Innovative Autobiography

Abstract

Innovative Autobiography Rachel Miller (bio) Almost American Girl Robin Ha Balzer + Bray www.harpercollins.com 240 Pages; Print, $12.99 Despite the steady increase in young adult novels and memoirs addressing a wide range of teenager’s immigration experiences, comics about the same remain rare. Robin Ha’s account of immigrating from Korea to America when she was just fourteen, Almost American Girl, joins a short list of graphic — or as she terms it “illustrated” — memoirs and narratives for young adult readers, including works like Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese (2008) and Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani (2017), that narrate their subject’s experiences of coming to America through text and image. Visualizing the unique circumstances of being uprooted from her home in South Korea and moving to Alabama amid all the usual tribulations of being a teenage girl, Ha’s memoir deftly navigates the interlocking conditions of being raised by a single mother, new familial structures and expectations, learning English, and — perhaps most importantly — ardently loving art and comics. Through Ha’s precise storytelling and innovative approach to the comics page, Almost American Girl opens up the medium of comics to the kinds of stories that need to be told the most — those of the young people who come to this country on someone else’s dream and find themselves becoming “almost American.” On the morning of August 7, 1995, fourteen-year-old Robin (also referred to by her Korean name, Chuna) pours over a stack of comic books on her floor, trying to decide which she will stuff into her suitcase to bring along on what she thinks is a quick end-of-summer trip to America with her mother. “I don’t know which one to take!” she laments as she sifts through the stack. “They’re all so good.” Expecting to be reunited with her beloved comics soon, what Robin doesn’t know is that she’s about to leave behind her collection, along with all her friends, school, and Seoul, the city she grew up in, for good, as her mother has plans to permanently relocate their small family to Alabama should things work out with her most recent paramour. Not long after their arrival to a nondescript suburb of Huntsville, Robin and her mother become enmeshed in the Kim family and, to Robin’s dismay, her mother informs her that they will be staying in America indefinitely. “Just like that,” writes Ha, who, in vibrant splash panels, juxtaposes herself weeping with glimpses of her former life in Seoul, “everything I loved was suddenly snatched away from me.” But it isn’t all loss that comes from Robin’s mother’s headstrong decision to radically reroute the trajectory of her and her daughter’s lives. Although Robin dreams of running away in the first few weeks of living in America, she begins to understand that her home is rooted in her relationship with her mother, a woman who has always defied conventions — like refusing to marry Robin’s father when she became pregnant and, ultimately, deciding to raise her daughter on her own despite the stringent social codes that might shame her into a life she did not want. Although starting school in [End Page 5] America is intimidating because she knows little English, Robin nevertheless finds joy at the prospect of shedding her Korean name, “an unusually old-fashioned name which is equivalent to names like Bertha or Myrtle in English,” and adopting a new, America name. Transforming herself into a superhero with a question mark emblazoned on her green tunic, Ha writes, “This was my chance to start all over again with a new identity! Things like this only happened in movies and comic books, and now it was happening to me.” But as she introduces herself under the gaze of her American classmates, the mantra “Look normal” (“But…what is normal here?”) etched through the page, it is clear that a transformation of her identity is more than just picking out a new name. Language becomes an immediate barrier for Robin as she begins to navigate her new life in America, but, under Ha’s direction, Almost American Girl...