'The Legend of Auntie Po' - a surprising, colourful, sweet, and bittersweet all-ages graphic novel.
I'll let the first half of the blurb sum up what 'The Legend of Auntie Po' is about:
'In a Sierra Nevada logging camp in 1885, thirteen-year-old Mei bakes the most delicious pies and tells the best stories about Auntie Po, a gigantic elderly Chinese matriarch who could probably cut even more trees than Paul Bunyan.
In the midst of racial tumult following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mei tries to remain blissfully focused on her job, her close friendship with Bee, the camp foreman's daughter, and her stories.'
Basically, Mei and her father, Hao, are Chinese immigrants, and they are the best chefs and piemakers at a nineteenth century American logging camp - all the white male loggers and their families, and one Black family, would starve without them. Mei tells stories about Po Pan Yin, or Auntie Po, her version of Paul Bunyan, to the loggers' kids at campfires. Amid racial tension and violence, Auntie Po, and her blue buffalo Pei Pei, suddenly seem to come to life to Mei, in times of need at the camp.
Times for stories, making your own myths when the land you live on and serve doesn't respect you or your culture, and for needing to believe in a saviour, a protector, a god, who will watch over you, when faced with crises and tragedy.
Mei is also falling in love with her best friend, Bee.
'The Legend of Auntie Po' is about making your own faith, in order to live, and thrive, and hope for things to get better in the future. Sometimes your imagination is your greatest asset when one crisis after another stumps you, devastates you, keeps you as unchanging and unmoving as stone. Immigrants imagine, and invent stories, while retaining and respecting their traditions and roots.
Don't let your own culture, history, and faith fade, even when in a foreign country.
Let's talk about the artwork: I didn't like it at first. I didn't like the dead-eyed, beady-eyed humans. And why do some eyes look demonically red? Was that a stylistic choice, or an artistic and/or printing mistake? But I got used to it the further I read, and I got more immersed in, and engaged with, the story and characters. The art reminds me of Melanie Gillman's work, actually. I like the colours, and Pei Pei is so cute!
Most of the characters are likeable. It is easy to follow, support and root for the hardworking, feisty, and imaginative young Mei. She likes to read books, and dreams of a life and adventure outside of the logging camp. She is definitely fit for higher education.
When I first bothered to properly read the blurb (not doing so before buying graphic novels is a bad habit of mine), I was shocked to find out that Mei, and her bubbly, sweet, fat, blonde and white friend Bee, are supposed to be thirteen-years-sold. They are almost the same height as the adults. They are smarter than a lot of them, too (not that age denotes intelligence, of course). I knew they must have been teenagers, but I didn't think they were that young!
Mei's father Hao is a sweet, kind, gentle, protective, and good soul, equally as hardworking and talented as his daughter. He is candid and blunt when talking about racial injustice. Bee's foreman father, Hels Andersen, is surprisingly a good, thoughtful man, who knows what's what and what's right, and at least tries not to be racist. However, he is a pushover and enabler, prone to caving in under unfair and unjust laws, and fearmongering. But he learns and develops into a better person.
Hels will go above and beyond for Hao. He respects and listens to Hao - their families are like one family - and it is laudable, heartwarming and wonderful to see.
Mei's romantic feelings for Bee are obvious from the start, and her struggles with them, and what to do about them, are gradually, organically shown to the reader in pieces, at appropriate times. Her and Bee's friendship is very close-knit, regardless of any deeper, more intimate emotions, and theirs is a supportive, playful, adorable, and complex bond. Female interracial friendships
Heck, the relationship between their fathers could also, almost be read as something verging on the romantic! They have many private conversations, albeit work related, and they touch each other's shoulders, they tease each other and tell jokes, they give each other gifts, and they go out to eat meals together. Their relationship development grows into a warm and understanding connection. The white-boss-and-immigrant-employee, power imbalance between them will not matter.
But simply being nice, kind, decent human beings to other human beings is enough. Platonic love should be showcased, too.
Seeing people of different ethnic, cultural and social backgrounds effortlessly getting along and completing one another, and forming their own established community, especially in America at this time period, is another beautiful element in the comic, realistically or not, fairy tales or not.
By the end of this wonderous, tasty (those pies, and other foods!), historical, political drama graphic novel for children, full of trees, logging, girl power, real nontoxic man power, dreams, the magic of having a voice and the written word, and loving your own non-whitewashed, non-appropriated culture and history, I was left with one burning question:
What happened to Mei's mother? Bee's mother is mentioned once, but not Mei's.
But seriously, I do recommend 'The Legend of Auntie Po', for a fun, sweet read, and an American history lesson, of a part that is widely overlooked and swept under the rug (typically, yet again).
On that note, another thing I will bring up is I wish the book could have highlighted the racism and racist laws against Black people, as well as Chinese people. Slavery would have been abolished (mostly) for around twenty years in 1885 in the California state, and racial tensions were still strained, to say the least. And I know that the author, Shing Yin Khor, says in their Author's Note at the end that they didn't include any Indigenous and Native American characters in their story because they felt that part of American history wasn't theirs to tell, but it still feels a bit dodgy and disingenuous to not mention something about it within the story itself. Native American communities had their own logging camps in the Sierra Nevadas, and there is a whole complicated history there. It feels like further erasure of marginalised and colonised people.
But Shing Yin Khor is aware of what they are doing - they are smart and thoughtful, they did their research, and they know their storytelling capabilities and limitations, for a 283-page graphic novel. I like that they state the following important fact, also relating to 'The Legend of Auntie Po':
'But they were there. We were all there. This history, like all American history, is not a white story.'
Race representation and LBGTQ+ representation in an overlooked aspect of American history, told in a graphic novel for all ages. Add in the storytelling and magical realism and faith-based realism elements, plus the themes of intimate friendships and comradery, and you have a gleaming gem in your hands, a mined diamond in the rough (in every sense of the word).
Final Score: 4/5
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