I’ve always wanted to do my own version of Anatomy of a Scene because there is SO MUCH thinking and detail that goes behind a movie, an essay, a story. I’ve made peace with the simultaneous beauty and limitation of writing, which is that I won’t be able to upload my exact thoughts into your brain. But in honor of the 14 hours I will spend this weekend at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, where I will sell physical copies of this comic (which was a mini-grant winner!), I wanted to use this platform to talk about the thinking and experiences that went into this piece as if I am an Oscar-winning director and you, an audience who cares. (Humor me, please! Thank you.)
Uncle is a comic about a movie about a story about a memory. The story follows a writer-director, Nadine Zhou, who “recreates” a trip with her uncle that never happened. The story jumps between multiple timelines, including Nadine’s memories, her uncle’s stories, film production, and even the movie itself. In the mini comic, Nadine’s story takes on new life as she forms professional and personal relationships with the actors and her crew. Using story structure, drawing style, and the underlying backdrop of the cloud, I hope this comic questions the boundaries between an artist’s life and their artwork.
The Scene
The Anatomy
I Need You!
Making art is so damn lonely! I say that with access to the best writing groups, communities, and friends on Earth. (You guys are the best.) Still, the bulk of artmaking for me, the writing, the drawing, the THINKING, is done alone.
As a newbie screenwriter and comic essayist first, I'm fascinated by collaborative art mediums where everyone plays a small but integral role in telling a story. When I wrote the script for and produced a low budget short film titled Introducing Mimi with my friend and the director Emai this July, I was shocked by how the story took on new life when entrusted with the cast and crew. Even though the script was the “blueprint,” people built a world I could never have imagined on my own. The character that I had based on myself (Mimi… Amy…) finally became her own complete person under the care of our talented, hilarious actress Juliette Lin and Emai’s discerning eye for strong female characters, and their experiences with Mandarin. The same will happen for Nadine in Uncle. She is me, my dreams and fears, but her story will shape her into someone else, hopefully. It may be more difficult without teammates.
Thin Air
I started to believe I could write fiction in my senior year of undergrad, when Alexander Chee gave a virtual writing workshop with the Tufts Asian Student Coalition. He told us to write what we did that day and then turn it into third person. I always believed that stories were pulled out of thin air. Maybe some authors are able to do that, but I find it impossible to write about anything I’m not an expert on. At the very least, life is a starting point and I find the story’s possibilities come from the unspoken fears and unfulfilled desires.
But I think there’s also a danger to this. The week after filming Introducing Mimi, I jetted off to Wuhan, China, where I spent two and a half weeks with my dad’s side of the family. Up until then, I had never interacted with my relatives without my parents or with a fully developed brain—that is, as an adult. My cousin delivered me from the airport straight to a smoky restaurant under my grandma’s apartment, where my stoic uncle ordered an exorbitant amount of food. My grandma fawned over me while estimating how much time she had left to live, and my cousin’s baby girl played on the side. It was a scene out of an A24 Asian American coming-of-age movie. I saw the cinematic black bars constricting the moment. So I promised myself I wouldn’t write or draw—essentially, romanticize—any of the trip because there’s no genre or narrative structure in a complicated family, just real people and flaws. (Yet here I am.)
The least movie-like part of my trip was getting to know my uncle. The best meals I had in China were the ones he cooked shirtless in the kitchen with no AC, and I was surprised whenever a bout of giggles would interrupt his stoic expression. My uncle isn’t perfect, as most people you get to know aren’t. My family has a short temper and we prefer silence over honest communication. Except when I tried to buy a size small souvenir T-shirt in the mountains and my uncle shouted over me, “No, that will never fit you!”
My uncle and I clicked over those homemade dinners where my uncle shared stories about his travels from his youth. I’m used to hearing about mid-life crises from men of that age, but my uncle spoke with the romanticism of someone who had properly seized the day, like a real storyteller. I promised him I would visit again so we could revisit the places he remembers with such awe. His descriptions of “a land so high you could pluck a bundle of cloud from the sky” were so lovely that I couldn’t stop myself from sketching a story in my notes app, based on my hopes of returning and my fear that I’d never be back to turn this memory and story into something real. But how real is a memory anyways? Therein, the main character Nadine becomes obsessed with the difference between what’s real and what’s tangible. Nadine and I become obsessed with the cloud.
To Touch a Cloud
I was able to catch the last performance of the autobiographical one-person show, Did You Eat 밥먹었니 , written and performed by Zoë Kim. My friend Maria and I were moved by Kim’s ability to make us laugh and cry, as she acted out her childhood to adulthood relationship with her emotionally and physically abusive parents. It’s one thing to write about these experiences, I can’t imagine being the actor in her story, embodying the characters night after night, and reopening healed wounds over and over. To the standing ovation of her closing night audience, Kim bursted into tears.
There is no sense to this mess that we call life. I’ve long been insecure about my propensity to fit my life into square panels with black and white illustrations, but Kim shows us that this process is necessary for survival, not dishonest.
In the essay, “Mere Belief” by memoirist, Sallie Tisdale, she differentiates the two truths of people’s memories— the historical truth and the narrative truth.
“The many proponents of narrative theory today seem to assume that we are all sifting through debris to find the structure underneath—and not just that we do this, but that we have to do this, that sifting debris is a fundamental human need, that a self has to narrate to exist. But what if all the narration is a dream? We may know our history, the timeline of events, the key experiences, but many of us still seek a throughline. A unifying meaning or moral. We become both narrator and protagonist—because there has to be an explanation for all this. Doesn’t there?”
As Young Nadine keeps reasserting, it is impossible to touch a cloud. Actually, there is one way: cinema. The international borders are closed and she can’t return to China to fulfill her promise to her aging uncle. Instead, she writes a script and directs a film about a false memory. She constructs the reality she hopes for by altering her past with clever filmmaking substitutes (CGI, location scouting, talented actors). The real movie magic, beyond the special effects, occurs when this story is told by teammates, partners, and lovers during production. The collective construction rewrites the false memory into something tangible, but the story flies off from Nadine’s original foundation and she starts to lose her grasp on what’s real or imagined.
I didn’t mean to, but writing this has helped me realize that Uncle is my response to the question, “Why do I turn my life into art?”1 But it leaves me with the original one—when life becomes art, where do we draw the distinction?
(So you can buy a copy for $18 including shipping! Haha! Just kidding. Imagine if this whole thing was an elaborate ad. Email me if you want a free PDF link or yes, I will send you one.)
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