Stories From the East
Journey to the West
Two stories that I have chosen because they have helped shape my cultural identity.
Intro
Stories from the East is my grandparents and parent’s journey navigating through the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Chinese Civil War and eventually settling down in the United States. Journey to the West is a traditional Chinese folk tale that follows the Monkey King, an anthropomorphic monkey on his path to redemption. I chose these stories because they represent an east-meets-west divide that many Asian American individuals have trouble reconciling as parts of their identity. The two stories also both deal with finding acceptance through a physical journey that I felt was appropriate as a metaphor for an individual’s journey when dealing with cultural identity.
The two stories are physically bound together, which symbolize the cultural ties we have to the stories that define us.
Stories From the East
Stories from the East is at its core a story of my family’s resilience and strength. The text itself is an interview with my parents, and the images are a mix of historical and family photos. The historical images are there to give context to the events and the family photos are there to make the experience more personal and intimate. The two sets of photos are also there to juxtapose and symbolize the way we idealize memory. The family photos are loosely placed in chronological order to show the passage of time.
I also wanted to emphasize the passage of space in the book, which is why I included the latitude and longitude coordinates of the settings in the upper corners. They are there to help the reader keep track of where the events are happening and my parent’s eventual move to the United States.
It is an attempt to understand the historical trauma and events that have defined my family and help me rediscover where I come from.
Journey to the West
Journey to the West is a translated version of the story. It is originally in Chinese, and therefore there are phrases and terms that are not as easily understood to a western audience. These are also phrases that confused me when I first read the text, and had to ask my parents to explain to me. This is why I chose a caption system that would allow me to explain certain phrases or sayings as well as comment on plot points. I chose to translate the pull-out quotes to Chinese because I wanted to give a more traditional feel back to the text, and remind the viewer that this section is distinctly “Chinese”.
The images used are two-fold; one set are illustrations of the Monkey King and his cohorts to give the reader context on what they might have looked like, while the other images are of places often associated with the story, such as specific mountain ranges in China. This is why I chose to include these images to again give context to an otherwise hard to contextualize story.