Words & Images: Relationships

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Words & Images: Relationships

12/3/2025

We had the opportunity to read a text that represented a historically undervalued genre–though that is very much changing– and a memoir. And a Pulitzer prize winner. It gives a lot to talk about. For tonight’s post, please identify a particular set of pages that really spoke to you from anyplace in the book. Identify the relationship between images/lettering/movement of the page and the story. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? A writer is choosing both word and image to tell their story, and we should assume that they do this for a reason. Choose a scene carefully, one that allows you to speak to the wider themes of the memoir, which is the second key component of this weeks ICRN: how does our author’s specific story allow us to understand the lives of others, and our own lives, in new ways?

4 Comments

Alexandra O'Brien

12/6/2025 10:56:05 am

When the author called off her engagement and then found her way to Antarctica, it felt like she was really finding herself and claiming an identity of her own by simply allowing herself to be, rather than forcing herself to be anything in particular. On page 305, she finds a drawer full of vinyl records from the military base. On page 306, she puts on a record and sits back as it plays the song about not being fenced in, and the music on the page slows onto the next, and you see it like a string of music, tying into and flowing all around the page, to all of these places she is going. Showing symbolically how she does not want to be fenced into any area of her life, to any ghosts, or man, or life, instead, she wants to reclaim her own life. I know at some points the author ran away from her ghosts by going everywhere but home, but I feel like part of this journey and traveling for her was her way of facing them.

This part of the graphic novel felt like a collection of the story's bigger themes. Themes about avoidance of trauma and wanting to find peace in the self (especially when having so much cultural clashing about where she comes from versus where she is and was raised). By telling this story, she is facing her ghosts, learning about her history, and how she feels connected and separated from it. And I thought that this scene about the music, traveling, and being at peace, to a song saying, “don’t fence me in”, is saying a lot about how facing your ghosts can look like many things. You can have moments when you feel so connected to life and yourself – and even when you want to be a little disconnected from it, by being all the way in Antarctica, BUT somehow it still comes with you because your past is a part of you. And that’s how this story helps us understand the lives of others, and our own as well. It gives us perspective for so many generations carrying different forms of the same trauma. This story is also teaching me to have perspective for other people's stories while telling my own, which I feel is super important.

I.S.

12/6/2025 04:13:31 pm

There are so many aspects of this graphic novel that I loved, but I particularly liked Hulls’s depiction of having a mixed race identity. On page 30, she expressed how her friends would struggle with categorizing her. It shows an image of an “Asian data points” system with a friend calculating the total. I think this excellently portrays how a lot of Americans think of race, trying to sort people into neat categories and feeling confused or frustrated when unable to. Since Hulls was raised in the U.S., she kind of adopted this view of race as well, making her struggle with how to identify herself. It then added tension between her and her mother, neither quite knowing how to navigate the cultural differences that led to miscommunications and conflicts between the two. She began to feel more comfortable with her identity through her visit to China with her mother and extended family, and by making other mixed race friends. Additionally, seeing how Wasian people actually had a place in Chinese society helped her have a stronger sense of belonging.

The author’s story allows us to understand just how complicated identity and history are. Despite what society demands, many people cannot fit into one category–the human experience is nuanced and cannot be simplified. This can extend beyond race as well. Her grandmother wasn’t all crazy or merely a bad mother, she was extremely traumatized and navigating difficult circumstances. Her mother wasn’t just overbearing and emotionally distant, she was struggling to be a mother because she didn’t have much of an example to follow. It’s easy to slap a label on somebody or something and move on, but Hulls took the time to give every aspect of this novel the nuance it deserves, which is what allowed her to do a lot of healing.

The story also allowed me to understand my own life in a new way. Similar to the author, I’m mixed race because of one grandparent and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by someone with a lineage like that. I really related to how she had to explore her identity more as an adult, allowing her to better understand her life and heritage. There’s so many things where I didn’t recognize the impact it had on me–microaggressions, people not knowing what to make of me or my family, my grandfather leaving his country in the midst of a genocide, and now how Latin Americans are being treated in this country. Sometimes it feels like that history isn’t mine to claim, which Hulls struggled with as well, but reading about her experience made me feel a little less weird about it (for lack of a better word) because those things do affect me, even in ways I still might not realize. My takeaway from this aspect of the novel is that you don’t have to sacrifice any part of who you are to make others more comfortable. Defying categorization can be a source of strength.

Ashley Luise

12/8/2025 09:27:04 am

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole graphic novel, particularly as someone who does not typically read this genre, but I was most impacted by the excerpts from Sun Yi’s memoir throughout part 3. I appreciated getting direct insight into Sun Yi’s life through her own words in a way that both feels true how Hulls learned this aspect of her family history and presents Sun Yi as an active participant in her history for the first time. While general knowledge about Chinese history is important to Hulls’ narrative, situating her specific family history within it is all that more important because it is what she has spent her whole life trying to figure out. Sun Yi burning anything that could be “‘incriminating reactionary evidence’” (105) emphasizes the sheer fear she felt over simply being herself in Communist China. Similarly, for the first time, we see Sun Yi as Rose’s mother figure, rather than Rose mothering her. Turning “if I don’t come back…Please take care of my daughter” (123-124) into a piece of dialogue allows readers to get into Sun Yi’s mind and really feel the fear she had for herself and her daughter’s safety. This allows readers to better understand why, in addition to it being a cultural norm, Rose did not see caretaking for her mother as a burden; Sun Yi protected her daughter for all of the time in her life that she was able to, and Rose genuinely wanted to return that love. Hulls does an excellent job of blending her words with her grandmother’s to create a profound effect on readers, and I imagine that this effect is not dissimilar to the one Hulls had after piecing through her family history.

The excerpts from Sun Yi’s own memoir drive home the theme that reconnecting with one’s roots is essential to healing trauma but cannot be done objectively. Though Hulls shows that she has done her research to objectively understand the sociopolitical situations in China that have impacted her mother and grandmother’s lives, she cannot end there to get a full picture of what led her grandmother to become the woman she knew her as. While including Sun Yi’s own words was impactful on its own, it was even more impactful considering the work Hulls put in to translate the original text—which involved learning a whole new language—and situate it among the complex sociopolitical context of the time.

I found it fascinating that Sun Yi’s, as well as Rose’s and the narrator’s, words were written in distinct fonts. I appreciate it being an easily understood signifier of whose perspective we are in, but in the case of Sun Yi’s memoir excerpts, the use of the typewriter font emphasizes her words as being both a piece of family history as well as a historical document. While Hulls remains interested in the significance of her grandmother’s memoir for her own family history, she is equally as interested in determining to what extent it is a curated document. The use of the typewriter font, in my opinion, explores how Sun Yi’s words, unlike the other two characters’, were written with public consumption in mind; this understanding is essential for both Hulls and readers to get a full understanding of how much information Sun Yi’s memoir can offer to her family as well as the public. While it is an essential piece of family history, its contents cannot be completely accepted at face value; however, this does not devalue the memoir. Ultimately, Hulls’ use of font and excerpts from her grandmother’s memoir brilliantly grapple with the meaning of public and personal history, how these impact a specific family’s history, and where the distinction between these terms lies.

Anna

12/10/2025 01:21:06 pm

The set of pages that spoke to me the most was early in the book, pages 49-51. In this part of the story the author and her mother are visiting with family in Suzhou. As she watches her mother engage with her family with ease and comfort, she notices the mirroring of her grandmother in her great-aunt. She notices how happy her mother is to be speaking her native language, and how “whole” she is while sharing food and stories with her extended family. When the author and her mother return to their hotel, the author asks what the phrase she kept hearing was and what it meant. Visually, the speech bubbles are split into the mother figuring out what the phrase was, confirming and sitting with it, translating it into its original lettering, then finally translating it into English for her daughter. The fact that these are split shows the extent to which her removal from her culture has separated her from her daughter, and in some ways herself. The phrase itself, meaning “come home” shows as well that she has more of a true home in China than it seems like she has ever had in the U.S. The other visually interesting element of this page is that she sees the lettering for hui lai in the water below her. Water is used as an element of holding history and importance to the author’s family throughout the novel, so seeing the letters spread across the water was such a beautiful way to show the culture floating on the surface for her mother, just out of reach.
The author’s story really allowed me a powerful glimpse into how trauma, mental illness, and displacement can affect immigrant families, and what an amazing feat it is to acknowledge one’s history and work to break a cycle of inherited pain. I really commend the author for doing this dive into her family’s past and using it to heal her relationship with her mother as well as her willingness to accept the difference between what she had conceived of her history and what she learned, the areas that she had made assumptions about without the context of existing around her extended family.

Words & Images: Relationships

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