The Origins of Tong Hua (同化)
To those few people who know what I’m talking about.
Tong Hua (同化) or Assimilation, is my comic series following the life of a donkey named Karin (花林). It’s essentially a coming-of-age story with Alana humor and musings. I think the best way to break down the journey to it’s fruition is in 4 parts:
- Childhood Aspirations of Becoming an Illustrator
- Happy accident: Motivation to Learn Chinese
- Queeriosity
- The Illusion of Freewill (ie. Alana’s Brain Does What It Wants)
Childhood Aspirations of Becoming an Illustrator
As most second-generation children, I grew up in a household that did not speak English in the English-speaking country I resided in. I don’t really know why or how I started drawing, only that I remember doodling Princess Aurora from Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” riding Maleficent the Dragon all over my coloring books instead of actually coloring. I was very fortunate to have teachers who encouraged my love of drawing: all my teachers noticed I loved to draw and would encourage me to draw and write something about the drawing, which was a pretty damn clever way to get an ESL students to practice her English and think it was fun. This usually came in the form of “write a story describing the picture”.
I would consistently create an assortment of comics and short stories over the years, many of them unfinished, all of them nonsense. 50 notebooks of drawings later, my brain matured enough to write coherently.
Happy accident: Motivation to Learn Chinese
Mostly because I’m a nerd, I decided that I would self-study for the Chinese Advanced-Placement (AP) exam. Seeing as I was already going to Chinese school I should have had nothing to worry about. However, I had been slacking on my studies for years, so nope, my mother insisted I enroll in an additional Chinese class, specifically for AP Chinese. It was actually really cool; they talked a lot about customs and holidays like 中秋節 that I experienced all my life but didn’t understand or appreciate. To make sure I internalized all this new information I needed to not only memorize for the test, but wanted to know for myself, I decided to draw a comic to practice writing Chinese characters and to incorporate all the bits about customs and holidays I was learning.
And that was the birth of Book 0. (同話/With Words, not 同化/Assimilation.)
Queeriosity
Some time while working on Book 0, I saw an episode on the Tyra Banks Show where she was interviewing trans kids and I was irritated that all these kids were so stereotypically “boys and girls” that I pondered in anger: “I’m a girl. I don’t do all that girly stuff. Certainly there must be [trans] girls who are like me.” At that time, there were no answers on the internet except for one personal blog stating “[trans] women can be butch too”. That was enough for me, and this is why Book 0 has a trans female character who is more masculine. She would come to play a prominent role in both Book 1 and Book 2 and sometimes when I reread her character arc I am overwhelmed with joy.
Besides an exploration of neurodiversity, the comic inadvertently became an exploration of queerness: Karin is queer, her best friend Lanh is not queer but he’s a fine (cis) boy who’s very comfortable being feminine. When I was in first grade, I was best friends with a boy. Eventually, kids began to make fun of us and the taunting got so bad we decided we could no longer be friends. This plays a huge role in me wanting to tell a story featuring a girl and boy who are just best friends and stay that way because it was something I had not grown up seeing, but believed was possible.
In hind sight, Karin reflected more of my subconscious desires than I realized at the time of making Book 1 and 2. Karin was a lesbian character from her conception. Meanwhile, at the time of writing Book 1, I still thought I was straight. When I was imagining what it was like for her to be queer and how she felt about girls, there was less imagining and more projecting than I was aware of or maybe, wanted to admit.
The Illusion of Freewill (ie. Alana’s Brain Does What It Wants)
The brain is made up of multiple streams of consciousness that work together; this fact is confirmed by split-brain case studies. A person once described me as “someone with a lot of momentum”. I’m incredibly stubborn and will do as much as I can to finish what I started. In some ways, these days I feel possessed by my comic because I have these characters who feel alive and real to me who have a story that needs to be told (and finished). They are their own streams of consciousness that I have insight to, and I love them very much because I got to delight in watching (most of) them grow up.
But this is all an aside. “Why did you do this? What was your inspiration?” people ask.
I was in physics class doodling a baby Karin and I just knew I wanted to tell her story. I saw bits of her life flash and she became familiar. As I was about to graduate high school, it seemed like the perfect time to challenge myself to draw a comic from start to finish. If I could overcome my childhood struggle of finishing what I started, I knew it would become the beginning of something bigger (3 books).
The best answer I can give, (besides being possessed by creative madness,) is
I felt like certain life experiences and identities were not represented enough, and I wanted to see them, explore them, share them. And art and storytelling was the medium that spoke to me.
