Author: Hannah Ku

“And though my parents took us far away from the site of their grief… certain shadows stretched far. Casting a gray stillness over our childhood…hinting at a darkness we did not understand but could always feel”  In this beautifully illustrated memoir titled, The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui tells the story of her family’s journey of fleeing Vietnam and migrating to the United States. During the initial draft of writing this book, she felt that it came off as too ‘academic,’ and thought of…

Trigger Warning: This graphic novel depicts and describes instances of sexual violence.   Figure 1.1. Book Cover  Grass, illustrated by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim and translated by Janet Hong, is a harrowing graphic novel that narrates the stories of comfort women during World War II. [1] Specifically, Keum chronicles the story of Granny Lee Ok-Sun’s experience as a young child growing up during Japanese occupation and her eventual capture into sexual slavery at comfort stations.  Prior to the start of the Second World War, Granny Lee Ok-Sun…

“Every adoption requires a family to be broken apart. Yet, you never hear about that grief”  Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom in Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption illustrates the process of investigating her adoption documents to better understand her origin story. Lisa is a Korean transnational adoptee, illustrator, cartoonist, graphic designer, and adoptee rights activist who beautifully captures the multi-faceted and difficult experience of being a transnational and transracial adoptee within this graphic novel. When becoming pregnant with her first child, Lisa began to question further…

Where did the Chinese sit on the bus during the era of Jim Crow segregation? In the documentary, Blurring the Color Line, director Crystal Kwok tackles this question, unpacking her family’s history as grocery store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia. Shedding light on this little-known part of American history, Kwok aims to bridge these two groups  while confronting difficult conversations about race in Asian American communities. Kwok’s grandmother Pearl, born in San Francisco Chinatown, moved to Augusta in 1927. Her parents…