Process for I Am An American
Written by Martha Brockenbrough and Grace Lin
pub. November 23, 2021
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I learned about Wong Kim Ark for the first time through this book’s manuscript. I was shocked not to know this story, even though I myself am an American through birthright citizenship. I was even more surprised to learn that I owed it to someone with Chinese ancestry. It would have been a point of pride growing up, and that was very motivating - not only did I think this book should exist, but I wanted to be part of its existence.
I love that I Am An American talks about two different types of identity. We have national identity (nationality) vs ethnic identity (ethnicity). In this story, people believed that ethnic identity could prevent someone from having a certain national identity. Wong Kim Ark set out to prove they are not mutually exclusive.
I relied heavily on old photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown as well as on the publishing team’s fact checker. Together, these resources were invaluable. Thanks to the treasure trove of photography by German American photographer Arnold Genthe (also a first generation immigrant), I have a surface level view of how these Chinese men worked, dressed, and sometimes had families.
In I Am An American, Wong Kim Ark challenges our idea of the “other”. When we talk about equity and justice, whom do we imagine that we are protecting? I was happy to draw a protagonist who looks physically different than our stereotypical Western idea of a hero.
I was determined to draw WKA’s queue in a way that was very matter of fact and NOT exotic or strange. The queue is a traditional Chinese hairstyle where the hair is shaved off above the temples and the back is long and braided. It was a political symbol of the Qing dynasty, and a totally mandatory hairstyle for all Chinese men (under the punishment of death by treason!) until the Qing dynasty fell in 1912. So during much of Wong Kim Ark’s life, every Chinese man in China had to wear a queue, and that applied to Wong Kim Ark too when he later went back to visit China.
I’ve seen the queue depicted in Chinese historical soap operas quite earnestly, but they also appear in bigoted, xenophobic American propaganda posters pitting Uncle Sam against Chinese men. These posters created negative stereotypes by exaggerating the queue along with other physical traits. I wanted to make Wong Kim Ark’s queue feel comfortable and normal, not something to be laughed at or mocked, just a hairstyle of a certain time period, along with the clothes and buildings. You can tell that he has a high shaved forehead and his queue is long in the back, but it’s no more striking than his red shirt or black pants.
When I was deciding how this spread would look, I thought about Martha’s text and how she mentions the different paths Chinese immigrants took after entering the country. My initial sketch showed railroad workers on one side and a shopkeeper on the other. I considered placing Wong Kim Ark (in the red) in the shop scene, shyly hiding behind someone we might presume is his father.
But I wanted this book to place Wong Kim Ark’s life front and center. Sometimes people were cruel to him, but sometimes life was good! So the full spread now depicts a bustling corner of Chinatown where Wong Kim Ark is proudly helping out. On the left is a fortune teller and a curious young child. There’s a man on the way right who’s looking at job postings. The women next to him are sitting in front of a sign that advertises a buffet inside! They’ve made a whole industrious world of their own.
Color palette would be an important element for a book called “I Am An American”, and I expected to use patriotic colors in some way. But you might notice that other than on the cover, the colors aren’t used in a way that you would typically associate with American patriotism, and that’s very intentional. The blues are generally darker and mixed with grays, the red is slightly orange, and white is used very sparsely. The beauty of this country is that Americans are not a homogenous group. Each group of immigrants is so unique and distinct, and I loved portraying our red white and blue in a slightly different way to reflect that.
With the formidable Martha Brockenbrough at a school visit to Hamlin Robinson in Seattle!
Martha has written a whopping 23 books, including Unpresidented, a biography of Donald Trump, and Into the Bloodred Woods, a subversive reinterpretation of our once familiar fairy tales.