It’s both a great and terrible time to be an immigrant, no matter what country you’re emigrating to. But it is in great and terrible times that we often get the best art.
In Teresa Wong’s new collection of cartoons, All Our Ordinary Stories (paperback, Kindle), she presents stories about “…my life growing up as a child of Chinese-Canadian immigrants.”
In the following email interview, Wong talks about what inspired and influenced this memoir, as well as whether she’s shown it to her parents yet.
Photo Credit: Kaitlin Moerman
I’d like to start with the text. What is All Our Ordinary Stories about, and when and where does it take place?
All Our Ordinary Stories is about my life growing up as a child of Chinese-Canadian immigrants. It’s a pretty wide-ranging book in terms of both time and place. It begins in 2014, when my mom had a minor stroke, but other stories occur in the early 1900s, the 1970s and ’80s, the early 2000s, and all the way up to the present. The book is set in China, Hong Kong, and Canada.
Where did you get the idea for All Our Ordinary Stories?
I’ve been trying to write this book in one form or another for the last 20 years, ever since I took a trip to China with my parents and learned details about how they escaped from communes during the Cultural Revolution by swimming to Hong Kong.
All Our Ordinary Stories is a memoir. And as the writer of this memoir, you get to decide how honest you’re going to be. How often, when writing Stories, did you have an internal debate about whether or not to include something? And how did you resolve this conflict?
Because the book is structured as a collection of stories, there is definitely a lot about my life and my parents’ lives that I left out. When choosing the stories to write and draw, I wanted to focus on the barriers I faced in having a closer relationship with my parents. So if a story didn’t address or somehow build on that theme in a meaningful way, it didn’t make the cut.
All Our Ordinary Stories is your second graphic novel after Dear Scarlet: The Story Of My Postpartum Depression, which we talked about when it came out in 2019. Are there any writers, or stories, that had a big influence on Stories but not on Scarlet? And I include in that all kinds of writers: prose, poetry, as well as graphic novelists.
I think the work of Asian diasporic writers really influenced my work on All Our Ordinary Stories, whether it was graphic memoirists like Mira Jacob (Good Talk) and Malaka Gharib (I Was Their American Dream) or prose memoirists like Y-Dang Troeung (Landbridge) and Denise Chong (The Concubine’s Children). Also, while I was drafting, I re-read Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, one of the very first Chinese diasporic memoirs and kind of an ur-text for what an Asian American (or Canadian) memoir could be.
What about non-literary influences; was All Our Ordinary Stories influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?
Not an influence exactly, but after I’d written the first draft, I watched the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I found super inspiring. I thought, “If I could write a book even half as smart and moving, I’d be happy.”
Moving over to the art, All Our Ordinary Stories is comprised of black & white line drawings, which is also what you did for Dear Scarlet, though that book seemed a lot more minimalist. Why were black & white line drawings the way to go with for Stories, and why be less minimalist this time around?
I’ve gotten better at drawing since I first drew Dear Scarlet, so I guess my artwork is less minimal this time around because I actually have the skills to draw more things.
As for the choice to go with black & white again, All Our Ordinary Stories was a big project already, and I didn’t want to add to its complexity by messing around with color (something I’m not totally comfortable with yet). I am only now starting to experiment with color in my artwork, and I’m excited to see where it takes my work in the future.
Are there any artists — in comics or fine art or anywhere else — who had a big influence on the art in All Our Ordinary Stories but were not an influence on Dear Scarlet?
I can’t think of a specific comics or art influence. My style is generally defined by my limitations as an artist, so I’ve gone with a really flattened view (not a lot of perspective lines in this book).
It might have been inspired by the work of cartoonist John Porcellino, who manages to convey a lot with very simple lines?
As I mentioned, All Our Ordinary Stories is your second graphic novel after Dear Scarlet. What did you learn writing and drawing Scarlet that made doing Stories both easier and better?
Dear Scarlet was my very first attempt at graphic narrative (before that, I was a writer only), so I basically learned how to make comics from working on the manuscript — everything from big decisions around visual storytelling to technical details like panel borders and lettering. To be honest, it was pretty hacked together, but it did lay the groundwork for All Our Ordinary Stories. The new book is, I think, a much more polished and professional looking product, but I couldn’t have gotten there without hacking my way through Dear Scarlet first.
Dear Scarlet was about your daughter, and the postpartum depression that followed her birth. In the interview we did about Scarlet, you said you let the kid read the book. All Our Ordinary Stories, as you said, is about your parents. Did you let them read Stories?
My parents don’t read English, but I did show them the manuscript before I sent it to my editor. I wasn’t asking for permission — they already knew I’d been writing their stories — but I also didn’t want them to be surprised at the contents of the book after it was published. So I took them through each page and simply described what was happening. My dad kind of brushed it all off, saying, “I know all this already. I lived it.” And my mom said, “I don’t know who would want to read this stuff.” [laughs] They did like my drawings, though. Apparently, the people I drew looked like the people they knew.
And just out of curiosity, did you ever let them read Dear Scarlet? Or let your kid read All Our Ordinary Stories?
My parents have read the Chinese translation of Dear Scarlet, and they have never told me what they thought. However, they shared the book with a Chinese lady who lives in their apartment building, so that tells me they were probably proud of it.
Only one of my three kids was interested in looking at All Our Ordinary Stories, and she says she liked it. I think it might’ve been a boring read for a 12-year-old, though. It’s not really written for a youth audience.
So, now that your parents and kids are hardcore comic nerds, what are you guys going to dress up as for this year’s Comic-Con?
Ha! My kids are much more into manga and anime than they are traditional comics. If I were to guess, maybe we’d all go as characters from Spy x Family.
In the interview we did about Dear Scarlet, I asked if there had been any interest in adapting it into a movie, and you said that your agent had retained the film rights, but that you had joked to your husband that, “Dear Scarlet is the least cinematic story ever.” Though people said that about Dune and The Lord Of The Rings… So, could All Our Ordinary Stories work as a movie, or is it also not very cinematic?
I’m not sure. I actually do have a film / TV agent for this book, so I guess she believes it could work on screen. There are definitely some dramatic scenes, especially with my parents’ escapes, but much of the story is also very introspective, so I don’t know how that would play out.
And if someone did want to make a movie based on All Our Ordinary Stories, who would you want them to cast as your mom, your dad, you, your hubby, and the kids?
That’s a fun question. Maybe Nora Lum [a.k.a. The Farewell‘s Awkwafina] for me? I feel like she fits my vibe.
My parents would have to be played by multiple people at multiple ages, and I can’t really think of who would be good at representing them.
So, is there anything else someone might need to know about All Our Ordinary Stories?
I wrote All Our Ordinary Stories for all children of immigrants, really, so I hope it connects with that demographic especially. You can feel really lonely and lost when you’ve grown up disconnected from your parents and cultural heritage — this book is meant to acknowledge that confusing state of being.
Finally, if someone enjoys All Our Ordinary Stories, and they’ve already read Dear Scarlet, what graphic memoir of someone else’s would you recommend they check out next?
Definitely The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, which tells her family’s story of leaving Vietnam as refugees in the 1970s. And also Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory, which is not a graphic memoir, but a book of prose poems about the Chinese American experience that also incorporates collage. I read her collection after completing All Our Ordinary Stories and thought it’d be a great companion book to mine.
