Photo by Mike Baker
Shaun Tan is the creator of the classic graphic novel The Arrival, first published almost two decades ago and now available in a new edition. His other books include Tales from Outer Suburbia. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Q: What inspired you to create The Arrival?
A: A whole lot of things, like several seemingly unrelated interests being drawn together.
One was some personal research into Chinese market gardeners in South Perth, Western Australia, about a century ago. It’s all recreational parkland now, but used to be home to a community of migrants, many of whom were separated from their families back in China, servicing the local, predominantly Anglo-Australian population, who knew very little about these quiet Chinese men.
Another was a very old, shelved picture book project about a character in a strange land trying to deliver a parcel – a parcel that eventually turned into a suitcase. Was this a person leaving or arriving, and why?
A third inspiration came from old photographs, albums from deceased estates left to a local suburban museum. I would often use these as inspirations for oil paintings.
One picture was of an unknown family of British immigrants, having a happy bush picnic around the turn of the 20th century. I enlarged the image to a 16 square metre oil-on-canvas painting for the community library next to that museum.
I was interested in how Western Australia must have seemed a strange place to these people, a foreign land, even as it is very familiar to someone like me who has grew up there. So I’ve always been interested in this idea of investigating or reimagining a forgotten past, and the idea of displacement.
Q: What led to this new edition of the book?
A: I’d always considered a smaller version, having noticed that most of the graphic novels I read myself were in a smaller format.
For example, I would read something by Chris Ware or Adrian Tomine on a train but could not imagine reading (or even noticing in a bookshop) the original format of The Arrival, being a larger picture book that was often shelved with children’s literature only.
The protagonist in The Arrival himself travels around with a small notebook, roughly the size of this new paperback, so there is a nice connection here. I liked the idea of being able to give a copy of this book to a backpacker, for instance, and saying, here is something you can read on the road.
Q: Especially given the current political situation, what do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Interestingly, I’ve had this same question every year, under every administration, since first publication in 2006, now almost 20 years ago. The Arrival has often been seen to be a comment on unfolding political situations, essentially because the crisis of displaced people, struggling for empathy and respect, is always a current event. And a huge one.
Back in 2006, we had a number of serious crises involving refugees from the Middle East arriving by boat to Australian shores, and our political leaders leaned heavily on fear and racism for political gain, obsessed with borders, illegal detention and deportation.
These are all debatable issues, but what I found particularly troubling was this unspecified categorisation of a diverse group of people as “illegal immigrants” as if this itself was a species of human being. It ignored all the nuances of each person’s situation, they were just lumped together as “problem people.”
And we see this unfolding over and over again, all through the world, all through history. It is a fundamental error of perception, exploited by duplicitous governments.
The only way we can really correct it is by understanding the diversity of people’s stories, and looking at things from a more intimate, human level. It is very hard to demonise someone once you know them, realise they are just another version of yourself, thrust into a difficult situation.
When we read books, we walk in other people’s shoes. This is always an important thing to do, regardless of what political conclusions you might draw.
Q: The writer Art Spiegelman said of the book, “Tan’s lovingly laid out and masterfully rendered tale about the immigrant experience is a documentary magically told.” What do you think of that description?
A: Well, it’s a wonderful thing for him to say, particularly as I know that Art is not big on blurbs. I had the good chance to meet him briefly in Melbourne, some time after, and was sure to pass on my appreciation.
I think what I like the most about this comment is the word “documentary,” as this was what I was really going for. The book is very research-based, in the sense that every event depicted in the illustrations is based on a comment by a refugee, translated into a different universe.
For example, one Romanian refugee described her world as being “drained of life, colour, even birdsong” under communism, and so I represented a world where such things are literally vacuumed up.
Others spoke about intrusive bureaucratic processes, deep homesickness, difficulties with language, and so on, and I tried to represent all of these accurately, using broader visual metaphors.
It occurred to me that my project was not strictly fiction, but a little like the animated dramatisations you see in documentary films: that this book was the closest thing to nonfiction I’d produced.
I’m super pleased that Art noticed this, particularly as the author of Maus, a big influence, which helped me think about graphic novels as being potentially fact and fiction mixed together.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve been helping a team of animators adapt another of my books, Tales from Outer Suburbia, into a children’s TV series, which has been an interesting process: fraught, but interesting! I believe it will have some airing here and in the US next year.
Incidentally, there is an ongoing discussion about adapting The Arrival as an animated feature film, as it’s been adapted multiple times for the stage, as well as projected with different musical scores, being already quite cinematic in its visual language. We’ll see how that goes.
I’m quite happy for others to take my work and transform it into different narratives. I’m more interested in new ways of looking at things, than defining particular stories.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Not really, but at this juncture 20 years on, it’s interesting to reflect on the impact this book has made around the world, given the difficulty I had in making it.
At the time of creating The Arrival, my confidence was not high. I often thought it might well be huge a waste of time, that nobody would be able to read or relate to this wordless, over-length picture book, which took quite a few narrative risks.
It was also executed over a number of years during which it did not generate any income at all, as is often the case with such things – creative work can be an expensive decision, requiring a lot of compromise, a lot of uncompensated labour.
But ultimately, I was just driven by the notion that this book just needed to exist. That I could possibly be the one to do it.
I don’t even like drawing or composing stories in this very fussy, photorealistic style with lots of people and landscapes. Nor do I naturally produce stories that are so long. But The Arrival needed to look a certain way, and be a certain length, and I was the willing slave to this concept.
I also worried that, not being a migrant myself, I was failing to capture the reality of that experience. The overwhelmingly positive feedback from readers, especially migrants who tell me, “This is exactly how I felt,” has been truly heartening after such a long period of creative insecurity.
I’ve since learned to trust that gut feeling. Not so much “I should create a book,” but rather, “this book needs to exist, and I guess I’m the one that has to roll up my sleeves and do it!”
I’ve also learned you don’t need first-hand experience of thing to reflect upon it empathically, to get it right. You just need to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes, using every bit of your imagination, and do a lot of homework.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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