A picture’s worth a thousand words, and prose can capture the kind of deep introspection that could seem hokey in another medium. When a graphic memoir manages to bring both of these tools together, though, the result can be something really affecting. That’s certainly the case for Makee’s debut, Call Me Emma, a graphic memoir about the artist’s experience navigating adolescence, culture shock, and family troubles, and coming out the other side with a more solid sense of self.
Yi-Xuan has a lot on her plate: her family’s just moved and she and her sister are starting at a new high school. That’s a lot for any teenager, but especially when the move is from China to New York, and she doesn’t just have to learn a new neighborhood but a new language and culture, too. In her mandatory English as a Second Language class, the other students adopt American-sounding names, so Yi-Xuan does, too: Emma. As Emma, none of her teachers struggle to pronounce her name. As Emma, she finds more confidence in her efforts to fit in. Soon, she’s forming friendships, developing a crush, and even being invited to parties.
Yet even as Emma feels she’s starting to get this whole American thing down, cracks are starting to form at home. Her parents’ marriage, already a bit shaky in China, is crumbling, and her sister is struggling far more than Emma to find her footing in this new country and its new expectations. Emma, too, begins feeling like her succeeding as an American is coming at the cost of some deep part of herself. Being a teenager is always tough, but Emma—Yi-Xuan—whoever she is—is afraid she’s reaching her breaking point. None of the answers will come easily, but she has to believe they will come if she keeps holding on to the people and things that mean the most.
Through black and white and shades of blue and gray, Makee paints a vivid portrait of both the uncertainty and potential that come with both a big move and that point of growing up when you start choosing who you are instead of relying on your family and surroundings to do that for you. Makee’s use of perspective and framing tell as much or more than the words; the imposing high school looms over her head, for example, while tight panels really drive home the claustrophobia of a crowded hallway. That’s one thing I love about graphic memoirs, even or maybe especially as someone who works primarily with prose: words can only go so far, and a beat between characters can feel stretched out and heavy through, say, a series of panels of boats on the river in a way that words can’t replicate.
As I was reading Call Me Emma, I couldn’t help but notice how normal and even mundane some of the moments felt: sitting down to dinner with family, feeling alienated at school, the devastation of being disappointed by a crush, worrying about whether your parents are happy together and happy with you, standing at the cusp of seemingly endless possibilities for adulthood but not knowing if any of them are actually realistic. At the same time, so much of Emma’s story is foreign to me, a white woman born in the rural U.S. In that way, Call Me Emma positions itself to give the reader a sense of both the familiar and the disorienting, even if the elements representing each are switched for some.
Call Me Emma is, however, ultimately a story about identity, both who we choose to be and who the world will supposedly accept. It’s one of those apparently universal parts of growing up, but here, it’s more obvious than most. Yi-Xuan is one person. Emma is another. Neither is the full truth, and neither is a full lie, but they feel irreconcilable. Finding a way around that incompatibility between selves isn’t just crucial for a teenager; it’s a process we repeat again and again in our lives as we grow and discover more of who we are and what the world pressures us to become. It’s heartening to see this process described with such clarity by a young writer. Inevitably, there is some refining of events through the lens of retrospect, no matter how truthfully we try to communicate our own pasts, so it’s likely that young Emma/Yi-Xuan wasn’t quite so articulate as she came to define herself on her own terms as a teenager. Even still, I felt myself on the rollercoaster right along with her, including cheering for her newfound self-assurance at the end. I look forward to whatever future stories and messages Makee has in store for us.
Ring Reads 