TERESA WONG IS A comics artist and writer. She’s the author of the 2019 graphic memoir, Dear Scarlet, The Story of My Postpartum Depression, a finalist for the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize, and long listed for the CBC Canada Reads 2020. Her comics have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s. Her new book, All Our Ordinary Stories, is just out from Arsenal Pulp Press. Listen in and read along as we discuss the intimacy of the graphic memoir. Welcome Teresa.
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Teresa: Thanks for having me.
Marion: Well, I’m delighted that you’re here, and I’ve been reading your work for a while and it’s very, very wonderful. So, let’s just jump right in. Speaking of wonderful, in the wonderful newsletter, The Walrus, you have a remarkable piece that I could pretty much talk to you about, um, I don’t know, forever.
And that’s good. It begins with your son’s tantrums, but it’s not at all about tantrums. It’s about living this creative life. And I’ll put a link in the transcript to it because I want everyone to read this perfect short piece that turns on a word and lets us consider and compound our determination to live this writing life.
So, let’s start there. Let’s reflect for a minute on small to big. It seems to be your absolute wheelhouse, using the small moments to illuminate us on the large themes of life. So, can you just take us back and think about knowing that a tantrum had a larger message and when and how that idea developed into this fine piece?
Teresa: Well, I mean, I don’t think I knew that a tantrum had a larger message when it was happening. Yeah, when my son was two or three, he just, you know, as all toddlers do, went through a stage of throwing tantrums over every insignificant thing. And what I learned, and he’s my third, and so by that point I had learned like there’s nothing you can do about it.
They’re having big feelings and you just kind of have to let it happen, let it run its course, and then it would end. And so, when that was happening, I was also beginning my journey as a creative writer and artist. And so, I was always looking around for things to draw.
I had been doing this thing on my Instagram where I was trying to make a drawing a day and it just turned out that because he was having tantrums almost every day, I just started, I would snap a quick photo and make a little painting of his tantrum at the end of the day, so after he had gone to sleep.
And it became a kind of almost a meditative practice and also a coping mechanism maybe to help me get through that stage of parenthood. So that, you know, when a tantrum started, I wasn’t just drawn into it and upset or flustered. Instead, I kind of could step back and look at it with some perspective and think, “Well, you know, here’s another tantrum I could draw or paint.”
And so after a while of doing that, I just had this little collection that I called “The Tantrum Series,” and I’d put it on my Instagram. And then a little later on, a few years later, after I had published my first book, a woman who was editing a book about motherhood and creativity called Good Mom on Paper through Book Hug Press asked me to contribute to this anthology, and I started kind of just brainstorming things that I could write about, and the Tantrum Series came back to me as a good starting point. So, I started writing this essay just about, you know, turning my son’s tantrums into art, kind of the conflicted feelings that I had around that, because, you know, as a mother and a writer or artist, you feel a lot of guilt around turning your kids’ lives into a story or something to be consumed by other people.
And it kind of turned into an essay just about art making and how hard it is as a parent and how many reasons we give ourselves not to do it. And all the guilt that we feel if you are a parent or a mother around, you know, taking time away from your life with your kids in order to make art or betraying them in some way, not being enough for them.
Marion: Yes.
Teresa: And so, it became something different entirely. And I kind of learned that through writing the piece, like I didn’t start with that theme in mind.
Marion: That’s wonderful.
Teresa: Yeah.
Marion: I love that. And I love the, I mean, the idea of giving permission to other writers to say, so somebody calls or you see a call for submissions and you think, well, “I’ve got this Tantrum Series,” and you dive in and look where it led you.
The other thing that I find really I can’t resist drilling into is this idea that he’s actively having a tantrum and you snap a photo. I love that so much that you admit that in the Walrus piece. I tell people all the time when it’s holiday season, I always say, take notes.
And people just look stricken like, “Oh, I could never do that.” And I think, “Well, you have to.”
Teresa: Yeah. I wasn’t a good enough artist to just draw it from memory. And so, I knew I needed to take that photo and yeah, it kind of felt weird in the moment, but it’s what I needed to do to record the moment.
Marion: Exactly. Exactly. You got great reviews for your previous graphic novel, Dear Scarlet, The Story of My Postpartum Depression. I just want to give a couple of quotes from a couple of them. The New York Times said, “It feels brave that you articulate sentiments that fly in the face of societal conventions about motherhood in a book explicitly created for her daughter to read. An urgency of these stories is matched by the immediacy of their form.” The Paris Review said, “we see quiet but daunting images, simple bird’s eye views of her baby surrounded by white space, tiny arms stretching out of her swaddle. The rendering’s variance tone feels true to life. It’s sometimes quiet, sometimes deafening and always complex. Whatever the volume, there are always possibilities for suffocation, but also for beauty and hope.”
And yet in that fine piece in The Walrus, you reveal that the manuscript was rejected by a large number of publishers and that one person said they couldn’t see it breaking out of the market because of its topic – postpartum depression.
That one editor said that they didn’t think mothers who had gone through it would ever want to revisit it. Your agent dropped you telling you over email. So, I’m not going to ask you if you feel vindicated with those great reviews, but I am going to ask you more about what you state in that beautiful Walrus piece, as you alluded to a minute ago, which is that creatives just keep going.
Specifically, your quote from that piece that I just want to have tattooed somewhere says, “The creative impulse remains – disruptive and uncontrollable as ever. My only job is to stay with it and to let it become fully alive and fully itself, just like the child in my care.”
Fabulous. So, talk to me about “disruptive and uncontrollable” because that’s it precisely, isn’t it?
Teresa: Yeah, I think so. You know, I couldn’t not make art. I couldn’t not write my stories. You know, I’ve read a lot about writing and the creative impulse and those are things that you have to honor if you have those impulses. You have to just keep going, publishing, you know, getting recognition, getting reviews in The New York Times. That’s all separate from that. I’ve learned over the years. It’s great. It feels nice that when your work connects with other people, but the main thing is if there’s something inside of you that’s driven to do this work, you have to do it, or you’ll be miserable. It’ll, you know, eat you up inside.
Marion: Yeah, it will. It absolutely will. So, your new book is All Our Ordinary Stories and it delves beautifully into the language of families, as you find words you need in English, Cantonese and Mandarin to live the life you want, all the while revealing this feeling you have as a fractured self.
So, let’s just drill into that. That fractured self is portrayed marvelously in a simple drawing that takes up two cells with half of you in one and half in the other. And I promise you, had I merely read the phrase “fractured self” in a sentence, I would have gotten it. But seeing it on the page the way you portray it, having read the words that preceded it, I got it. So, talk to us a little bit about the power of this genre of the graphic memoir to convey our interior lives.
Teresa: Yeah, I think, you know, imagery has a power all in itself. And we understand that, you know, from movies or television or even memes, right? That’s the power of an image to quickly transmit information and ideas is really, yeah, truly powerful. But when you put that together with memoir, I think it kind of creates a kind of alchemy where you can really show someone what it feels like to live your life.
And I think that comes from the fact that it’s kind of one creator. So, you know, with a film, you know, there’s dozens, hundreds of people involved in kind of bringing a film to life. But with a graphic memoir, it’s one person’s vision, one person’s words, one person’s images.
And so, the kind of creative control and vision that you have over everything is very different from almost any other medium.
Marion: Yeah.
Teresa: You know, I love reading graphic memoirs myself. And that’s because I feel like they really draw you into one person’s interior world.
Marion: I think so. I think they’re intimate. I mean, going through reading both of your books, I felt that there was the most intimate work I’ve seen on these really complex topics. And so, I guess I need for the audience, for them maybe to give us a little bit of context here.
These are not illustrations. It’s not that there’s a picture in an illustration like a comic book, or maybe I misunderstand comic books, but they’re not illustrations. It’s not just merely that. So first, and so everyone can understand, can you give us some insight into what a graphic memoir intends and what separates it as well as connects it to comics?
Teresa: I mean, I would still call them comics. I think you make an important distinction though, between illustration and comics.
Illustration generally, the image is there to support the words. And so, if you think of a children’s picture book, like Goodnight Moon, you know, in the great green room, there was a telephone, a red balloon, and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.
And the illustration has all of those things, right? Just shown as images. And if you took away the illustration, it wouldn’t be as fun of a read, but you could still get the story very clearly through just the words. Whereas in comics or graphics forms, the imagery is there to kind of tell a story on its own as well.
I kind of think of it as an image led medium and the words are important and they can contribute a lot, but the image leads. And so, I think, you know, in my book, what I tried to do was tell a story through just the imagery often, as well as the words.
And so, you could read the book kind of both ways, reading only my words or just looking at the images. And when you combine those two together, it comes at you with a different force.
Marion: Yeah, it does. And I think in All Our Ordinary Stories, your new book, this force, this fractured self, this intimacy is as good as I’ve ever seen it. You take on massive amounts of material and history. For instance, your parents grew up in China, born after the Japanese occupation at the end of World War II.
And they grew up under Mao’s reforms, including severe famine and persecution. And you draw and write in the book about asking your mother and including asking your mother about her life and including this astonishing fact that your mother to escape mainland China swam to Hong Kong. Swam. I think, again, if I had read that sentence, I would have just kept reading, thinking, I don’t know what, but the illustration of what she held on to and how she did it.
I’d like you to explain for the reader, which I suspect will get everyone listening to go buy this book and have a look for themselves.
Teresa: So, my mom’s journey is exceptional, you know, to people like us, but she calls it ordinary because so many people did that when she was in that situation. And so, she escaped from the commune that the government had put her on and then spent days traveling across, you know, hundreds of miles to get to the mountains, kind of near the coastline, and then trek through the mountainside.
She and another girl and a boy and kind of got lost and hiked only in the dark so that they wouldn’t be noticed by anyone. And then finally got to the coastline as close as they could to an island that was designated as Hong Kong territory. And it was still about five or six miles away across the bay.
And they literally just dropped everything, left everything behind. She had with her, back then, I guess, basketballs had an inside liner. And so, she had that with her that she kind of inflated and tied up and held on to that as she swam. And she swam tied together with the boy and the girl.
And they just swam and swam for hours, you know, through the bay and wasn’t quite getting anywhere. They were having a tough time. And so, the boy untied himself and swam ahead. And my mom really thought at that point that this was it, you know, she was going to die in the bay.
There was, you know, no more hope. And her friend encouraged her to keep going, that they should stick together. And then by daybreak, a boat from the Hong Kong side had come back for them because the boy had reached the destination and found a boat to go rescue the girls.
Marion: It’s remarkable. It’s just remarkable.
Teresa: Yeah, I know. And, you know, like you say, I, you know, my mom told me this story. I had an idea in my mind, I knew it was hard, but when I started doing image research and I, you know, Google Earth the terrain that she would have had to go through and the images of the bay that she swam in, you know, that all brought it viscerally to life, just seeing the type of, you know, forest, jungle forest she was trying to make her way through.
They weren’t, you know, in hiking shoes and all equipped, you know, they had simple cloth bags.
Bags, cloth shoes, and the clothes on their bags kind of thing. But yeah, it’s quite a remarkable story. Ordinary because so many people did it, but extraordinary because, you know, who does that?
Marion: Well, exactly. And you interviewing her, it makes from the sound of that story, you would think that interviewing her was easy, that she coughed up every detail.
But the fact is, she didn’t. And you had quite a time interviewing her. And so I want to talk for the benefit of the people listening about interviewing people who have previously been quiet, because so many memoirists face this, whether they have living relatives who survived the Holocaust, combat, or any of the many genocides of this world, who simply don’t share their pasts, whether they want their children to grow up happier, or they just don’t ever want to talk about it, or whatever.
And you write that it felt like an opportunity for connection, but that you never got the connection you were seeking. So, talk to me about the process of finding out but not really finding out what you were looking for and deciding to write it anyway.
Teresa: Yeah, I mean, I did the first interview in my 20s when I had moved out and gotten married and saw that I really needed to know my parents better because now that I didn’t live with them, there was kind of no reason for us to even converse. And so, I started interviewing my mom and she told me everything kind of willingly and matter-of-factly, but also in a very cursory way.
I don’t know if it’s because of Chinese culture. She didn’t really like to talk much about the past. I don’t know if it’s because it was traumatic, or if she just didn’t think it was a big deal. And through that, I got, you know, the basics of the story and the information, and then tried to develop it as a piece of prose writing, actually, and realized that I just didn’t know enough, and that I wasn’t really getting anywhere.
And so, I’ve interviewed her again since one other time, just specifically for this book just a few years ago, and tried to ask her better questions to try to get more deeply into it.
But that seemed to actually upset her. And she had started crying in the middle of it, kind of stopped short and just remembering the past. And I realized this is not worth it. Obviously, it’s not, you know, making me have a better relationship with her by doing this, even though she knew I was writing the book and gave her consent and understood what I was trying to do.
And what came out of that was just the understanding that, yeah, maybe the writing process wasn’t going to fix our relationship, and actually probably nothing would ever completely fix our relationship. But knowing this information and finding out the facts, and also just seeing my mom in these interviews, understanding her point of view, helps me understand myself better, you know, that I have it all now.
I can either choose to, I guess, move on and understand that this is part of my story. I guess what I’m saying is, I have to make a choice to make it my story and kind of move forward from it.
Marion: Yes. That’s what I was hoping for you to get to, that sometimes we have to pivot, and we don’t get what we wanted.
I mean, good reporters will tell you that you never go into a story with intent. You go in with curiosity, maybe you go in with hope, but not intent. And so, when you, and I won’t give away how you conclude this book with the remarkable device that you use, but there’s a pivot there, there’s an acceptance, and you still bring the book to a close.
I want everyone to go buy it and see it. But I think that what you’ve just pointed out is so deeply important that we can’t help but hope that this might heal our relationships, or it might bring clarity or closure, all these crazy things we believe in, but they frequently don’t. And you go anyway to conclusion.
Teresa: I think so. Yeah. I think one main thing while doing this book was that I realized also I couldn’t make it like The Joy Luck Club, you know, like I couldn’t get that satisfying, like Hollywood ending. And that not all stories can fit that kind of, you know, templated narrative, right?
Marion: No.
Teresa: And so to let go of that was a really important part of the process.
Marion: It’s such good advice. And everyone listening to it right now is kind of looking at their hands going, I have to let go of my expectations. I know I do. You know, memoir writers ask me all the time, what do I do if there’s no happy ending? And I always say the same thing.
I don’t trust books that have happy endings. I trust the fact that we have to be comfortable with uncertainty, that we need to figure out to go with what we’ve got, as we say in journalism. And that is what you did so masterfully in this book. It doesn’t tie it up in a pretty little bow, but it does have an ending. And it leaves us better for having read it, which is a wonderful thing to do.
Teresa: Thank you.
Marion: You’re welcome. Whenever I have a memoir writer on the podcast, I always ask them the same question. And I really need to ask you this, it’s, you know, I mean, I know you’ve had this insane response from a publisher about women not wanting to go back into something.
But the fact is, we go back into things when we read and write memoir. So when we ask a memoir writer to go back into something, into trauma, what are we asking her to do? You know, you went back into postpartum depression. You went back into this really difficult relationship with your mom, really difficult history that they had.
What are we asking her to do? Are we asking her to relive it, reanimate it, or simply stand coolly back and have a look from here?
Teresa: I mean, I think it’s a little bit of both, right? To tell the story properly, you do have to relive it a bit. And when I was working on, well, both books, but especially the postpartum depression book, I really, I would cry while I was drawing some of the scenes.
Marion: Yes, I bet.
Teresa: Yeah. And I think it’s the same with the new book. There’s a part of the book where I drew myself crying as a child on the floor of the bathroom. And it is upsetting to kind of relive that, you know, both in words and imagery and just to bring yourself back to that place.
But I think you can do that and step out of it and look at it from the perspective of where you are now and kind of see how far you’ve come in that journey. And so, you know, an important part of memoir writing for me is that retrospective, I guess, feel or voice.
And I feel like that’s important for me to grow as a person, to be able to go back, feel those feelings, but also be able to step out of it at the end of, you know, the writing or drawing session and realize that I’m not that same person anymore.
Marion: Yeah, that’s lovely. I had a person I was working with recently say to me, “I’m living differently because I am writing.” And I was so touched by that. So hers was a very difficult story. And it’s not that it’s all pretty and it’s okay, or that she changed the end of her story, not at all. But she got her hands on it. And it allowed for some perspective of A, that was a while ago and B, that, you know, without going into the details of her story, that she had some control now over the narrative.
So I wonder, as we wrap this up, if you could just shed a little more light on how writing these books, drawing your cartoons have impacted how you live.
Teresa: I think I do believe that I live more mindfully. And, I hope, more generously too, you know, understanding that, generous to myself, I think, kindly to myself, understanding that, you know, what I’m going through currently might be difficult, but that also I have gone through difficult things and I am able to move forward and to even have, you know, perspective and be able to kind of share my stories with other people.
And so, yeah, despite the challenges that come at me through my life, I feel like writing memoir has made me a stronger person. And hopefully, yeah, just a better one too.
Marion: That’s lovely. Thank you, Teresa. It’s just a joy to talk to you and your work has informed me deeply.
I just can’t wait for more. Thank you so much.
Teresa: Thanks so much.
Marion: You’re welcome. The author is Teresa Wong. See more on her at By Teresa Wong dot com. Follow her on Instagram. Her new book is All Our Ordinary Stories, A Multigenerational Family Odyssey, just out from Arsenal Pulp Press.
Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit Studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey.
Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion Roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go.
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