Angry Girl Comics

All content (c) Wendy M. Xu

Posts tagged asian american comics

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meiwan: This is my piece for a community project started by Angry Girl Comics’ Wendy Xu.  The purpose of this project is to expand on the diversity of the Asian American experience, because lets be real people the Amy Tan model does not reflect that of all Asian Americans.  To find our more about this project or if you want to submit your own piece [ which I highly encourage you to do :) ] please go here.  I am Chinese and yet this piece of my identity is something that I have to constantly qualify.  Not just to white people, but to my own community as well.  I say “my own community”, yet a majority of the time it doesn’t feel that way.  The fact that I am not full Chinese [ what does that even mean? ]… The fact that I am also Peruvian and White… The fact that I am Queer…  The fact that I am only fluent in english [ I know a little bit of Cantonese and Mandarin…tho not much Spanish ]… The fact that I have a mixture of my mother and father’s features…  All of these things tend to negate my identity and I am done. I am so FUCKING DONE. ~李美雲  this is great wow!! major snaps for the excellent commentary! at the risk of sounding like a cheeseball, I’ll say it anyway—we belong to very diverse and multifaceted communities in ways that sometimes we don’t even realize bc we all grow up with these internalized stereotypes and racism. thank you Meiwan for helping smash that mold!!! you are awesome.  if anyone else has submissions please feel free to either inbox them or email them to angrygirlcomics@gmail.com! I went back and edited the original post for wording bc last time I came off as pretty offensive. I just wanted to say again that you are all welcome to submit as long as you identify as API—East Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander and the like.  you guys are all amazing!

meiwan:

This is my piece for a community project started by Angry Girl Comics’ Wendy Xu.  The purpose of this project is to expand on the diversity of the Asian American experience, because lets be real people the Amy Tan model does not reflect that of all Asian Americans.  To find our more about this project or if you want to submit your own piece [ which I highly encourage you to do :) ] please go here. 

I am Chinese and yet this piece of my identity is something that I have to constantly qualify.  Not just to white people, but to my own community as well.  I say “my own community”, yet a majority of the time it doesn’t feel that way.  The fact that I am not full Chinese [ what does that even mean? ]… The fact that I am also Peruvian and White… The fact that I am Queer…  The fact that I am only fluent in english [ I know a little bit of Cantonese and Mandarin…tho not much Spanish ]… The fact that I have a mixture of my mother and father’s features…  All of these things tend to negate my identity and I am done. I am so FUCKING DONE.

~李美雲 

this is great wow!! major snaps for the excellent commentary! at the risk of sounding like a cheeseball, I’ll say it anyway—we belong to very diverse and multifaceted communities in ways that sometimes we don’t even realize bc we all grow up with these internalized stereotypes and racism. thank you Meiwan for helping smash that mold!!! you are awesome. 

if anyone else has submissions please feel free to either inbox them or email them to angrygirlcomics@gmail.com! I went back and edited the original post for wording bc last time I came off as pretty offensive. I just wanted to say again that you are all welcome to submit as long as you identify as API—East Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander and the like. 

you guys are all amazing!

Filed under asian america asian american comics

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DO NOT DELETE THIS COMMENTARY PLS seriously if you reblog it and I see it stripped of this commentary I will be so fucking mad and I will call you out on it because this is a hopefully gonna be a community project that I want all of us to participate in I was going to write “I have a lot of mixed feelings on Amy Tan” bc I feel like as Asian Americans we should celebrate her contribution to mainstream American culture but that’s a total lie. I actually hate her writing. to me she will be forever a reminder of the time my white high school ex tried to educate me on my own culture by giving me a copy of The Kitchen God’s Wife  let’s not forget that there are NO GOOD ASIAN HUSBANDS, ONLY ABUSIVE ONES (or ones that die), in her work (as far as I’ve read and I remember). y’all want some “older” stuff that’s still good? read Maxine Hong Kingston.  anyway it’s kind of unfortunate for Amy Tan because whether she wanted to or not, she inadvertently ended up as the voice that people try to encompass all of the relationships between Asian American mothers and daughters. while some of the themes her work are relateable, I do not enjoy this celebration of the white male savior, particularly when contrasted next to the “abusive backwards husband from the old country.”  anyways Asian America is a constantly changing and morphing thing. Amy Tan’s model is outdated. this is what my experience of Asian America looks like, and I encourage you all to draw your own and submit them to me! I’ve made a blank one for you guys to color and do with as you please. it can be stick figures, or ink drawings, or even writing, w/e, anything you like!  I want this to be a collectively shared experience. my experience of Asian America is NOT the only version of Asian America. whether you identify as a woman or a man or neither, whether you are straight or lgbtq, mixed, what have you, Asian America belongs to you. I didn’t say “API America” because my personal comic does not encompass the experiences of Filipino/Pacific Islander Americans, but if you happen to be Pacific Islander, please feel free to erase what I wrote and put your own text in.  meanwhile enjoy me and Juliet twerping around and looking at cuties y’all are awesome, thanks for reading. Edit: Someone kindly pointed out to me that it reads like I’m not including Filipino-Americans as “real Asian Americans”. it’s because I’m a dumbass & completely misread this quote:  The problematic terms “Asian-Pacific American” (APA) and “Asian Pacific Islander” (API) not only offer no recognition that Pacific Islanders already constitute a pan-ethnic group that is distinct from Asian Americans, they also efface Pacific political claims based on indigeneity. For example, indigenous Pacific Islanders who have ties to islands that were forcibly incorporated into the United States (Hawai`i, Guam, American Samoa) have outstanding sovereignty and land claims, based on international principles of self-determination, which get erased by the categorization with Asians. Hence the frameworks for understanding the ills affecting Pacific peoples and their political claims are shaped by imperialism and settler colonialism, not simply civil rights. We need to uncouple “Asian” and “Pacific” in order to examine these concerns, especially in higher education, where the socio-economic profiles of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders are severely distorted due to the continued problematic lumping with Asian Americans. One of my favorite brief explanations of the importance of not using “APA,” “AAPI,” “API” or “APIA” or any other constellation of letters when Pacific Islanders are not included in the discussion, essay, scholarly work, etc. Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui -Where are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in Higher Education I don’t know why I thought she included Filipino Americans when she (to my knowledge) mostly meant folks from Hawaii, Guam and Samoa.  I’m really sorry for my misreading and general dumbassery and I will do my best to write things more succinctly and clearly in the future. 

DO NOT DELETE THIS COMMENTARY PLS seriously if you reblog it and I see it stripped of this commentary I will be so fucking mad and I will call you out on it because this is a hopefully gonna be a community project that I want all of us to participate in

I was going to write “I have a lot of mixed feelings on Amy Tan” bc I feel like as Asian Americans we should celebrate her contribution to mainstream American culture

but that’s a total lie. I actually hate her writing. to me she will be forever a reminder of the time my white high school ex tried to educate me on my own culture by giving me a copy of The Kitchen God’s Wife 

let’s not forget that there are NO GOOD ASIAN HUSBANDS, ONLY ABUSIVE ONES (or ones that die), in her work (as far as I’ve read and I remember).

y’all want some “older” stuff that’s still good? read Maxine Hong Kingston. 

anyway it’s kind of unfortunate for Amy Tan because whether she wanted to or not, she inadvertently ended up as the voice that people try to encompass all of the relationships between Asian American mothers and daughters. while some of the themes her work are relateable, I do not enjoy this celebration of the white male savior, particularly when contrasted next to the “abusive backwards husband from the old country.” 

anyways Asian America is a constantly changing and morphing thing. Amy Tan’s model is outdated. this is what my experience of Asian America looks like, and I encourage you all to draw your own and submit them to me! I’ve made a blank one for you guys to color and do with as you please. it can be stick figures, or ink drawings, or even writing, w/e, anything you like! 

I want this to be a collectively shared experience. my experience of Asian America is NOT the only version of Asian America. whether you identify as a woman or a man or neither, whether you are straight or lgbtq, mixed, what have you, Asian America belongs to you. I didn’t say “API America” because my personal comic does not encompass the experiences of Filipino/Pacific Islander Americans, but if you happen to be Pacific Islander, please feel free to erase what I wrote and put your own text in. 

meanwhile enjoy me and Juliet twerping around and looking at cuties

y’all are awesome, thanks for reading.

Edit: Someone kindly pointed out to me that it reads like I’m not including Filipino-Americans as “real Asian Americans”. it’s because I’m a dumbass & completely misread this quote: 

The problematic terms “Asian-Pacific American” (APA) and “Asian Pacific Islander” (API) not only offer no recognition that Pacific Islanders already constitute a pan-ethnic group that is distinct from Asian Americans, they also efface Pacific political claims based on indigeneity. For example, indigenous Pacific Islanders who have ties to islands that were forcibly incorporated into the United States (Hawai`i, Guam, American Samoa) have outstanding sovereignty and land claims, based on international principles of self-determination, which get erased by the categorization with Asians. Hence the frameworks for understanding the ills affecting Pacific peoples and their political claims are shaped by imperialism and settler colonialism, not simply civil rights.

We need to uncouple “Asian” and “Pacific” in order to examine these concerns, especially in higher education, where the socio-economic profiles of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders are severely distorted due to the continued problematic lumping with Asian Americans.

One of my favorite brief explanations of the importance of not using “APA,” “AAPI,” “API” or “APIA” or any other constellation of letters when Pacific Islanders are not included in the discussion, essay, scholarly work, etc.

Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui -Where are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in Higher Education

I don’t know why I thought she included Filipino Americans when she (to my knowledge) mostly meant folks from Hawaii, Guam and Samoa. 
I’m really sorry for my misreading and general dumbassery and I will do my best to write things more succinctly and clearly in the future. 

Filed under Asian America comics Asian American comics interactive experiences ermergerd fascinasians

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hi friends! I hope all my fellow NYCers survived the hurricane safe and sound. my area of BK was thankfully untouched; I am so freaking grateful to have had power through this whole ordeal. 

so the official launch date of Secret Identities is rapidly coming upon us (remember, remember, the 5th of November, woooo!) although you can still pick up an early copy if you’re in the NYC area and get to visit the Museum of Chinese in America, which I highly suggest doing. Right now through February they have an amazing API comics exhibit up featuring work by fine folks like my dear friend Alice Meichi Li and people I have had the great pleasure and privilege of paneling with, like Larry Hama and GB Tran, all of whom also contributed to SI! 

I was approached by Keith at the beginning of the summer and asked to contribute to the book. I almost could not believe that I was going to be in a real published anthology and consequently sat on the news for months, although I was dying to tell everyone (and now all of you have to get flooded with news about this, muwahaha). but I cannot even begin to describe how huge of an honor this is for me. 

I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. actually, when I started at NYU I’d started out in the psychology program with the goal of becoming a therapist (L O L HOW MINDS CHANGE) and then realized it was really not for me. but by then it was too late to change majors since I’d dived right in, so I just rode out the program, which I finished early, and turned my goal elsewhere, and in my sophomore year of college really got into drawing comics. I started Angry Girl in a very transitional and turbulent summer between my junior year and the start of my last semester and it has taken me further than I ever could have imagined. 

for the anthology I drew a two-page thank-you comic for Dr. Jan and Marica Vilcek, founders of the Vilcek Foundation, an organization that gives grants to immigrants working in the arts and sciences. The Vilceks themselves are immigrants, having left Czechoslovakia for the States in the sixties and becoming superstars in their respective fields of medical research and art history. The comic was written by Jeff Yang, one of our editors for the anthology. 

with that, here are the two pages I’ve done, as well as some preliminary sketches! (edit: okay Tumblr is being stupid, no preliminary sketches. BUT FINISHED ART YAY) They’re lettered in the anthology, but not by myself!

I am insanely pleased and proud to be able to contribute to SI and to be a part of this continually expanding API American comics community. Big thanks to Jeff, Keith, Parry, and everyone else who made publication possible! 

Here are some other fine folks who were included in Shattered and wrote about it:

Koji Sakai of 8Asians

Adam WarRock

Jenn Fang of Reappropriate.co, whose post will go up Thursday (but in the meantime, check out all of her other cool articles!)

Filed under comics secret identities being published fuck yeah! Asian American comics

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Saturday’s panel! from left to right: GB Tran (Vietnamerica), Fred Chao (Johnny Hiro: Half-Asian, All Hero), Larry Hama (GI Joe, Avengers, various other Marvel titles and TV shows) and yours truly!  credits to my lovely friend Chan Lin, who is directing a show called Letters to a Student Revolutionary, opening Friday and Saturday this weekend! It looks like an awesome show and it’s FREE! Here’s all the info you’ll need:

Saturday’s panel! from left to right: GB Tran (Vietnamerica), Fred Chao (Johnny Hiro: Half-Asian, All Hero), Larry Hama (GI Joe, Avengers, various other Marvel titles and TV shows) and yours truly! 

credits to my lovely friend Chan Lin, who is directing a show called Letters to a Student Revolutionary, opening Friday and Saturday this weekend! It looks like an awesome show and it’s FREE! Here’s all the info you’ll need:

Filed under NYCAASC comics Asian American comics