The Arrival - reflections

I had originally chosen to read Maus for the selected title in the graphic novel genre of teen lit. I chose that text because I had heard from several of my colleagues that it was a very powerful text, and a very good read. I completely agree with them on both of assessments. I found the conceptualization of the text to be original and unique, and the final product to be remarkable. However, I also was fortunate enough to read a classmate’s copy of The Arrival during the final twenty minutes allotted in class, and I absolutely fell in love with that text – and so decided to focus on Tan’s text.

On my walk home from class on December 7th, I called that friend of mine that I discuss fine literature with (we all seem to have a friend that we have great conversation with about a limited topic, don’t we?). I told him that I found something brand new and beautiful. In short, I could not wait to share this text with others. By the time I had gotten to my car, I had already decided to purchase a copy of the book for my brother teaching abroad in Japan, another for this aforementioned friend of mine, and one more for myself. Luckily, Amazon.com had a good deal on it.

The illustrations in The Arrival are simply beautiful, and I love when authors choose to spend as much time and attention incorporating detail into illustration as they do in the written text. It saddens me that our culture tends to disregard illustrations in “high” literature, often leaving the cover art (typically chosen by the publisher for marketing purposes, and having nothing to do with the text or author’s intentions) as a text’s only illustration. In this text, Tan shows how illustrations alone can tell a novel’s story. I have enjoyed picture books in the past, and I have certainly enjoyed (many) graphic novels – but this text struck me as being brand new. Like only exceptional texts can do, this one affected me by staying in the forefront of my mind for days on end. Several of my friends and colleagues were pinned down and forced to listen to me inadequately tell about this story. None of them got the real picture, I am sure – but the media specialist looked further into it, and is ordering a few copies for the school.

When I remark that this story was “brand new” to me, I refer to two things in particular. First is the aesthetic beauty of the text (its illustrations, cover art, and composition), and elegant subtlety of the story it tells without the use of words (clear narrative without being too obvious). The second is the universality of this story. To quote Gene Luen Yang in his review that appeared in the New York Times, “The Arrival tells not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story” (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Yang-t.html). The protagonist’s ethnicity and nationality are not known for sure, and the collage of faces in the opening of the text serves to tell the reader that this story is universal to immigrant experiences of all nationalities and ethnicities. There is not even a language to determine the old world or the new – just images that help us to determine that the new world is confusing and intimidating to the immigrant traveler. The themes of this text – fear, love, family, etc. are themes that are universal throughout cultures, and are themes that are present in every immigrant’s tale. Yang goes further to analyze many more images in a comparison to New York and Ellis Island; I was satisfied in recognizing that the images of the new world were purposefully foreign to any reader from our world.

This text struck a chord with me. I am not at all concerned with whether this is technically a graphic novel or a picture book. In my opinion, those are conversations that happen when there is not enough to speak on in the text itself. This text provided me with more to think and speak about than most texts we read this semester, and it accomplished this without the benefit of any written language.