Until We Meet Again. Lily Kim Qian. First Second. 224pp. Hardcover $25.99.
Review by Lara Boyle
Lily Kim Qian’s debut graphic memoir Until We Meet Again, published by First Second chronicles the cartoonist’s struggles and search for home amid a tumultuous childhood lived between Canada and China. There’s a classic saying in Creative Writing about storytelling that goes like this: there are only two kinds of stories: 1) a protagonist goes on a journey, 2) a stranger comes to town. This formally innovative graphic memoir features the first kind of narrative, one where Qian’s coming-of-age odyssey, which becomes both internal and external, shapes her lifelong search for her identity and her place in the world, a compelling quest many will relate to.
The plot is structured in nonlinear fragments, a comic formally built much like a traditional braided essay, where multiple threads are at work to bind the narrative together. There’s the thread of Lily Kim Qian’s heritage, the thread of her childhood, the thread of her father, and the thread of her mother, who struggles with mental health and frequently disappears. Lily Kim Qian herself is the biggest driving force behind the whole book, however, the character we’re most emotionally invested in and engaged with, the person we’re rooting for to succeed.
Qian’s willingness to approach the stories of her parents with nuance and complexity will be appreciated by her audience. She succeeds in giving them equal weight in the story of her life and views their impact from a balanced perspective. Rather than blame them or only depict a singular version of her parents, she looks at them as individual human beings from a place of empathy, and sees the good alongside the bad, instead of giving into the temptation to view the situation through a black and white lens. About her mother, she writes on page 35, “I could tell she was trying, desperately, to be a mother. But she didn’t know how. Everything just felt off.”
Qian’s art is playful and bouncy, the texture of the brushstrokes, though digital, often reminded me of clouds. The style is more abstract than literal, more lyric and metaphoric than realist. Lily Kim Qian isn’t afraid to challenge the conventions of the comic form in Until We Meet Again. Her visual language depicts her inability to feel at home anywhere she travels, as well as her longing for a more concrete family unit, or a desire for a connection to her culture. In one scene, Qian writes that her mother “reappeared like a cyclone that could never be predicted.”
At a foreboding threshold.
Against a black backdrop, she depicts two panels. In one large square, three faceless people face each other in a threshold. A woman in a green jacket holding an orange bag opens a door through a light blue hallway. She has one foot up, the other grounded, a small detail which emphasizes how uneven her presence in her daughter’s life is. Up ahead, a father and his daughter stand waiting for her. All the while, streaks of color cut through them all like daggers. They continue in the bottom panel of her smiling, the eyes not shown, her expression unpredictable. The lines cutting through everything provide a feeling of imminent danger. Though actions are depicted in the panels, the scene is nontraditional and works because it emphasizes what is occurring without a need for dialogue or traditional sequences. The body language and abstraction does more work in a page than perhaps several could accomplish.
Throughout the graphic memoir, food becomes central to the author’s experiences. Her drawings of various meals, from dumplings to eggs to soup, are characters in themselves, each bowl an unspoken act of connection between parent and child, between home and family, between herself and her ancestral roots. There’s also a nice contrast in the drawings of urban life versus the natural world, not to mention Toronto versus Shanghai, illustrating how disorienting the shift from one to another had been for the author, who never quite felt she belonged in either.
On the move.
Her color palette is light and full of childlike wonder and hope, the whimsical pastels soft on the eye and evoking a sense of calm and peace even when the protagonist’s life feels chaotic and unstable. Her choice of peach, baby blue, lavender, lilac, green, white and yellow, create a natural narrative rhythm and move the audience seamlessly from one person or place to another, carrying readers from scene to scene as if in a dream. The cartoonist’s use of color to fill a whole page sometimes adds to the emotional dysregulation experienced by the speaker; on the other hand, white space and black space are alternatively used to keep us at a distance from the subject matter or make us feel wholly consumed by the absence of a key mother figure in the narrator’s life. The pages appear to be structured based on the central emotion or experience the cartoonist hopes to convey, Qian utilizes the panel the way a poet employs a line break, waiting for the right moment to enlist the volta, or the turn in a poem. The bubbly, aesthetic, pencil-like font further adds to the authenticity of the autobio comic. We feel Lily Kim Qian’s hand at work.
For Lily Kim Qian, forgiveness eventually morphs into a meaningful step toward healing. At the end of this nonlinear, fragmented coming-of-age narrative, the author writes “Eventually, it felt like something was unraveling. The string connecting me to the mass of confusion that I saw as myself.” (208.) In Until We Meet Again, Lily Kim Qian unravels her identity through the places and people that raised her in order to figure out who she is in the present moment via a visual language brimming with creativity and love for her family. As she meanders through memory and questions her relationship to language and culture, she turns inward to find a home in herself. Readers will be delighted to follow Lily Kim Qian while she maps her journey toward self-acceptance in her heartfelt graphic memoir, Until We Meet Again, published by First Second.
Lara Boyle is a writer and cartoonist with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has bylines at Solrad, Broken Frontier and Southern Review of Books. Boyle is currently working on a graphic memoir.