 Well, I can just say for starters that I'm just totally honored to be here as well. And Tee and I go way back as educators. We actually taught at the same school for immigrant youth. I didn't teach there, but I was an administrator there. So this is a really big, ever since I've known her, ever since I've known you, you've been working on this book. And it was so thrilling to hold it in my hands. And I'm just so happy that it's out in the world in this big, giant way. And we just are all honored to be in your presence. So I wanted to, I have a million questions for Tee, but we're going to talk for a little bit and then open it up to questions from you all. And then we can, you know, she can sign all your books. But I wanted to talk a little bit, I was actually hoping that for starters you could just give us a little bit of the story of this book and how it came to be. Bookmaking is a wild thing, especially when you were both illustrating and writing your book. I can't kind of imagine how long that took and how complicated that was. You had to do a ton of research, you had to do a ton of emotional, like have a lot of emotional conversations, do a lot of emotional research, I imagine, and as we've seen here. So I wonder if you could just tell us the story a little bit about how you kind of conceived of this book and how it came to be. Sure. I feel like I need to explain this bag first. My dress has no pockets, so I have, and I have, I'm just going to be wiping my eye occasionally, you know. There might be a snack in here too, I don't know. So the story of the book is kind of long. The short story is that I almost flunked out of my MFA in sculpture program because I was making work that people said was too narrative. So it just turned out that I was in the wrong school and I should have gone to a comic school, but they didn't really exist back then. I've always wanted to tell stories and I've always wanted to tell this particular story that I have so much access to because I felt like it was being done all wrong. So the book was conceived of as my revenge against all of the bad Vietnam War movies that my family grew up with. Yes. Yes. Generally, you know, I had a lot of complaints and I went into them in great detail in a literature review and like this academic thesis project that I did in grad school when I was in an education master's program. But as far as like then trying to make something better than what existed, I did it as an oral history project at first. And so I have like just hundreds of hours of interviews that I then faithfully transcribed and translated some of them. And then when it came to the presentation, you know, I did something that was a bit of a hybrid and there were photographs and some bad graphic design, but I knew that nobody was gonna read that except me and my thesis advisor and my loving family. And at the time I was inspired by a few seminal graphic novels that had made it out to the broader public, one being Mouse by Arts Beagleman, which is just an incredible work of art and history. And then also a little bit later came Persepolis by Marjan Satrapi. And the funny thing is that they looked so accessible and doable that I was like, oh, I could maybe teach myself how to do comics. But it turns out it's really hard to do comics. And so it took me forever, like 10 years to teach myself how to do comics. Cause there was, I'd already failed out of, well almost failed out of that one MFA program. I did another master's program so I could become a teacher. There was no way in hell I was gonna go back to school again for another master's. So I just had to teach myself. So the book kind of took a long time, not so much because there were that many pages or I took that long to draw but more like, I was learning how to create in this medium that I was using. And I made a lot of rookie mistakes in the beginning. So there are probably this many stacks of bad pages of comics that you will never see. There's a lot of rewriting. And when you write in Microsoft Word, you can just erase things and move them around. But when you do it in comics that you've drawn, like just changing one scene means you have to redraw everything that came before and after. So there was that. Yeah, that makes me like start to break out in a cold sweat. It's like imagining that process because it's hard enough when it's just words. So this in many ways, this book is a story about memory and about narrative. Like you said, who controls it? Who gets to create it? What the dominant narrative is? What emerges? And I'm curious as you sort of took the reins on this particular narrative that, as you mentioned, you'd sort of seen done so poorly and unjustly and in such a flat way in so many other instances. Like what were your own responsibilities there? And what was your own sense of sort of like how to do that right? Yeah, yeah. I guess it strikes me as like a tremendous responsibility. It is. And I think I was paralyzed for a long time by my thesis advisor who's a very like, you know, critical Marxist feminist who kept quoting Edward Said to be saying all forms of representation are violent. And I was like, oh, crap. I'll guess I'll just crawl into a hole now. Exactly, I'll just, I'm just gonna sit here and look at my pages and like be paralyzed. Cause you don't wanna do further violence to people who have been violently represented and then also lived violent lives, especially if they're your family and your loved ones. But it was actually becoming a mother, like the violent process of giving birth and how there's just really no stepping backwards from that. You just gotta, you gotta get that baby out. So it became a really great metaphor for writing a book and just jumping in even if you're not ready. And that's why page one is what it is. So, Viet Thanh Nguyen who has a tremendous blurb on this book and it's just a tremendous thinker and writer and friend of tease, I believe, talks about sort of being a minority writer writing for a majority audience or a minority artist or storyteller. And I guess I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the experience of that. And also the kind of, I feel like the sort of inherent injustice of that and the sort of power imbalance of that and the sort of fact that it seems to me that often the majority audience is demanding explanations and when it's the reverse that is not the expectation. I guess I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and your experience of that. It was something that I worked against the idea of being a minority writer and having to write for a majority audience means that you have to explain your culture and translate it and I didn't want to do that because I felt very strongly that my audience was also people like me and that I was writing for them as much as I was writing for you, yeah, or someone not like me. And so I suppose it was a shift in my own thinking about our society at large and so instead of writing for a majority I wrote for a plurality which maybe is the nicest way I could think of to even the playing field. And it's a subtle thing so you don't have to like, you know, I hit people over the head with it but I think it makes a difference and so it helped me stand my ground when it came to like not translating certain words in Vietnamese, like I don't translate the words for mother and father you have to figure that out and you would be surprised at how many people don't do that. I think that that's just their name. Right, right. But culture changes slowly and so if they get used to it in my book they'll see it again and they get used to seeing Vietnamese diacritical marks. They'll look for them in other places too. Here's to more books written for the plurality. Thank you for that. So your new project which was mentioned a little bit in your bio I'd love to talk a little bit about that. Your new project is, this book is very much a personal story and it's your personal story and that story of your family of course that the lens or the prism through which we're seeing this extended moment in history and we're kind of examining these social issues and the kind of challenges of building a new life in this often inhospitable place that likes to masquerade as a very hospitable place. That would be the United States that I'm talking about. And in your new project you're not interviewing your family members. It's still a very narrative driven book very much based in stories and individual people's experiences within larger systems and larger systems of injustice and inhospitality. And I'm curious if you could talk, I mean maybe you could talk a little bit about what that project is to the extent you're comfortable and then also talk a little bit about what the difference is sort of on the research side of things figuring out how you ask questions differently or do you when you're talking to your family versus people who are at one point strangers. I think in some ways it's very similar because now I'm just expanding my conception of family. So I'm still interviewing Southeast Asians for the most part and people who came over as refugees like me. Guys like the ones I grew up within high school. They're all formerly incarcerated. Many of them went to prison as juveniles with really long sentences. Like some of them got life without parole but then got paroled because they transformed themselves in prison. But then because of our immigration and criminal justice laws they got, once they finished their sentences they got transferred straight to immigration detention for deportation. So they went in as kids. They got out as middle aged men and I've gotten to know some of them really well over the course of the last year and so they've become like my family too. So it's funny cause I started this project thinking oh, I'm gonna do a less personal project and I'm gonna learn how to be a journalist. I bought a few couple of books. I'm not gonna go back to journalism school. So bought a couple of books. But I think that if I was doing this story for the times or something they would have taken me off the story long ago because I've crossed that journalistic boundary. Cause now they're like my brothers. But the thing is I don't know any other way to do this work without getting very personal about it. I needed to gain their trust cause these are really, really heavy stories for them to talk about. And it's on the one hand odd to feel like I'm gonna re-traumatize them by asking them to tell these stories. On the other hand, they are the carriers of these stories that are affecting thousands of people here and that nobody knows about unless somebody says something. And when I started the work last fall there was very much a sense of shame at least in the Vietnamese American community around formerly incarcerated people or people in detention. People didn't wanna admit that they had a family member in trouble. So if you can't even admit that there's a problem how are you gonna get the help to address it? And I found that over the course of doing advocacy work and finding more people who are willing to talk about it there's been a sea change in the community. And now we're seeing like, actually just a couple of days ago we were up in the state capitol in front of the governor's office and there was an assembly of over a hundred people Southeast Asians singing, chanting, demanding that their stories be heard. It's been really exciting. So I feel like I'm a journalist too, although an accidental one I would say. And is that how you feel that you're sort of an accidental journalist? No, you're an intentional journalist. You're more of a journalist than me. Oh. I'm a fake journalist. Well okay, so this is exactly where I'm going which I think one of the great fallacies of journalism and this is a very touchy, so like bear with me here because this treads into really dangerous territory but I think a fallacy of journalism is that it's possible to be completely objective and of course there's a gradient between that and everything's fake and nothing's real and there's no such thing as fact. But I'm curious, there is some expectation of an attempt to be objective and so there's this idea in journalism too that activism or advocacy is not maybe diametrically opposed to journalism but that there's this real wall between those two things and I guess I'd love to hear more about your sense in your own work but also just in general the people that you read and the stories that you're reading, what do you think about that line? Is that a fair line? Is it an important line? I think that there can be false equivalencies that come up when you try to play that objective journalist thing the reality is you're doing a lot of these stories pretty quickly if you're trying to turn it out for the news so you just grab one person from this side and one person from that side and if you haven't gone deeply into the issue you might be giving unfair weight to one voice compared to another. For me, I take a page from Howard Zinn as a historian and just wear my bias up front so my politics are very clear if you follow me online and I'm clearly advocating for the guys in detention and to treat them humanely but having just gone through my first California Board of Pearl hearings I was able to hear from victims' families for the first time and it's, I gotta say it's heartbreaking to hear both sides and then to also hear the dehumanizing language that comes from the district attorney's offices when they go up there to automatically argue against someone's parole or commutation. But I think it's also important to weigh all of those different perspectives and voices because these are difficult questions about crime and wrongdoing and harm and then what do we do about it? So it seems fitting that it's not easy that there are a lot of gray areas and it depends on whose side you're looking at. So I suppose my job as a storyteller is to do my due diligence and listen to as many sides as possible and then also to listen to the perspectives that aren't taking sides, but that are just experiencing something really difficult. Yeah, it's like the gray area, the place to go. That's where we need to be existing. Yeah, and this idea too, right, that there's not a direct overlap between justice and objectivity, I would say, when it comes to sort of writing people's stories perhaps. Right. Or this sort of journalistic blind objectivity of I just write down what the words that were told to me. Yeah, it's a lot like if you're just a law and order person and you say, well, this is what's legal, well, what's legal is often not the same as what's right. So in terms of portrayals, I would love to talk a little bit about portrayals of immigrants, of forced migrants, of migrant communities, and there's of course, and this has always often, this has long been true, always been true, that we use dehumanizing language for the newcomers and for migrants coming to this country since even before this country was a country. And at the same time, I think we sometimes let the left off the hook, right? We were talking about this beforehand. So I'd love if you could talk a little bit about the kind of flattening of what and who immigrants are and the sort of, I don't know, narrative or image that we're casting forth about who migrants and immigrants are coming, particularly in like this moment in time. Right. The numbers are always an interesting thing. When you present people as a massive moving object, it's really easy to freak out the nativists. Because then you're, I mean, you're automatically equating people, humans like yourself with something other than human like cockroaches or some sort of pest, right? That's scary in great numbers. Like a caravan of migrants, boatload of rats, you know? So taking the scale down to something more intimate is I think really crucial, giving people names. And so that's really why I didn't do a broad sweeping thing about Vietnamese refugees. I did it about my family because that was my way to Trojan horse in a discussion of the issues and the history. And by giving you a chance to get to know these six people, you could extrapolate their experience into a better understanding of the hundreds of thousands of people who went through the exact same thing. My family's not special, they're just an example. And then I suppose the order in which you reveal information is really important. There's only one page of photographs that I use in the whole book and it is our refugee photos. Anybody who is Vietnamese or went through a refugee camp in that time probably has their own pictures that look pretty similar. I deliberately saved those two almost to the end of the book before you see them because I wanted you to get to know them as real people before you saw them as boat people. But it was still important for you to see them just for a split second as those people because you might recognize them from the newspaper. But sometimes like you're saying about the left, sometimes we overuse those sad photos like we do it all the time in our fundraising, like save the starving child, like pull out your wallet because it's hard to see those photos. But when you use them like that, those people also cease to be people. And it's easy to romanticize what a refugee is or what a person in need is. And then it's confusing when they show up and they're an asshole, you know? How can both things be true? So another thing that I was trying to do in my book was to paint people as like complex human beings and that Vietnamese refugees can be extraordinary or ordinary or total jerks just like you and me. Something that I have been thinking about, my book is about unaccompanied minors and I sort of started writing it right before 2014 when there was this like massive news sort of cycle frenzy that then fell away even though the people and the migration didn't fall away. And then the summer, I'm thinking of this because what you were saying about the images, like the summer, we were all like very rightfully outraged by family separation. Images have power, narratives have power. But what I'm curious about and what I'm sort of like become the sort of like substrate of my or almost like the meta outrage that I have is that like we can only pay attention for a certain period of time and then our attention, like we find the next shiny thing to be outraged about. And I'm curious like how do you think we keep our attention in a sustained way? Like how do we do that? How do we do that as individuals? And then how do those of us who are sort of helping tell the stories, how do we encourage that to happen? I think in the same way that me, this Vietnamese refugee kid knows the story of the Mayflower and the first Thanksgiving, like that propaganda was taught to me. So I mean stories, like again, I'm not gonna romanticize stories. Stories have the power to create collective memory and make complex things concrete. But they can also be used to distort history as well. So it's a powerful tool that we wield. And I think if we use it for good, it can be a great thing to help people make sense of the really quickly moving news that operates on this 24 hour cycle where it's suddenly something that was so important two weeks ago is now cliched or not even paid attention to or given time. Stories can help us remember the wise and the main people and help us go back to fix the problems that we were freaked out about. But then we maybe forgot about later so that they don't compound into things that we can no longer fix down the road. I mean, I guess at the same time that we're trying to do this good with stories, there are stories being woven, right, about the same things that we're trying to fight for. So I don't know, it's this ongoing battle, light and dark, epic. So in this unbelievable accomplishment of showing and telling your own story and the story of your family members or 99% of the story of your family members since mom's here, you just do such a beautiful job and I have sort of such, I actually teach when I teach writing, I always teach when I'm teaching scene, which is the thing that writing students struggle most with. People love to say, we would always, we often, every time this happened and no one's showing scene and like you can't do that and this is so much of this is scene, right? And so I always teach your book when I'm teaching scene and it's such, you make things come so alive and one of the reasons I start with teaching your book is because it's making writers see the tools that you're using that are not just words but it's this sort of, you're able to basically use image and use perspective and use point of view in ways that writers don't think they have but do have but what we don't have is our ability to be able to draw and you have that and I just from like a craft nerd's perspective would love to understand when you decide to use image and when you decide to use words, certain sections of your book are very text heavy and certain sections almost have no text at all or it's section, you know, short sections and I'm curious like how do you balance that? How do you make those decisions? What kind of craft element rises to the top? When I first started the words did come a lot easier than the images and then there's certain images. Really, the words came easier. They did, yeah. Well, they're a lot faster. Yeah. I'm just like, but you have this secret, like it's not secret, but this thing that I wish I had, you have this talent of, you have this secret weapon. Yes. My secret, oh, drawing? Yeah, that. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, I drew a lot as a kid and then I actually went, you know, I double majored like a good immigrant kid in like legal studies and art. So I learned to draw the traditional way, like I can bust out a Gallian art or Da Vinci copy like nobody's business, but it's not very useful for comics because that would take too much time. So I guess the drawing was harder because I had to figure out how to do it for this medium. And it turns out when you're drawing for comics, you're actually making sequential images tell a story. So in the sequencing of things, you do have to really break down scenes into really like concrete actions, like first he picks up, you know, first I am looking at the computer and then I hear my dad walk in and then I turn and then, you know, then I open the book. So I suppose like there's some built in like things about like creating images and sequence that forced me to unpack memory in this very specific way. Otherwise when I talk about stuff, I would, I totally do that. We would always and yeah, yeah, compound memories into things. Let's see what else. The rookie mistakes that I talked about earlier on. Yeah, tell us that. Yeah, so don't do these things, right? If you're doing comics, like make a really amazing illustration that takes up the whole page and then just sort of float some text around it. I mean, honestly. Actually, tell us why not? Well, okay, because I don't get it. Right, it looks really nice, right? And, you know, I'll be honest, I didn't redraw all of my earlier pages. So there are a few of those in here and I left some of them in because sometimes you can get away with it because it slows people down and they just want to sort of gaze at the art. But you have to do that intentionally. Like if a person reads your entire book, like gazing at every page, like it's a work of art, it's a bit of a timeless experience and they never really get into the plot where they want to turn the page and see what happens next. And it's a bit of a quandary because if you're doing your job well, then people like read your book in an hour and then they think, wow, that was so simple and comics are so great for kids. And you're like, no. Like what you just like, that just took me 10 years. So the thing about comics is like, we're like the floor tile layers of the literary world. Like we just lay the floor down and if we do a good job, you just walk right over it like nothing. But if we do a bad job, you're tripping. And the secret is to make this experience that draws people in so that they want to read it so fast that they just like gloss over all of your work. So for me, like the language came easy but it was also a process of editing out like all of the descriptive language. To let the images do the description work. And then oftentimes the language would do, the words would not match the image on purpose. For example, chapter two, I'll give you a little bit of insight into chapter two, which is sort of like the thesis chapter and the one that I rewrote the most. I was having a really hard day in the studio and I could not figure out in my thumbnails what I was gonna draw to go with this text that I had written. And I was having such a hard time that I went out to take a walk in my neighborhood in Berkeley. And then I just started drawing the things that I was looking at while I was thinking and then I had it. Then I had the images and sequence of my walk, of my experience going on this walk and the thoughts that I had ended up being the captions. And for me, it was like, oh, it was like a Terence Malick movie. You know where like the audio narration does not match the images? That's like life. Like what's going on in here does not match what's going on out there, especially if you're like a displaced person who's not feeling, you know, real connected with America. So I guess like I figured out something that day that helped me figure out the rest of the book about this weird medium of comics. I'm thinking of this sort of whole page or just a little bit of text, like in this idea of this place where you're sort of pausing and sometimes you want that for a fact. I'm thinking that's like that like white space in text, like this kind of like you're taking a breath and kind of having a moment with what you've just seen in red. Yeah, absolutely. And you can do that over the course of a two page spread to with the angles that you choose. So if you wanna finish a scene at the bottom right hand corner, it's really easy just to like pull the camera out. And that signals for a person that the scene has just ended so that it can turn the page and be ready for the next one. Yeah, the scene I always teaches Bo in hiding from the, hiding in like essentially a whole underground. And it's sort of, I'm not gonna remember the words, but it sort of starts with this, you know, that these swimming under, they have to swim underground and then he has to stay in this whole alone. And you just do this thing where like for several, what do you call it, boxes? What do you call it? Panels. Panels, thank you. For several panels, there's actually no words. It's just, you know, it's something like, you know, you don't say anything about his emotions or that he's afraid, but you just say, you know, the only way he could see daylight is he would look up and through a little hole. And that is how he could tell whether it was day and then it's like, you slowly get closer into his face panel after panel after panel until you're just at his eyes and then it comes back out and then night again. And it's just so beautifully done that this is not a question, it's just a fan girl moment. It's just so beautifully done that you're conveying emotion. Another thing that happens a lot in writing is we do a lot of like saying what the emotions are and there's so much emotion packed in there and all the words you've said is he's looking through a hole. That's how he's telling whether it's day or night and you're kind of panning in and panning out. And so I guess a question I do have is, how do you decide where to spend time and then where to kind of like move along through the story? Like how, especially in your research, like I imagine, I don't know, I felt like this in my research that like, you know, my book is maybe like 3% of what I learned if that, right? And so like, how do you decide what to keep and what to cut and how brutal and heartbreaking is the cutting process for you? It's pretty brutal. Yeah, the amount of research that you do for a nonfiction project is like the iceberg, right? And then the book is just the tip of it. But I feel like that's how it should be, right? And I guess like everything I ended up keeping was in service of the story. And so that's why I say it's like 99% true because it's not a documentation. It's a story that I created for you. And a story is a little bit like a garden path that I wanted you to walk through. And to create that experience, I had to leave some things out so that you wouldn't get distracted from the story that I wanted to tell. There are multiple side stories that I had to sacrifice. And partly it's because I don't know, it was my first time around and I didn't know that the page count that the publisher gave me was real. So, you know, I thumbnailed this much longer book and then I was like, is that page count real? And they're like, yeah. So I had to cut like 20% of the book. And in comics, there's no clean cuts. So I did what you did last night in your writing class. I actually like tricked myself into doing adult arts and crafts with like a pair of scissors and a glue stick just because it's such a painful thing to do. Like, so I was like literally cutting up my panels and putting them on different pages. But after the first pass, that gets really messy. So then I had to scan them in Photoshop then you can, you know, do a better job of resizing things. But it hadn't really occurred to me too that you're working on a page. Like you actually want a story to maybe end at a particular place on the page that had never occurred to me until right now, which I guess brings me to this idea of comics as this sort of sweet thing for kids or this lesser art or sort of this like fun weirdo thing. And like this is high complex literary and visual art. So can we just like one more time? This is such an amazing. For comics. Yeah, for comics and for tea. But like, how much do you hear that? Like how much are people poo-pooing this art form to you or around you? How much do you feel that in the zeitgeist? Is that shifting? Is that changing? I think so. I'm in this weird place where I get to talk to people who don't really read comics very much. And so I feel a little bit like an ambassador. And so this is why I tell the thing about the floor tile laying. You know, it wasn't too long ago. Like actually I remember when I was teaching high school in New York and I was in the social studies department. I was trying to tell people what an amazing book, what an amazing text Persepolis would be for learning history. And I remember another history teacher kind of looking at it and just sliding it back to me across the table. Like why are you showing me this kid's book? And things have come a long way since then. I mean now like my comic book is like required reading for a lot of university freshmen. So it's nice that like there's a greater acceptance. I mean, I will agree with librarians or teachers who like are trying to get kids to learn how to read. I do take out all of the descriptive language in my book, so you're not gonna get any of that there. But you will get story, you will get history, you will get structure and character development and all that stuff too. And I remember reading Mouse. I don't remember, it was sometime in middle school. And I have to say it was like one of the first story texts that I was given where I felt like I was let into a world of adult ideas through real history. Do you know what I mean? And so like even though there maybe wasn't as much text in there as there would have been in another book, like it was a deeply serious book and I sort of felt honored and like I was being asked to rise to the occasion to this book. And so it's also a pathway into books about really serious historical, political, social issues. Yeah, and being a stickler about whether it's words or words and pictures is sort of missing the point of the content, right? Exactly, yeah. So you are a teacher. You were a public school teacher for many, many years. I got to see you in action. I got to see to build a school while teaching in the school, which is kind of- It was hard, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, those were wild days. And I was on the outside during those times. No, Lauren was in the trenches with me. I wasn't teaching. We broke up a lot of fights. Rolling on the ground kind of fights. Back when we were young. Yeah, but I'm curious like how does your, how did or does your teaching influence your art and how did your art influence your teaching? Like what is the relationship and reverberation between- It's a good one. It's a really good one. I mean, it's the hardest, it's like the craziest job to have when you're trying to write a book because there's just no time and you have no energy when you get home from rolling around on the ground, breaking up fights on your lunch break, right? But like the things that I had to think about teaching in particular in our school, which was like 100% English language learner of all different levels in like 40 something different countries, right? Is that you had to really differentiate for different types of learners and for different languages and for different life experiences. You really had to consider your audience and that was just hugely educational for me trying to write this text to a plurality. So I guess I like very deliberately put different kinds of access points into the story. And then also, you know, I also took some ethnic studies classes and I was kind of like I have a little, I'm a little bit anti when it comes to writing for, you know, an imagined white audience. And so I guess I could have been like many of my peers, they're a little bit resentful of having to explain their culture or explain themselves too much. And they're like, that's not my job. You need to go learn that. But I guess being a public high school teacher, I'm like, all right, I'll volunteer to explain a little bit because somebody's gotta do it. And so like while I know that, like there are many younger Vietnamese American folks who grown when there's another book that deals with the Vietnam War. I'm also like, yeah, but somebody's gotta own that history so that we own it together. And it's better that some of us write that than leave it all to Ken Burns, you know. So when thinking about, this is the last question I'll ask before we open it up, but when thinking about kind of how we reclaim or how one reclaims narratives of your and kind of before they become calcified and it's almost like too late, right? It's never too late, but the longer we wait and the longer we keep telling ourselves the same stories about things that happen, the harder it is to shift, right? Or no, do you know how to agree with that? I don't know, I think it can go both ways. I mean, in some ways I was like, why am I writing about this war that went, like it was over 40 years ago. So long ago, why don't I write about something more recent? And then at the same time, I benefit from having that much distance from it. It's kind of like distilling a fine whiskey. You get perspective over time too. But I mean, like, you know, we're also still churning out books about World War II every year. Oh yeah. I mean, there are like a, there are thousands, thousands every year and then maybe like five Vietnam war ones. And then like maybe one of them is by someone who was Vietnamese. So I guess my question then is how do we, how do we make it so that the stories we're telling about the present are told from a diversity of perspectives are grounded in sort of in plurality, right? In, outside of the, of a dominant, how do we avoid a dominant and unfair narrative kind of emerging from the present? Like what do we do now for this, for what will become history? I think we have to recognize the power that we have as the storyteller. Even like I have a lot of power now that I can abuse. I can, I have to, like in my work now with like Southeast Asian community, I gotta recognize actually that like, you know, in the Vietnamese community, I'm just gonna be blunt that like Vietnamese people or the white people of the Southeast Asian community, and like I have to own that and I have to shut up sometimes. And I also have to like do my homework and like understand the conflicts between our communities and the ways in which like I can be a jerk just by not knowing. So, you know, I try to be mindful and uplift voices that are heard less than my own and not always like, you know, feel like I have to be the one telling the story. So I try to make space, make space. Yeah, let other, let the most impacted people speak first. Thank you. So we have time for a few questions and I mostly followed this rule, but I would just like to say that if you could actually ask a question, I'm sure everyone has wonderful things to say and this is a moment in time in which we all wanna say all the things we feel, but we're here to ask tea questions and this is an opportunity. So if you have a question, you can raise your hand and a microphone will come to you. I have a question. When you commented about Ken Burns, we can't just leave it to Ken Burns. And then another perspective is, well, at least he's trying to tell it. So I'm wondering, the implication is that the Vietnamese have been prevented from telling their own story and I'm wondering what your perspective on that is. Why do you think there's so, why has the story been told so seldom by people that were closer to it as your thesis is? I think that we just have fallen into patterns of like handing the mic to the same people over and over again. It's very easy to do that. Like I did an experiment in, the principal in our high school did an experiment where she went to, she followed one cohort to all of their different classes and then she asked the teachers afterwards, like how do you think that you call on your students? And we would all like, we all imagined ourselves to be very democratic about it. And she's like, actually, you all call on the same five eager students in every single class. And that was very revealing to us. It taught us a lot about how we needed to change the way that we look to our students. And so, for a long time, we've deferred to white male historians to tell us the story of the Vietnam War. And so it's just a pattern that you have to break. And then there's some really egregious offenses that I want to point out too. Like the apocalypse now, for example, is like this artistically incredible movie that is quite problematic in its depiction of a war, a country, an entire culture as just the backdrop for a white man's psychosis. And then, full metal jacket has this scene where you hear Nancy Sinatra singing, these boots are made for walking and this very skinny prostitute comes and does the most horrific parody of Vietnamese accent and while she's coming onto two very normal acting white male soldiers. And you can just try to imagine like from my perspective, if this is the only representation of a Vietnamese woman in the stuff that's available to you, you're gonna wanna make something else. So, Ken Burns doesn't do that, thank goodness, but Ken Burns should probably also be put out there offered with an assortment of other voices to balance it out, yeah. So, I just have a question. So, over the past, during the decade while you were working on this, you were working and had two kids? Just one. One kid? Only one. So you're a mom and working and making a book and just as a mom, just curious how. How did you get? How? I have the same question. I don't know. It was hard, you know, that's why it took so long. So, you're always gonna do something badly and I suppose it's easy to give up on the thing that's just for you. So, the trick for me was to tell everybody that I was working on this book so that I would be so ashamed if I quit, that I couldn't quit. So, because I'm also an immigrant, so yeah. I just wanted to thank you. The book made me really reflect on my life as a parent and a child of immigrants. My question is about the colors that you used. You know, it seems like it's mostly ink and then kind of like a salmon colorway. Why did you use that? It's cheap. In offset printing, it's really cheap to do black and white plus one spot color. They run the one, they mix this like ink for you that's like a paint and then they do the whole book in that color and then they run every page through again to get the black line art on there. And it was something that we figured out kind of late in the process. The budget was created for a black and white book and I was like, how about color? So, I had to figure out something that was gonna be inexpensive to make but then I had to choose the exact Pantone color that would work for the book and I went through a lot of different tests on different kinds of paper before I found the one that reminded me of like the dust that comes off of bricks. But just to clarify, the, it is cheap to do, what is cheap is to do one color. It's not that that color was particularly cheap. No, it wasn't that color. There wasn't like a deal on that color. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, go. Just wanted to make sure. Hi, so as an English teacher, I would like to thank you for giving me a book that I would consider teaching. One of my students already read it and loved it. But my question has to do with one of my favorite panels which is one with a father's long shadow and I just wanted to hear your process of coming up with that. I don't know, sometimes an image just births itself in your mind, like Athena fully formed coming out of her dad's head. Some images just come to me in my sleeping hours and they need to find a home somewhere. And so, I guess as I went along, the words and the images started playing together more and so I would come up with sequences all at once. But in the early days, it was either some image like that that was very strong or some text. And then after a while, they played together better. Hi, I'd love to know your siblings' reaction to the story. And did you feel you needed to check in with them in terms of your depiction of how you portrayed them in your novel? Yes. Mostly my parents though because my siblings got all the fun parts. My parents had to deal with me painting them with warts and all. And I self-published the first three chapters so that I could learn how the comics industry works. And chapter three is the one that's about my childhood and being terrified of my father. In fact, the chapter used to be called Terror. And I wanted to put it out with chapter four that gives how terrifying my father's childhood was to give it context, but I drew too slow. So I only had chapter three printed for the next like comics festival. I did not show my father, but he read it anyway and didn't talk to me for a couple of weeks. And we didn't have a fight about it. It's more like he went through whatever he went through quietly. And then he came back to me and was very generous and was like, okay. But I disagree with you on this one memory, that painting of a naked lady. I don't remember that she was completely naked. I would like you to fix that. So I just painted some grass in front of her privates and got off pretty easy, but I learned my lesson that I should show my parents the rough drafts. And so I did that for the subsequent chapters and it actually rewarded me because they would see their stories turned into comics and then remember more. So that they would tell me more and then I would have to edit to add all this new information. I thought that I was giving them veto power, but they never exercised it. So it ended up being like a really great collaborative process where I got their permission along the way and it was a sneaky way to spend quality time with my parents. Hi, so we all know that, I'm here. We all know that this story is very personal to you. So I'm just curious to hear more about how do you feel like your sense of self transformed, throughout this process of making the book? In other words, like how is the Tee Boo before the book and after the book different? I'm much happier. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I have no problem saying that the book was therapeutic. It was, the book, it's not one of those like celebrity memoirs or anything and it's not like a memoir of a person who accomplished all of these amazing things. It was a memoir of a person who had a lot of questions and the book was a vehicle for asking and exploring those questions, much like therapy. So I guess much like therapy can be the process of examining and figuring out your jumbled life experience and creating a coherent narrative out of it. That's a lot like the challenge of creating a story for people to read, right? And then there's like the all the unexpected stuff sharing it with strangers and finding connections. That's been really amazing. Thank you both for this really engaging conversation. The word empathy comes up a lot in relation to your book and I was wondering what the process of drawing your parents over and over again at these various moments in their life, what was that like, you know, thinking was that were you able to put yourself in their shoes? Like did that help you understand what they went through? Yeah, yeah. It taught me to ask better questions instead of asking them to analyze their experience. Like what was the most difficult thing you went through? I would just ask them simple questions that I had to draw them. Like what were you wearing? What were your shoes like? How did you do your hair when you were this age? And you know, maybe look at their photographs differently. How did you walk? Like how did you swim? What would you wear when you went swimming? Those were really basic questions about their lived experience. And yeah, it was very much a process of putting myself in their shoes that I think like helped the book get richer. And then like just the act of drawing is like an act of love, right? Like there's a tenderness that I felt for them while I was drawing them over and over again, especially as kids. And then also actually surprisingly drawing myself as a kid was an interesting act of love as well. And that was also therapeutic. I would, I highly suggest this form of therapy to anybody who's angry with anybody. You just draw them as a kid over and over again. It's great. You'll love them again. You'll love them again. Why did your mother feel more comfortable talking to your husband than to you? That's how it seemed like in the book to me. I was very moved by her by the way. She's great, yeah. I don't know, maybe I'm sassy or maybe I was a jerk. I try to be self-conscious about how I must have presented myself when I was like a know-it-all 20-something-year-old in grad school. And how- With a recording device. With a recording device. So yeah, that was just to show that you have multiple strategies. Like I know many people now are like wanting to ask their parents about their lives and they come up against blockages sometimes where parents don't want to talk about things or they don't know how to talk about things. So I showed that as one way to get around things like maybe your mom likes to talk to your husband better. Just sit in the back of the car, turn on the play button. Turn on the record button. Get out of the way a little bit. It's kind of the art of war, this interviewing thing. Hi, I have a question about did this book, was this book therapeutic to your mom and dad given their relationships and especially during the times when, during the boat escape where your mom did most of the work and when she went to work and your dad stayed home and the conclusion towards in which they were divorced? Did it help explain their relationship? The thing about memoir is that it seems like it's a tell all but it's really not. So there are many things that I did not include in the book because they didn't need to be there and I felt it unnecessary to re-traumatize my parents. So there's just enough there to tell the story of refugees and immigrants and displacement but it's definitely not like an expose or anything by any means. Great, two more questions. Thank you. Hi, T. I was your dad. Hi, dad. Now we have this relationship. Yeah, totally. Actually, when you asked about who would play the dad I really jumped at it because I really like your depiction of your father because my dad was from Vietnam too, it's always my mom. And in it, in the book you wrote about him and how he was kind of haunted by his experiences in the past and that's why inside a closed room, dark all the time, smoking cigarettes, that's my dad. And there's gotta be a point that you realize that your father was haunted by his past. How old were you and what made you realize that? Cause I realized that later on in my life too but I wanna know what your experience was like. And I think I knew it when I was a kid but I didn't understand it cause I was too traumatized by it. And so I guess like, I don't know, the past and the present do kind of conflate, don't they? There's like your adult self looking at the past and trying to understand yourself as a kid and trying to understand your dad at the time and trying to understand your dad now. So I guess that's what I was trying to get across in that one page where there's like four panels and we're both at, I'm at different ages, examining him and he ends up being a little boy smoking at the same table. I don't know, it's an interesting thing that can happen in a book and maybe that's where the therapy comes from is that you can revisit these like specific moments that carry all of that baggage and I don't know, there's also something about drawing yourself into it too that like helps you get some perspective and see, oh, that's why it was traumatic cause I was little, like it's so basic, right? But that's the thing about trauma is like these are our family members, these are the closest people to us and yet they were the people who were also able to hurt us the most. And that is something that maybe our parents' generation wouldn't have been able to get in a memoir. Thank you. I think that's maybe one of the best reasons why, like we also have to tell our own stories cause we understand our wounds in ways that other people cannot. Okay, I think, was there one more question? Two more. Two more questions and then that is it. Hi T, I was struck by your entire book but actually mostly by the last page where you said I think maybe my son can be free. Can you talk about what that means for you? It means that he can feel joy without feeling guilty that he doesn't attach the feeling of love and appreciation for his parents with like a knowledge of their pain. Like I didn't wanna wear my pain all the time for my son. I guess I just wanted him to be a kid, you know? So it turns out that he's like this middle-class kid from Berkeley and like actually my biggest fear is that he turns out to be a spoiled brat. Okay, but he's not, he's like the best kid ever. He's like my favorite. He has a book deal. Yeah, this kid has a book deal, okay. He's 12 years old? Yeah, he's 12 going on 13. He and I are gonna be illustrating a children's book written by Viet Thanh Nguyen and his son. So I mean, their intergenerational trauma is very minimal. Final question. Hi, thanks so much, T, for this amazing graphic novel. You know, I've read Mouse and Persepolis. The best we could do moved me to tears and it awakened in me something that I didn't realize was there. And I have a two-part question. The first part, so as someone making his foray into writing comics, I was curious, what is your writing process? When do you write, where do you write? What are the things that inspire you to write? And could you tell me a little bit about that? And the second part was, what are the major works that you're looking to right now? And which works would you recommend people read as follow-ups to kind of, to get in your head and get inside your world? I'm the worst at reading these days. Oh, it's terrible. I should have things to tell you to read, but man, I read my phone so much. I'm just like everybody else. I sucked into the 24-hour news cycle and it's terrible for my art. I read poetry now to clean my head because less words is good for comics. The worst thing you can do to yourself when you're writing comics, particularly non-fiction comics, is start with an essay that you wrote that has like 5,000 words because that's gonna become like on novella by the time you draw it all. So you should probably start with something that's like half a page long in text if you wanna turn it into a comic. Less is more. Look at things that are visual. Also look at things that are sequential. I love movies. Movies are so good. The one thing that we can't do is sound at the same time as seeing. So when you're opening a scene and some music plays that does things to your heartstrings that we can't do in the same way in comics, but we can do other things better because in a comic you can flip back and forth so a reader actually has like much more agency over how they read. So I guess, and I'm giving you some advice that I do not take myself these days, but playing is a really important part of the process. Really just like playing with the medium and seeing what it does. Try doing something like a 24 hour comic or just try doing something that's one panel and then three panels and then two pages before you decide to do a graphic novel. And again, I'm laughing because I did not listen to any of this advice, but I paid for it and you don't need to. Okay, I just wanna end with one. That was the last question, yes? Okay, I just want to end kind of on a note of action in the spirit of activism and also in the spirit of like this is a book that the San Francisco Public Library is encouraging everyone in San Francisco to read. That's such a beautiful concept, this idea of all of us sort of, all of us, many of us simultaneously engaging in such a powerful story. And so I'm curious in the spirit of sort of like local attention and activism and justice and sort of just like the sort of daily big pain and little pain of these days. I'm curious if you could give us some advice on ways or if you could encourage some sort of action that we should be taking locally in pursuit of some form of justice, particularly related to the issues that you write about and that you're writing about now. So many to choose from. I'm gonna go really big. Go big, go big girl. Clay, I would say there are two major elephants in the room. Our country is like garbage fire right now. So that's why I'm having a hard time picking just one thing that I want you to do something about. But because there are so many things that are, like so many fires to put out, I feel like that there are two big elephants in the room that we don't talk about enough. And one is climate change. Like it's happening and it's gonna affect everybody. And it's a social justice and racial justice issue. Exactly, and it, yeah. And we need to really expand our imaginations about how climate change will impact us all. But the thing is it's gonna impact our poorest first. So the other elephant in the room for me is what are we gonna let all the poor people die first? So wealth inequality is the other big elephant in the room that I think that we really need to address on a larger scale than we do. We're in second gilded age where we have, we're literally stepping over homeless people to get to where we're going in the Bay Area. And there are things that we can do to mitigate that that are on the ballot, so you should definitely vote. But I think like longer term, we need to find solutions to those two things that affect all of the next level things that we may be fighting on. Yes. So please let's give a huge thank you to Tee. Yay. And take her wisdom and her beauty and her art and her ideas and her calls to action out in the world. Thank you, everyone. And I think Tee will be signing both. And so will Lauren, we have Lauren's book here too and it's incredible. Thank you. So let's hang out here. We're just gonna be each other's hype girls forever. Yes.