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Abstract
I examine how Malaka Gharib's I Was Their American Dream and It Won't Always Be Like This frame, embody, and reimagine girlhood through a multicultural transnational lens. Born in California, Gharib grew up with Filipino and Egyptian heritage. Taking advantage of the formal properties of comics, her work situates her memories and experiences at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and transnational encounters. I interrogate how these books visualize the connection between girlhood and mixed heritage through the artist-narrator's interactions with and observation of her Filipino mother and relatives in the United States and her father, stepmother, half-siblings, and neighbors in Egypt. I also examine how the multimodality of comics draws on tropes of girlhood to enable representation through the depiction and layering of different selves.
Contributor Notes
Lan Dong is Louise Hartman Schewe and Karl Schewe Professor at the University of Illinois Springfield. Her teaching and research areas include Asian American literature and culture, children's and young adult literature, comics and graphic narratives, and women's writing. She is the author of Reading Amy Tan (2009) and Mulan's Legend and Legacy in China and the United States (2010). She is the editor of Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine (2010), Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives (2012), Asian American Culture: From Anime to Tiger Moms (2016), and 25 Events That Shaped Asian American History (2019).