Rosena Fung’s newest graphic novel, Age 16, explores the sophisticated relationships between three generations, leaping in time between the experiences of three 16-year-old women: Roz in Toronto in 2000; her mom, Lydia, in Hong Kong in 1972; and Roz’s grandmother, Mei Laan, in Guangdong in 1954.
How did you give you the narrative construction of Age 16? What impressed you to select 16 as the particular age that connects your three foremost characters?
I knew I needed to discover the lives of a woman, her mom and her grandmother, and the way they intersect and are interwoven with one another. From the start I knew that I needed a number of timelines to indicate how their lives and selections have an effect on one another. Sixteen is such an intense time for many individuals, and particularly it was a time of main upheaval and alter for my mother and my por por. It was a great way to parallel these lives collectively to indicate its many contrasts but additionally how the characters are so related to one another. I owe loads to my editor, who helped me sculpt this story into its closing type.
In your writer’s observe, you describe how the ebook relies by yourself household historical past. What was the expertise like of writing characters based mostly on actual relations, with all their messy vulnerabilities and tender humanity?
Writing characters based mostly on actual tales and actual lives may be so onerous. I attempt to be accountable to the individuals I’m writing about, to ensure I’m being sincere about my feelings but additionally to honor their very own tales and the place they’re coming from. Attempting to inhabit their lives is a part of the writing course of, and in addition imagining how it is going to be acquired by them. It’s usually a precarious act of juggling these elements, whereas staying true to upholding the story I’m telling. Penning this ebook was undoubtedly an emotional one as I confronted my very own emotions and recollections about my mother and grandmother!
This ebook brims with life—piles of glittery equipment in 2000s Toronto; fruit stalls crowded collectively in Seventies Hong Kong; fields stuffed with laborers in Nineteen Fifties Guangdong. How did you go about capturing a singular sense of place in every part? What sort of historic analysis did it’s important to do?
It was a mixture of going by a LOT of photograph albums, plumbing by the recollections of each my mother and my very own teenage self, and analysis about historic actions and context in addition to many photograph archives. I needed to ensure every place was a personality in its personal proper, as a result of the areas we reside in inform our sense of self and development. All through my life, I’ve visited each Hong Kong and Guangdong a number of occasions, and I maintain on to these recollections dearly. Generally a wayward scent or cacophonous noise in Toronto will convey me again to these locations right away and all of the sudden I can see all the colours, the panorama, the meals. I needed this type of vibrancy current within the ebook.
The distinction between every period is placing: China within the brutal aftermath of battle could be very totally different from Y2K Toronto. How do you stability grappling with the dangerous behaviors of older generations, whereas contemplating the tough—even unfathomable—circumstances from which these behaviors are born?
I believe everybody has depths that even they’ll’t all the time see, together with how previous experiences and trauma affect their present-day selections and behaviors. It took a very long time for me to know this, how an individual can maintain a lot however we solely ever see probably the most floor layer. With this, I attempt to take into account why somebody would act in methods I don’t perceive—to not justify or absolve hurt, however to know why, and from that place attempt to transfer ahead collectively. I by no means acquired together with my por por, however by the method of researching and penning this ebook, I gained extra readability and admiration for her as an individual.
When Roz, Lydia and Mei Laan get damage, they usually find yourself hurting others. How do you suppose one breaks this cycle of lashing out? What does forgiveness imply to you?
It is a actually onerous query! I believe that is one thing many wrestle with, and I don’t have a transparent reply. Within the ebook, I attempt to present that every character positive aspects a deeper understanding of one another and the way the best way they grew up, or the methods others have handled them, have an effect on how they in flip deal with others. Attempting to know somebody deeply is a begin, after which isolating their dangerous actions as a mirrored image of that trauma relatively than internalizing it as deeply private is a solution to distance that hurt. However that after all sounds simpler stated than achieved, and generally is a lifelong course of. Forgiveness to me means letting go. I don’t imply absolution or the absence of accountability for hurt and its aftermath. However I imply attending to a spot inside your self in order that these phrases, behaviors or actions lose their barbs. I believe forgiveness can’t occur if the opposite occasion can’t meet you midway. However typically (usually), life offers us no closure and we have now to decide on to maneuver on—with or with out the one who damage you.
I attempt to be accountable to the individuals I’m writing about, to ensure I’m being sincere about my feelings but additionally to honor their very own tales and the place they’re coming from.
In a world that’s unkind to ladies’s our bodies, meals haunts these characters. However meals additionally supplies consolation and connection, particularly within the context of Chinese language diaspora tradition. What ideas went into your nuanced portrayal of meals and the way we deal with our our bodies?
To begin with, I really like meals and any likelihood I can draw it or embody it in tales, I 100% will. Meals, consumption and our bodies are such fraught battlegrounds the place historical past, politics and misogyny play out. Girls particularly are taught to disclaim ourselves meals, pleasure and need. By means of this ebook, I needed to make specific the methods through which social expectations of how feminine our bodies ought to exist are extremely problematic and harmful, and the way we internalize these concepts as a given. But it surely was additionally vital for me to spotlight how ladies and women are sometimes compelled to make sure selections to outlive, relying on the context they grew up in. And a few of these classes (needing a husband to outlive, needing a fascinating physique, fatphobia) get handed all the way down to daughters. Many individuals have such painful and poisonous relationships with meals (girded by a capitalist industrial complicated that advantages from our self-hatreds), and problematic conceptions of “good” or “dangerous” meals, that I personally am making an attempt to untangle and unlearn.
“The world may be made to suit you” is a beautiful adage repeated all through this graphic novel. What else would you inform your 16-year-old self, if given the prospect?
“Hold all of your Sailor Moon playing cards and lip glosses and magazines as a result of someday you can be nostalgic for all of it and you’ll have to pay some huge cash to purchase this stuff again once more.”
Roz fantasizes about promenade, however has to make a tough alternative when she’s additionally invited to anti-prom. What would your very best anti-prom night time be like?
I’m a homebody, so cozy in mattress studying a ebook with a comfy cat and snacks subsequent to me seems like true bliss. BUT I’d additionally love a celebration with lots of glitter and sequins, all my associates, a drag and/or burlesque present, and a buffet. And Taylor Swift. The after occasion could be both at a Chinese language restaurant or a diner. Or each, one after the opposite.
Are you able to communicate extra on the presence of cats (expensive Millie!) all through this ebook?
I LOVE cats. SO MUCH. Millie is an amalgamation of my cat Foomy that my mother and I had after I was 16, and my present cat Coco (aka Bean). She is a mixture of Foomy’s sass and habits with Bean’s candy grey, fantastically rotund physique. I needed to make use of cats as a motif all through every timeline to affirm repetition within the characters’ lives, but additionally as an excuse to attract them. My cat (and my associate) have been a supply of assist and an anchor whereas I wrote this ebook. They’re my North Stars!