you in a sweat lodge? For the unintoxicated collectors out there, can you explain this concept?
Shing: The Center for Otherworld Science has been evolving in different forms and into different names since I was…10? When it first started, it was a straight rip off of Brian Froud’s Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book and Wil Hugyen and Rien Poortvliet’s Gnomes (so much of my work still owes a debt to those books, I think). When I was 14, it expanded to being a research institution that investigated mermaids, fairies, gargoyles, other mythical creatures. There were a lot more fantasy tropes mixed in there when it first started out, because y’know…I was a huge nerd. Well, I still am.
I’ve always loved monsters, so it was logical to bring them under the Center for Otherworld Science umbrella when I started sculpting them. They were meant to be props, basically just the work product of the Center. I started filling out the narrative around it a few years ago, with the intention of working it into a novel, but the response to the artwork was more than I had anticipated. Now, I just try and write bits of it when I find time.
Basically, the Center for Otherworld Science is the “heart” of most of my work, and encapsulates most of my themes. I don’t think my work is quite so much about weird little critters, than it is how they got to the point where they are preserved and displayed for all to see. It’s about what humans do to them, especially at the Center – we preserve them, we stuff them, we record possibly inaccurate things about them. So, it might sound like a cute idea, the Center for Otherworld Science, but there’s a lot of well intentioned, but very fallible, human beings behind it all, and they do bad things to these fairly hapless critters. The unseen people of the Center for Otherworld Science are sinister because they’re kind of clueless about the whole new world they’ve stumbled upon – they’re the bumbling backbone of my world. God, humans are assholes!
To see the rest of the awesome interview, click more.
How many of your artworks come to you in dreams? How many after whiskey? Speaking of which, what is your favorite whiskey? Other than lack of consciousness, what else inspires you?
Shing: I don’t really remember my dreams. I sleep very soundly and quickly, it’s one of my hidden talents. I’ve never been able to pull an all-nighter, and I get usually cranky if I’m not in bed by midnight.
I like whiskey, but after too much whiskey, I go to sleep, so it’s the same thing, I guess.
The bottle of whiskey that resides in my studio is Maker’s Mark – it’s good enough. And, it is also cheap enough that I can clean wounds out with it if necessary. I honestly don’t really know if I have a favourite, but I definitely prefer bourbon over scotch.
Anyway, I feel like I’m inspired by three major categories. The stuff that inspires me visually is easy. Invertebrates, the ocean, bad sci-fi movies, fantasy novels, comic books, old museums, that sort of thing. I’ve been really into 18th century scientific illustration lately as well, especially the stuff done before and around the time Linnaeus published his taxonomy guide, when humanity was trying to categorize this brave new world.
The other, that’s maybe more important, is the more cerebral researchy stuff, that I think has made my work a lot stronger and more cohesive once I started diving into it. For instance, right now I’m a bit obsessed about the colonial era, and its effect on indigenous populations. My hometown in Malaysia, Malacca, is a port city, which means it has been colonized by the Dutch, Portuguese and British and is littered with all sorts of post colonial detritus, like really cool forts and the A-Levels. Post colonial culture is fascinating, a mishmash of influences and co-opted aesthetics.
The role of the early museum is especially interesting to me – I mean, you pretty much had rich people(or people sponsored by rich people) travelling the world to plant a flag on “undiscovered” lands, rape the local women, subjugate the local populations into slavery…and also bring beautiful and wondrous things back to their home countries – and that’s how museums evolved out of private cabinets of curiosities. Under the noble veneer of science and exploration, the very existence of a museum holds a legacy of plunder, war and death. It’s not a pretty history, and that is fascinating to me. Anyway, a lot of thoughts about this sort of thing inform my work now, even if it’s just a bit of ugliness and awkwardness lurking under the surface of these quirky little invertebrates on tiny pedestals.
And the third, which is a sort of wishy washy thing, is really just my feelings and moods. Usually, it’s anxiety, which is why so many of my critters always look anxious too.
How does being a full time paralegal effect your work as an artist? And does being an artist make you want to go back to your paralegal work?
Shing: I’m really lucky – I actually quite like my day job, and I’m working in a legal field that I am passionate about(privacy law). I’m not a traditional paralegal; it’s actually some sort of hybrid technical paralegal/researcher/project manager role that got made up for me. The specific job itself doesn’t really have too much of an effect on my art, other than lending me some strong opinions on how our legal system works(the short rant: not great for independent artists, really). Also, getting project management training has probably been the best thing I could have done for my art, for obvious reasons like meeting deadlines and not getting things done at the last minute.
And, it has given me a lot of confidence, I think. There was a period of time where I got to travel a lot and speak and run workshops. It was kind of weird, being really comparatively young and going to all of these places, like Princeton University and Air Force armories and big conferences, in my one cheap H&M suit(and my Doc Martens! I was unwilling to go TOTALLY corporate, and no one said a word.). And having all of these way more experienced people – district attorneys, law enforcement, FBI dudes, CEOs – treat me like a peer and actually care about what I had to say, even if we usually did not agree – that was really cool. Then, I would go back to the art stuff I was doing, and I’d have directors screaming at me like I was nothing and galleries that couldn’t pay me on time. Getting respect and career advancement and a decent paycheck in a completely different field from art really made me open my eyes up to a lot of the bullshit, flakiness and hot air in the art world and made me very unlikely to deal with it just for the sake of getting “known” and selling work.
Mainly though, what my job has given me is freedom. I’m not really cut out for the “starving artist” lifestyle, and I don’t think that is a label to be proud of anyway, because we end up with a society that doesn’t value art because “artists are supposed to be hungry.” I did spend some time as a freelance artist, and I’m glad I chose my early-mid 20s to do it, because I’m quite done living with roommates and depending on flaky clients. I would do “creative work” all day, and come home and feel completely spent and unable to do any of my own work.
Now, I come home and walk straight to my studio in my backyard – my head is still in “work mode” and I can get a lot of work done just working one or two hours a day. I’ve produced far more work that I’m proud of with a day job than without. I can fund a run of resin casts myself. I can eat sushi or steak for dinner when I go to conventions. And it has given me the power of “no”. I can say no to commissions I don’t want to do. I don’t feel compelled to participate in shows with subject matter that doesn’t excite me. I don’t mean to sound like such a crank, but y’know, it’s kinda nice.
I’d love to do art full time again someday, I really do! I plan to! But when I do, I’m going in with a damn good business plan that’s likely to succeed, not one based on “well, if I just sculpt more, good things will happen, right? Right?” I’m not delusional enough to think that just talent and hard work gets you by, at least not when you have a Los Angeles mortgage and a cat with vet bills.
Which of your characters do you feel best represents you and why? If you found yourself having to dispose of a body, which of your creatures would be most helpful?
Shing: None of them, really. I am the asshole researcher scientist type off screen that dips them in formaldehyde and prepares them for public display.
I would choose the Desecrated Gravebeasts to help me dispose of a body; they eat any organic matter.
Why do you call your creatures Larms? Are all of the creatures in your world Larms?
Shing: Oh boy. That one is actually a really bad pun. My husband and I both work a lot, so a lot of the time we actually get to hang out and talk to each other, we’re already in bed and sleep-addled. So, anyway, one night we came up with this creature that would always look scared. And it would be a Larm. Get it. A Larm? Alarm. Oh god, this is awful. Anyway, I sculpted it that week, and getting it cast in resin was a bit of an impulse, but it became my first resin editioned work.
Just the guys that look like turtles are Larms(they have shells, so they can hide) – there are also Fattybugs, and Scaleybugs, and a whole lot of other..bugs and jellies and the such. I’ve mostly laid off the puns, but I might be naming something a Dorbal soon. As in, that is a Dorbal(say it out loud). It’s going to be really cute.
Other than telling them not to copy you, how do you recommend new artists find their own unique style?
Shing: Yeah, don’t look at people that are still alive for inspiration. Plunder the corpses of the dead. Steal from a hundred artists, not a handful. Brush up on your art history. Learn your trade, learn your craft. If you can already paint like Rembrandt, you probably don’t have all that much to worry about.
Really though, be inspired by things that are not other artists. You have to be passionate about something to make art – if the only thing that inspires you is “other artists,” then you’re probably going to suck. Try and live an interesting life, and let your experiences form your voice.
Sometimes though, you’re just working from a pool of common, shared influences with other artists, and it’s difficult to bury some of them(the influences, not your peers. don’t bury your peers.). It’s hard to end up making work that’s a direct copy of another artist if you are being even remotely self aware. You’re probably still going to fuck up somewhere, though. We aren’t creating work in a vacuum. Don’t be a dickbag, admit when you’re wrong, and have some humility, and it’ll probably be okay.
It’s also worth taking the time to recognize the artists that you share influences with and the ones you get compared to most often and actively strive to differentiate your work from theirs. I’ve recently implemented this thing in my personal process called the Ryniak-Levings Filter, obviously named after Chris, and Leslie, my friend/collaborator that I’m doing the upcoming “Dubious Beasts” show with. Pretty much, every time I sketch something that I think going to be really cool, I have to go and google their past work to make sure they haven’t done it already – just in case. However, now my internet search history contains shit like “chris ryniak ruffled pink butthole” which will be awkwardly misinterpreted if my internet records are ever subpoenaed.
Leslie and I especially have a lot in common, influence-wise, we’re both pretty nerdy, live in LA, about the same age, museum obsessed, monster loving, consume similar media, we had two of the only sculpted webcomics on the internet(hers was first), we’re drawn to bright palettes, and so on. It makes her an amazing and really fun person to do a show with, but we do end up working and negotiating around each other when we work on stuff. We agreed on a “museum” theme for our upcoming show, which is a really big undercurrent in both our works, so we each had to pick and choose the elements that are “ours” and really hammer out where our work diverges. Like, she’s got all the glass terrarium boxes and domes, but I get all the brass label holders and wood shadow boxes(which I build from scratch), at least for this show. Her work is more charming, mine’s more off balance. She sculpts distinct feet, I prefer tentacles. I gravitate towards invertebrates, she prefers mammals, we both like amphibians. We talk; it works out.
We’ve noticed you starting to explore different types of sculpting media; is there a particular set of fumes you prefer to expose yourself to in order to create new characters? Other than fumes is there a driving force behind what you choose to sculpt with? I hear rumors of bronze casting?
Shing: I’m just sort of ADD with making things. I always have several things going at the same time; lots of projects in varying stages of completion. I’ve always had a jack-of-all-trades skillset, and I was upset about that for a long time because I wanted to be really, really good at SOMETHING, but now I’ve come to terms with it. Also, every year, I like to try something out of my comfort zone to challenge myself. I’ve done circus classes(static trapeze and rope…it was thoroughly embarrassing) and blacksmithing the past couple years, and now I’m taking a ceramic wheel throwing class. I’m comfortable with clay, but not with symmetry and rapidly spinning objects, so there’s that.
I really like working with Magic Sculpt, which is my primary sculpting medium now – it forces me to not overwork things. Unfortunately, I have skin as sensitive as a pretty princess’s taint, so I’m constantly trying to find less caustic alternatives. I’ve been working with Monster Clay and wax as well, but I have not developed an enduring love for them.
I’m collaborating with my mother on a series of bronze works. A lot of the organic shapes I’m drawn to in my work are very similar to what she likes to work with as well. We’ve been trading wax sculpts back and forth, as well as making bronze versions of my resin sculptures. I’m not entirely sure where exactly that is going, but I think we’re going to try and amass a bronze-centered body of work and try to do a collaboration show together.
“Sawdust Bear” can have so many possible meanings—how did you earn that nickname?
Shing: It was a name bestowed upon me when I was working in a scene shop during my theatre days. I had a knit hat with bear ears that I wore to keep my hair out of my face, and it would regularly get covered in sawdust. One of the shop guys started calling me “Sawdust Bear,” which was a nicer name than what I tended to call him. It implied that I was the sort of scrappy, tomboy, carpenter Care Bear, and I liked the idea of using a name given to me, rather than making one myself. So, I guess I earned it after a year of TA-ing/yelling at freshmen Stagecraft students. It reminds me of how lucky I was that I never caught the hat’s tassels in the table saw.
Are there any other projects or shows for the rest of 2013/’14 that you can share with us?
Shing: I plan on really refining my process this year, and trying to get to a point where I’m much more productive. Sculpture wise, I plan on releasing a few new editions of the Fattybug – I have about a hundred blank casts of them, so I have to do something with them now. I’ll probably do a few small editions, I get bored painting things the same way, so my edition sizes are all 10 or smaller. 2013 will probably be the Year of the Fattybug. I’m toying around with the idea of moving them to vinyl in 2014.
Convention/show wise, I’m doing SDCC and DesignerCon again this year(and probably all years to come), although SDCC usually focuses a bit more on my comics work. I also have a small solo show(my first) in September at a really amazing gallery in Albuquerque, you might have heard of it. It’s gonna be called “a nervous harbour” and is inspired by port cities, marine invertebrates and anxiety. Leslie and I are also planning Dubious Beasts II for 2014 – I don’t want to drop too many details about that, but it will likely be in the Pacific Northwest.
I’m hoping to scrape some time together to finally fabricate something bigger too – maybe a bug large enough to cuddle with(for instance, a three foot tall bug would probably be a good sized little spoon).
Women Creating Comics: ‘We Built Our Own Little Playground’
Four diverse artists on the power of representation and designing a new world.
By Emily Blake 29 May 2015 | TheTyee.ca
Emily Blake recently completed a practicum at The Tyee.
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Comics artist Shing Yin Khor
Shing Yin Khor: ‘Basically, we don’t want to be unique anymore.’ Photo by Emily Blake.
When Los Angeles based artist Shing Yin Khor was growing up, she never saw people that looked like her in comic books. Now she is one of an increasing number of women who are taking it upon themselves to change the comic world.
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Representation of diverse characters is notoriously lacking in mainstream comics -- recent attempts to improve representation with a female Thor were met with anti-feminist outrage by some male fans. Women, people of colour and LGBTQ people are among the least represented characters and authors of comic books.
“In terms of mainstream comics the diversity’s still kind of awful, but we’ve built our own little playground and we’re doing great in it,” Khor explained.
Tim Hanley, a comic book historian and self-proclaimed women-in-comics stats nerd found that in February 2014 only 13.8 per cent of credits in DC comic books and 12 per cent in Marvel were female. Data journalism site Five Thirty Eight crunched the numbers on women in comics and found that females account for 31.1 per cent of the most frequently appearing characters in Marvel comics, and 29 per cent at DC. Of course, female characters are often relegated to supporting roles and hyper-sexualized, which many like the Hawkeye Initiative lampoon by drawing male superheroes in the same fashion.
The Tyee recently caught up with some of the women producing unique comics at the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival about colour, queerness and the characters and worlds that they create.
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Shing Yin Khor
Shing Yin Khor is a self-described immigrant, bisexual, Malaysian-Chinese American woman. The sculptor and illustrator runs her own micropress, Sawdust Press, and said her work meets at the intersection of autobiography, race, feminism and sexuality.
She started drawing comics when she was 13, posting on LiveJournal, and began attending comic arts shows six years ago.
Her primary comic is the Center for Otherworld Science, which centres on three hazmat-suited women who work at a cryptozoology institute. Dr. Maggie Ng (Mags) is an evolutionary biologist who works with unusual species. Danika Jones (Dani) is an engineer who knows the building better than anyone else, and Jennifer Kim (Jen) is a project manager with an activist streak and doctorate in Medieval literature.
While Khor includes diverse characters in her stories, that is not the sole focus of her work. “I like writing stories that happen to feature queer characters of colour without being particularly blatant about it, like they’re stories that they happen to exist in.”
She added that she has been getting more in touch with her immigrant heritage, which is having a greater influence on her work.
“I don’t really spend a lot of time going, ‘These are immigrant comics!’ but you know people still find that in it, and that’s very heartening to me,” she said.
Because women of colour are few in number in the comic world, Khor tends to be treated as a representative for all women of colour.
“There just aren’t enough women of colour comics. I mean, we’re there, but it hasn’t really reached the point where our stories are allowed to stand alone rather than kind of being a representative voice,” she explained.
“We’re just hoping that the diversity of creators continues to increase. Basically, we don’t want to be unique anymore.”
Blue Delliquanti
Blue Delliquanti has illustrated horror and erotica comics, as well as non-fiction comics for journalists and war correspondents, but her favourite genre is science fiction. Her graphic novel O Human Star was one of the winners of the 2012 Prism Comics Queer Press Grant.
The artist and illustrator from Minneapolis describes her comic as “optimistic science fiction” that focuses on an inventor and his unconventional robot family.
It was when she stepped into her local comic book store at age 12 that Blue decided she wanted to make comic books instead of becoming a cartoonist. “I was just like, oh no I want to do this instead, because I can do it all by myself,” she said.
582px version of 'O Human Star' by Blue Delliquanti
From ‘O Human Star’ by Blue Delliquanti.
She said the internet and shows like the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival are to thank for increasing representation in indie comics.
“It’s much easier to get in the door and find yourself with people who really enjoy your stuff. So at shows like this, equal representation is rarely thought of, it’s just so automatic,” she said.
Blue likes to include LGBTQ characters in her work and said it has helped her in figuring out her own identity.
“I wish I’d come across that years ago, or when I was a kid, being able to realize there were other ways to live and other kinds of people in the world,” she said.
Joamette Gil
Joamette Gil is a queer, Afrocuban illustrator and cartoonist studying illustration at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. She likes to draw women of colour and queer characters and is interested in themes of race and poverty, injustice and collective liberation.
She got involved in comics as a way to communicate with people outside her world. “A drawing is a universal language. Images are so universal, so they can communicate to anyone of any background whatsoever.”
She said that representation in comics varies between mainstream, independent and web comics. While independent and web comics have seen a growth in diversity, she feels progress in mainstream comics is stagnant.
582px version of Comics artist Joamette Gil
Joamette Gil: ‘A drawing is a universal language.’ Photo by Emily Blake.
“Generally, it’s not very good. Lots of white male characters across the board, and then when you do have characters of colour, even just white women characters, they’re not always very complex or they’re based on a middle-aged white man writer’s idea of what that person should be like,” she explained.
Gil likes to create unique characters from groups that are often underrepresented in the media.
“I want people to look at my work and think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen X demographic playing a witch’ or ‘I’ve never seen X demographic be the one going on a hero’s journey’ or ‘Oh my God, that happened to me and no one’s ever talked about it’ in a comic or in a poster or whatever the medium is, and finally have that moment of, ‘I see myself.’”
Kathleen Jacques
When Kathleen Jacques is not making comics she is working as a graphic artist. She is behind Band vs. Band, a queer, femme comic inspired by retro cartoons that focuses on rival girl-fronted rock bands. It is also finalist for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards in the LGBT Graphic Novels category.
Jacques started drawing Band vs. Band in 2010 for fun, and it lead to a printed collective book in 2014.
“I didn’t think it would go for more than five or six pages. I wanted to draw something to entertain myself and it’s still going,” she said of the project.
582px version of From 'Band v. Band'
‘Band vs. Band,’ by Kathleen Jacques.
She is excited to be part of the growing diversity in indie comics, especially putting queer characters on the map.
“I really love that this is much more prominent and available now,” she explained. “It’s a powerful thing to see someone like you represented in the media and especially, ideally, if you don’t have to seek it out as a really specialty thing.”
She hopes that reading Band vs. Band is a meaningful and positive experience for people.
“It’s okay to be yourself and express yourself, and I think that’s really at the core of what the comic’s about.” [Tyee]
Read more: Gender + Sexuality,
INTERVIEW WITH THE AMERICAN DREAM? AUTHOR SHING YIN KHOR
by Ashley Kuehl, Executive Editor of Trade YA Nonfiction
Shing Yin Khor is the author and illustrator of the new graphic memoir The American Dream: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito.
Which came first, the plan for the road trip or the idea to make a road-trip book? And what surprised you most during the course of this project?
I had been researching the trip, but when my editor Daniel asked if I had any book pitches for him, I pitched a memoir about the trip and committed to driving it. I had no idea whether the trip would even be worth writing about when I sold the book, but I had faith that the road would have its own stories to tell.
What surprised me the most is that I fundamentally understood that immigrants were everywhere in America, but it was really heartening to see very clear roots planted in places that I assumed would just be majority white. My normal diet is heavily Asian (and I have some dietary restrictions that do not mesh with many typical foods considered American) and I was afraid I’d end up being miserable because of not being able to eat what I wanted–but I actually was able to stop by some sort of Asian market in every town. Amarillo, Texas, delivered some of the best Burmese food I’ve ever had.
I was appalled at the lack of education I had received about the history of Native Americans in the country, in my two years of American high school and in college, which is something that I am embarrassed it took me driving through multiple reservations to learn more about. It’s something I’m remedying with more reading now!
I was also surprised at how well my dog took to the road! We only adopted her in December, four months before I took her on this trip, and while we had definitely already bonded, I was unsure how she would take to almost 6 weeks total of living out of a car and various motels. Instead, she absolutely relished being able to sniff out a new campsite most nights, she loved traipsing around the wilderness, and she loved snoozing in my car blanket piles. Now every time my car door is open, she jumps right in and settles into the passenger seat and whimpers expectantly at me until I buckle her seatbelt.
You met a lot of people on your journey. What kinds of commonalities and differences did you find among them?
I find it hard to talk about this now because it has been more than 3 years since I finished this trip, and the political climate has shifted significantly for a person like me, which deeply shifts the logistics of traveling alone and talking to strangers. I couldn’t get it in the book, but there is a long history of racism along Route 66 (the history of the Green Book is worth looking up) against black people, racism against American Indians that is not unlike the unrelenting and brutal racism played out throughout all of American history, and I did manage to get a tiny bit of conversation about the racism against South Asians in the book. As a lighter-skinned Malaysian-American, I was generally treated politely, if not particularly welcomed, in smaller towns–but my appearance would obviously mark me as someone who was just passing through and spending money in town, and large parts of Route 66 do largely survive on tourism. Even as the epilogue of my book presents a brave face and the declaration that I’m going to keep on visiting new places, friends driving through more recently have informed me that there are now Confederate flags in towns that I drove through and wrote about in my book (the one I can confirm myself is Oatman, Arizona). I would not drive through a town that blatantly displayed Confederate flags now, and I certainly wouldn’t write about it.
That said, there were a couple of consistencies that I think still hold true. One is that capitalism is the language of America, and a lot gets overlooked as long as you are spending money. The other is that immigrants have made their homes in many places. Queer people have made their homes everywhere. Black and brown people have made their homes everywhere. And it is harmful for us to ever paint entire swaths of the country with a hateful and dismissive brush because there are almost always people there fighting to make their homes better and more inclusive and to support marginalized voices in their communities, and they are doing work that most of us in the weekend brunch and protest crowd don’t quite have the nerve to do.
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In the book you mention the false distinction between tourists and travelers. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
There is a tendency in a lot of contemporary travel writing that places a lot of value on discovery and self-sufficiency, which is often parsed through a white gaze. Discovered by whom? Budget travel for whom? Often, it is the work of black and brown bodies (food, clothing, labor) that are treated as exotic commodities, as a product to be discovered by predominantly white “travelers” who gain reputation and bragging rights for “finding” undisturbed landscapes, and eating “new” foods.
Meanwhile, scorn is often directed towards tourists–the cruise ship masses, the Chinese tour buses, the people who do not stray off the beaten path. Here’s the thing–local economies have generally adapted to mass tourism and know how to deal with it. I think it is worth being honest about what anyone does when they insert themselves into a new culture, especially when the power differential is to the outsider’s advantage, which can happen for many reasons, such as societal norms that demand politeness toward visitors or long histories of colonial subjugation. The fundamental difference between mass tourism and the idea of “traveling” that much contemporary discourse about travel is about is that the idea of “traveling” is meant to appease western emotional guilt over disrupting local cultures that visitors hold a degree of privilege over.
That sort of honesty feels like it should be important when driving Route 66. Tourism is what keeps a lot of these smaller towns alive. None of Route 66 is undiscovered land; it is literally the most famous road in America.
What are a few of your favorite books of all time?
I really love late 19th and early 20th century American history, and Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series were major touchstones growing up. Aside from that, I really liked stories with spunky and personable heroines doing their own thing, whether it was creating stories or building survival shelters–Anne of Green Gables and Island of the Blue Dolphins were two constant favorites. As a cartoonist and illustrator, I deeply connected with illustrated epistolary books–Gnomes, Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book and Griffin and Sabine.
As an adult, I read a lot more nonfiction, and recently I’ve been really into nonfiction books…about institutions? I loved Susan Orleans’ Library Book, Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder, and Richard Fortey’s Dry Store Room No. 1.
What other projects are you working on these days?
I’m working on another graphic novel that will hopefully be out in 2020, and this one is historical fiction! It’s about Chinese labor in the American logging industry in the late 1800s, set in the tense era immediately after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, but also about a 12-year-old camp cook who tells campfire stories about Paul Bunyan, reinvented as an elderly Chinese matron named Auntie Po (and her large blue water buffalo, Pei Pei).
I’m also not quite done with Route 66 stories and am drafting a fiction project that takes place along all of it. It’s going to be about a family dealing with grief while embarking on what they think is the Great American Road Trip. I don’t know what format it’s going to take yet, but it has been really wonderful digging back into Route 66 research and reminiscing about my own trip!
Interview: Everything and the Kitchen Sink with Shing Yin Khor
Date: April 29, 2019
Author: Steve
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by Jon Erik Christianson
It’s impossible to describe any person well in a pithy interview introduction; it’s impossible plus twenty to do that with creative polymath Shing Yin Khor. She does a lot. But, luckily for this blurb writer, Khor does a better job than he could delineating her works on her portfolio, pinned Twitter thread, and Patreon.
But I can try and speak to my experience of her work. My first was her short story “Duty and Honor” in the Beyond: Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comic Anthology. It was somber, it was sweet, it was of course multimedia, and it dealt with death in a polyamorous relationship. And for that it was also risky, given the fraught media history media regarding death and queer characters, but ultimately brave, given its complexity, honesty, and considerate execution. And those have remained unifying in my experiences with her art.
So though the “a lot” portion of her portfolio obviously matters – it is key to understanding her creative constellation and how it connects with her career as installation artist – it’s also the artistic interrogation and nuance that matters too. And though in this interview I focus a lot on the “a lot,” Khor, as she does in her own work, shows that breadth doesn’t come at the expense of depth.
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Shing! You do so much. You make loads of comics spanning autobio, construction materials, zoology, and more. You lead an installation art group. You sculpt and you create Twitter bots. What draws you to do so many creative things?
Shing Yin Khor: I’ve just always been that kind of person that liked doing a million things. It was a huge source of anxiety for a long time when I saw my peers being able to focus really well on one single thing. And most of my peers now are still very much people who are incredibly focused and are very good at one or two things.
And I’ve always been that “I just want to try everything! I want to be a little bit good in lots of things!” but over the years it’s become less of a “why am I like this?” to more of a “okay, I’m like this, this is just how it is.” I just like exploring lots of new things.
But I feel like a lot of my work does kind of combine a lot of my interests together, a lot of my comics work is very relevant to all of the other things I do. Everything does kind of play in the same universe.
Could you talk about your creative background and how you fell into all these different worlds? What was the journey for that?
I made comics in the early, early internet, although I never thought I’d actually do anything with it, and certainly not anything resembling an income. I’ve always been kinda scattered, so comics drifted out of my life when I got a lot more involved with theatre and other art projects.
I didn’t make any comics for a long time, then when I eventually became a theater designer – that’s my actual educational background. I am a scenic designer, went to grad school for it, dropped out of grad school for it. That came into play a lot with my installation work after I had gotten tired of working for a lot of theater companies led by old straight men.
I was like “wait, I have a ton of carpentry skills, I can just do my own things!” So I did that and I had a day job for a long time. And that’s what I felt actually gave me the creative desire to make things, because I didn’t have to do it for a living. And it was a good day job, where I didn’t have to take my work home with me but it also paid me really well. So I started doing conventions, I started selling sculptures, I started doing more and more comics, and about three years ago, I basically hit that point where professionally, I had to make that decision: do I become a full-time artist or do I stick with my day job?
And fortunately everyone at my day job was incredibly supportive. They let me give basically two months’ notice. And they let me stay as long as I wanted to and they had been really supportive of my career. They’re my Patreon subscribers, they’re amazing. So I became a full-time artist about three years ago.
And with why my work spans a lot of genres and mediums: I feel like there are a bunch of recurring themes. I do work with themes of postcolonial detritus and a lot regarding ritual and tradition. Those come up all the time and also a lot about found family.
Could you talk about the The Three Eyed Rat, your immersive installation art group, and how your background has informed your career with installation art?
Yes! I started going to Burning Man about ten years ago and the first year I went – the thing that appealed to me wasn’t the party scene, it was the fact that it was just a playground where you could build something. You could just build something huge and bring it there and just share it with other people.
I was a theater designer at that point, I’d already had a lot of theater background, so the next year, my husband and I built a spaceship! We brought it to Burning Man, and it was very well received and I was like, “Alright! This is what I’m going to do!”
Because it utilized all of my scenic design skills, which was all the stuff I liked about theater design – the building, the creation, the collaboration, and running a crew – without any of the stuff I hated, which was working with grumpy directors and feeling like a tool.
Installation just kind of happened to me and then Burning Man started offering me grants to do artwork. Basically the combination of money and skills and I love doing it. It’s being able to tell a story three-dimensionally. I mean – I love comics, obviously -but the kind of installation art that we do is immersive installation art. We build rooms – and at Burning Man, this is possible, it’s possible to stumble into this room and just find yourself in a completely different universe – and you kind of just wander around this room, and you’re reading letters, you’re opening jars, you’re opening boxes and trapdoors, and climbing weird ladders into hidden spaces and you’re
discovering a story there.
And it’s just been really meaningful and helpful to me to be able to conceptualize narratives outside of the printed page. It’s a very natural way of storytelling, it feels to me.
For those who aren’t familiar, what is installation art?
Installation art is basically large sculptures, when you see large, public sculptures, that’s installation art.
The stuff that I do specifically, which is something that’s kind of becoming more of a buzzword lately, is immersive installation art. I say immersive, narrative installation art. It’s probably best exemplified by things like Sleep No More, which is the immersive theater show in New York, which is one of my early inspirations, where I went to watch and I was like, “Oh my god, this is something I can do! You can tell stories like this!”
Meow Wolf in Santa Fe is another one that’s been wildly popular right now. So those are the two major touchstones of immersive art and immersive theater that’s going around nowadays. And I think they’re probably the best parallel to draw.
One of my super early inspirations, and I keep mentioning this because I love this person, is Gregor Schneider, a German artist, he was at the Venice Biennale in 2000 representing his country, and I saw one of his installations called “Dead House u r” at a local art museum when I was in college. And it blew my mind, because he basically built recreations of his childhood homes and it’s fascinating ties to memory and nostalgia, but you walk in, and things are subtly different. There’ll be a passageway and you can walk in and there’s rotting meat going on! It was the first time I ever saw museum art that you could walk into and experience and engage with at that level. And it changed the way I thought about art.
Do these different things scratch different itches for you? Comics vs. sculpture vs. installation art vs. Twitter bots?
Yeah, they all kind of work together to relieve my carpal tunnel syndromes. Because any one thing for too long actually is a problem!
But yes! I don’t know if they scratch different itches, but I just kind of have this compulsion to do different things. I think it’s more that focusing on any one thing would drive me mad.
I’d love to hear about the inception and development of Center for Otherworld Science.
I was sculpting. That started out as a sculpture series.
Yeah, I’ve seen sculptures of yours that mirror the creatures you see in the comic.
Yeah! So I actually started with the sculpting first for that whole thing. And I’ve always been making little monsters, it’s just a thing, I don’t even know where it comes from. Just a lifelong thing.
And so when I started sculpting it seemed very natural. And then the comics started – it’s actually a very embarrassing story that I will tell you later – I basically just kinda challenged myself to start and finish a comic. Which is not something I’d been very good at, I was one of those people that’s like, “Hey, let’s just think of stories and characters and plot!”
So one day I sat down and was like, “Alright, twelve hours, I’m basically going to do a mini 24-Hour Comic Day and start and finish twelve pages of this comic and have it be an entire arc.” So that became chapter one of Center for Otherworld Science.
And after I’d finished one chapter, it was very freeing. I was like, “Oh, if I’ve done twelve pages and it’s a complete arc, I can do another twelve, and then I can do another twelve” and it was just purely a momentum-driven thing. But all the people who look like little jelly beans – they look like that because that was before when I learned how to draw people.
I have since gotten better at it, just out of sheer practice. But at the time, little jelly bean people was what I can manage. So the embarrassing part of this, which I will tell you now, is: I met Scott McCloud at a comic convention maybe five years ago. And he comes up to me and he’s the nicest person and he doesn’t look familiar to me, because he looks like a dude. So he asks me about the inception of Center for Otherworld Science and that’s when I explain 24-Hour Comics Day to Scott McCloud.
I don’t know how often you get to explain something to its actual founder, but that’s what I managed to do. He was very sweet. I realized who I was talking to after he had already left. And I sent him an email and was like, “Dude I am so sorry, that was embarrassing, you are truly an inspiration, you were very influential to me, and I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. And I’m sorry I literally explained your own project to you.”
Well, he got to see a mirror of his experience through someone else!
*Laughs* Yeah, I was like “24-Hour Comic Day is great, it started my entire comic. Let me tell you what it is!” You have a new graphic novel in the works! Can you talk about that? So I’ve been really obsessed – hm, not obsessed, it’s a thing I’ve been really into: a lot of early Americana and American history, which has led to a huge interest in the Paul Bunyan mythology, which has in turn, led to a really pronounced interest in early American logging history. Because that’s where it intersects the most with the Paul Bunyan myth.
So I’ve been researching all of this for about two years and this December I was reading a book about Chinese people in the logging industry, and I’ve also had an adjacent interest in immigration stories, so this is very much a story of: these are all these things that I’m interested in, and they’ve just meshed together.
And I was learning so much about people of color in the logging industry, especially Asian people, Chinese people and Japanese people especially, who were employed in the logging industry in the Sierra Nevadas in the Pacific Northwest. So the book, which is a middle grade book, is about a twelve-year old Chinese camp cook who tells stories about Paul Bunyan, but she reinvents them as an elderly Chinese matriarch, Auntie Po. The tentative [Editor’s note: now confirmed!] title for this story is The Legend of Auntie Po.
And it’s all about this twelve-year-old camp cook who’s living in a fairly idyllic logging camp bubble. Her best friend is the camp foreman’s daughter, she works in the kitchen – there’s a lot of racial tension outside but she’s been largely protected from it. And it’s this kind of the moment in her life where she’s becoming aware of all these other things, and being aware that she’s kind of different, that she doesn’t have the same opportunities that her best friend has. She’s well-known in camp as a storyteller and as a cook, but what’s the going to mean outside camp?
It’s very much a coming-of-age story where she’s learning both her worth but also her place in the world, and also how awkward that can be.
Can you talk about your fascination with Americana and reconciling that with your immigrant background? I know that’s a topic that’s comes up in your upcoming graphic novel about Route 66.
Absolutely! The fascination with Americana is actually fairly old. And when I say my immigrant history, I actually moved to the United States at age 16, and I was in an international school in the Philippines before that, so I actually left my own country at age ten, which is Malaysia, by the way.
“America” was kind of always this sort of “other” place to me, but because I was kind of a nerd, it was the America in the Grapes of Wrath, or the America in Paul Bunyan or Raffi’s nursery rhymes, folk tale-y songs. The America that fascinated me was kind of this very old cowboy, western America and not so much the Beverly Hils 90210 America. And that kind of persisted when I moved here. When I was in high school I was super excited because we went to Monterey and I was like “this is Cannery Row!” I was the only seventeen-year-old who was obsessed over John Steinbeck. Yay me!
It’s been a consistent thing in my professional career. I didn’t feel super comfortable doing it in the early days of my career because, in a sense, it was an America that I did feel like I had the right to, but as I study it more, as I research it more, the more I learn that people of color have always been in America. Our histories are very deep. In a sense, my research and passion for a lot of early American history and a lot of reclaiming these American myths as mine, as in “I’m American – Route 66 belongs to me too!” Paul Bunyan also belongs to me. And these are things that have kind of been very white in the conventional narrative.
I am attracted to these old stories and I am excited about the chance to kind of surface all of these histories that belong to people of color, that have always belonged in this narrative.
On your Patreon, you mention your Tiny Adventure Journal travelogue where you document your love for a number of things, including “most animals that are not ostriches.” What did ostriches do?
Khor began describing her experience visiting an ostrich farm, but then interrupted herself (“a picture’s worth a thousand words”) and told me to share the following photo from her Instagram.
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WRITTEN BY BARBRA DILLON, FANBASE PRESS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
TUESDAY, 06 AUGUST 2019 15:47READ 1949 TIMES
FANBASE PRESS INTERVIEWS SHING YIN KHOR ON THE GRAPHIC MEMOIR, ‘THE AMERICAN DREAM?’
Fanbase Press Interviews Shing Yin Khor on the Graphic Memoir, ‘The American Dream?’
The following is an interview with Shing Yin Khor regarding the recent release launch of their graphic memoir, The American Dream?: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito, from Zest Books. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with Khor about the inspiration behind the memoir, what they hope that readers will take away from the experience, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: Congratulations on the recent release of your graphic memoir, The American Dream?, through Zest Books! What initially inspired you to tell this story and to launch the road trip of this book?
Shing Yin Khor: My editor, Daniel Harmon, actually solicited pitches from me, and I always had this dream of driving all of Historic Route 66, and that was the pitch that he wanted! So, I set out on the trip knowing that it was going to have to eventually be a book. I've always been interested in the elements of the American mythos, and especially the American West. I've got an accompanying obsession with the Paul Bunyan mythos and I am currently really into learning about the Pony Express. Route 66 seems like one of those central elements of the American myth, except instead of just its fascinating history, it also exists very much in the present. I didn't plan the trip too much, other than the very specific route I would follow, but I trusted that the road would have stories for me.
BD: Following your work on the Eisner Award-winning anthology, Elements: Fire, what can you share with us about balancing both the writing and illustrative duties of The American Dream?, and what have been some of your creative influences?
SYK: I write and illustrate all my own work for now, so it's not really something I think of as separate things! And this book specifically is a memoir, so it wouldn't feel quite right for someone else to be drawing it.
My influences are...varied and ever changing. I've was really into rediscovering my childhood favourites when I was working on this book, things like Gnomes by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen, the Griffin and Sabine series, and The Way Things Work. I am not certain how those influences show, though, but they feel like things that are just part of the fiber of my being.
I don't read a ton of travelogues, but I was thinking a lot of Lucy Knisley's Displacement. She has an amazing knack for making a very specific story universal. I also thought a lot about Annie Dillard's travel writing. She's brilliant, of course, but she never slips into jadedness, only wonder. She is respectful of the land she walks on and the people she meets. I tried to take a brave and gleeful trip. I knew I had to be my own protagonist, and I wanted to tell a honest story, even though I didn’t exactly know what it would be, and I wanted that story to have a lot of happiness and joyful discovery in it.
BD: Having provided readers with a window into a deeply personal narrative, what did you find to be most rewarding and challenging about your work on the book?
SYK: Well, traditional publishing moves slowly, so the book was largely "done" two years ago, and I turned my final files in before the current administration took office. I am so grateful to my editor, Daniel Harmon, for reaching out to me and asking me to pitch this book, Liz Frances for all her design work, and Hallie Warshaw and Libby Stille and Ashley Kuehl for helping me usher this book into the world. The wait was probably the hardest part, especially in such a tumultuous couple of years - I felt like I was growing in leaps and bounds as an artist and also becoming more confident in my own voice and politics, and I love this book so much, but I already feel like a different person now than I was in 2016! But I feel so lucky to have written a travel memoir about this incredibly important trip to me. I feel so lucky to have all these pages and all this art documenting who I was as a person, and this really cool thing I did with my great dog.
It is hard to read the slightly more political sections of the book, because I know I'd be so much more articulate now! But I am glad that the book captures this sense of meandering hopefulness and confusion. I think it is important to recognize that I don't always know the answers, and that there is joy in searching for them, even if I don't find them.
BD: Your journey in The American Dream? preceded the 2016 election by a few months. In light of the tumultuousness of our country in the time since the election, what is your experience in revisiting the memories of the road trip and the graphic memoir itself?
SYK: I drove Route 66 in April 2016, and I finished the book before Trump took office. I thought Hillary Clinton was most likely to be the next president, I was contending with my identity as an immigrant, and I likely always will, but in April of 2016, I didn’t actually find my citizenship tenuous the way I do in August 2019. I’m not sure I expected the book that I wrote. It is a softer and more introspective book, I think, and perhaps a bit more meandering, than if I had written it right now, where it feels like there is this rage bubbling under my skin all the time.
Even the epilogue of the book, which ends on a hopeful note, is braver than I think I really am now. Confederate flags fly openly in some of the towns I passed through, including in states definitely not in the confederacy. I haven't stopped road-tripping or traveling, but I am significantly more conscious of where I am going, and of my safety, and who I approach or talk to. The early 2016 version of me was a more friendly, curious, and congenial person who wanted to find the joy and conversation in everyone, and the 2019 version of me knows that the majority of white women voted for Donald Trump.
It is bittersweet, but it is an honest book, and I do think it is a good time capsule of that journey, and the person I was, and the feelings I felt on that trip.
BD: What do you hope that readers will take away from your work?
SYK: Honestly, almost all the books I got as a kid featured white protagonists. The vast majority of the travel writing I've ever read is by white people. I've only recently been reading writing by queer people. I hope this book speaks to adventurous brown kids who never felt that they got to have space in writing like this. It's not a book about queerness and it's not about gender, but it is about me, and I want my younger self to know that we have so many stories to tell.
A lot of this book was driven by an intense curiosity, and I really hope I get to impart some of that curiosity to readers. I really hope I make people want to travel within America more, to seek out little pockets of comfort and home everywhere. Most of all, I hope that it serves as a starting point to go dig into so many things I wasn't quite able to get into the book - ranging from really serious and awful topics like the treatment of American Indians, and the blatant racism towards Black people along the route which extended way past the time of the Civil Rights Era, but also wonderful little silly things, like how the dinosaur statues of Holbrook ended up there, and how to tell a Paul Bunyan Muffler Man apart from the other models, even if he doesn’t have his head on.
BD: Are there any upcoming projects on which you are currently working that you would like to share with our readers?
SYK: I'm currently working on my second full-length graphic novel, The Legend of Auntie Po, although this one is a middle grade historical fiction book. It is about a 12-year-old Chinese logging camp cook who tells stories about Paul Bunyan, but reinvented as Auntie Po, a giant matriarchal lumberjack with a giant blue water buffalo. It gets into attitudes around the Chinese Exclusion Act, early American labor, and who gets to own the American mythos.
I also have a solo gallery show opening at Stranger Factory (strangerfactory.com) in Albuquerque, NM (It is on Route 66.), the first week of September, where I'll be exhibiting over twenty new watercolor paintings! I'll also be organizing and hosting an event there on September 7th, in conjunction with my role as one of Kickstarter's Thought Leaders this year. There'll be a conversation about queer comics and with Melanie Gilman (their book, which is this gorgeous queer western, is coming out in early September), a creative roundtable about pursuing and sustaining creative careers, and quite a bit more!
The Legend of Auntie Po
Shing Yin Khor. Kokila, $22.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-525-55488-2; $12.99 paper ISBN 978-0-525-55489-9
In 1885, following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese American Mei, 13, works alongside her father at a California logging camp, feeding 100 white lumberjacks and 40 Chinese workers. In her free time, Mei regales the women and children at camp with stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, reimagined as the legends of Auntie Po and her faithful blue buffalo, Pei Pei. Through these tellings, Mei navigates the dangers and politics of lumber camp work, her yearning to hold on to her cultural identity, her burgeoning acknowledgment of herqueerness, and the waning dream of university education. When tragedy strikes, Mei's faith in her invented god, Auntie Po, falters. But by connecting with traditions old and new, and harnessing the healing power of storytelling within her community, Mei begins to recognize her agency in a prejudiced world. Khor (The American Dream?) straddles myth and harsh realities via stunning digital pencil and handpainted watercolor art that highlights cornerstones of Chinese culture. Much will resonate with diasporic readers, though any reader will find Mei's journey cathartic. Informative spreads serve as sources of logging trivia, and an author's note clarifies identity intersections and historical omissions. Ages 10--14. Agent: DongWon Song, Howard Morhaim Literary. (June)
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"The Legend of Auntie Po." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 19, 10 May 2021, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A662132082/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=346a0a68. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
KHOR, Shing Yin. The American Dream?: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Burrito. illus. by Shing Yin Khor. 160p. Zest. Aug. 2019. Tr $37.32. ISBN 9781541578524; pap. $16.99. ISBN 9781942186373.
Gr 8 Up--Khor was born in Malaysia and immigrated to the United States, eventually becoming a citizen. In this graphic memoir, she records her journey along the historic Route 66 to learn more about America, trying to understand how, as an immigrant, she fits in. Vivid watercolors and a thoughtful narrative bring each stop to life, cataloging quirky Americana, interesting people, and the remains of towns that disappeared as travelers deserted Route 66 for more modern highways. The art is warm and vibrant and, when depicting open vistas and night skies, breathtaking. The writing turns introspective as Khor discusses her impressions as an immigrant and person of color. She feels rejected when she sees the "American owned" signs (code for "not South Asian") on motels in New Mexico, embraced when she finds a strong immigrant community in Texas, and conflicted at how Native American culture has been promoted through commercialization. This is one person's story, but it reflects the complex experience of many immigrants trying to understand where they belong in this country. VERDICT This beautiful memoir raises thoughtful questions about what it means to be American. A strong addition to most collections.--Carla Riemer, Claremont Middle School, Oakland
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Riemer, Carla. "KHOR, Shing Yin. The American Dream?: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Burrito." School Library Journal, vol. 65, no. 6, June 2019, pp. 94+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587876251/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=36983bbc. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Khor, Shing Yin THE AMERICAN DREAM? Zest Books (Young Adult Informational) $None 8, 6 ISBN: 978-1-5415-7852-4
Artist Khor recounts their spring 2016 road trip from Los Angeles to Chicago in this graphic memoir.
Growing up in Malaysia, Khor knew two versions of America: "The first was Los Angeles, full of beautiful people and sunlight and open roads," and the other was the America in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, "filled with dusty roads and big hopes." After living in the States for 10 years, they and Bug, their "tiny adventure dog," embark on a journey along historic Route 66, hoping to better understand the American dream. Through bright, expressive watercolor illustrations, Khor portrays the memorable locations they pass through, including a former gold-mining town in Arizona where several Hollywood films were shot; Amarillo, Texas, which has become a haven for refugees; and kitschy attractions including dinosaur statues and the Blue Whale of Catoosa. They detail both the amusing (going to the bathroom outdoors) and emotional (loneliness and exhaustion) challenges of being a traveler. Khor's pilgrimage is as much an exploration of themself as it is of nostalgic Americana. Their travels inspire them to share insights into their path to atheism, their anger with xenophobia and racism--which are provoked when they find a motel labeled "American owned"--and the meaning of "home." Many of Khor's observations will resonate with those who have questioned national identity and the sense of belonging.
An informative graphic travel journal that offers important perspectives on being an immigrant and American identity. (Graphic memoir. 12-18)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Khor, Shing Yin: THE AMERICAN DREAM?" Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587054297/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8afda589. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito.
By Shing Yin Khor. Illus. by the author.
Aug. 2019.160p. Zest, $37.32 (97815415785241; paper, $16.99 (9781541578524). Gr. 9-12. 741.5.
Malaysia-born, LA-dwelling Khor introduces the "two Americas" that were their obsessions growing up: a Los Angeles "full of beautiful people and sunlight and open roads" where 10 years of living has also added "lots and lots and lots of traffic," and a landscape defined by Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, in which the Joad family desperately pursues the American Dream. Khor takes that "feeling of desperately searching for something better, for a new start," and adapts it to their own "pilgrimage" as immigrant and artist traveling historic Route 66--"the part of America that my brain finds more American than anything else." Traversing from LA to Chicago in their 2010 Honda Fit will require their "tiny adventure dog," Bug, and the kindness of multiple friends and strangers en route, captured in whimsical full-color detail. The end-of-the-road realizations are (surprise!) not what they expected, but the rewards--of course!--are many. What lingers longest is Khor's four-panel epilogue, revealing their trip was taken six months before the 2016 elections; in magnifier-necessary micro-font, the penultimate panel confesses, "This comic feels like a record of a time when a brown girl could drive America fearlessly." Khor, with Bug's support, refuses to "let those jerks keep us down"--an encouragement to all to also keep going.--Terry Hong
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
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Hong, Terry. "The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 21, 1 July 2019, p. 46. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A595705108/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2d01d295. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Khor, Shing Yin THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO Kokila (Children's None) $22.99 6, 15 ISBN: 978-0-525-55488-2
In a late-19th-century Sierra Nevada logging camp, a Chinese American girl spins tall tales and dreams of a better future.
Mei helps her father in the kitchen, feeding the dozens of hungry men who work at their logging camp. At night, she entertains listeners with her made-up stories about Auntie Po, an elderly Chinese woman taller than the pine trees who has a blue water buffalo. In these stories clearly inspired by Paul Bunyan, Auntie Po is a guardian figure, protecting the logging crew from threats including giant mosquitos and unscrupulous companies. But in the real world, anti-Chinese sentiments have turned into acts of violence. When the logging company caves under a boycott, the White camp boss dismisses all the Chinese workers, leaving frustrated Mei angry at her own helplessness. Nuanced portrayals of characters’ relationships keep the themes of discrimination and allyship in focus; the tenuous friendship between Mei’s father and the camp boss in particular highlights the difference between offering verbal support and taking meaningful action. The clean, expressive linework and muted watercolors portray both the dangerous realities of logging and quiet, emotional moments with equal effectiveness. In a sweet, naturally inserted subplot, Mei, who wears trousers rather than dresses, says she is not interested in boys and is clearly enamored of her closest White female friend.
A timely and ultimately hopeful tale. (author's note, bibliography) (Graphic historical fiction. 10-14)
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"Khor, Shing Yin: THE LEGEND OF AUNTIE PO." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A659924828/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=18169588. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.