INTERVIEW: Teresa Wong, Author of the Graphic Memoir, All Our Ordinary Stories

Interview by Lara Lillibridge

I first met Teresa Wong when she spoke on the debut author panel at the 2019 HippoCamp: A Conference for Creative Nonfiction Writers—and she also absolutely captivated attendees when she pulled out a ukulele. Her graphic memoir Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression had just been released, and I’ve been a fan ever since.

Her second graphic memoir, All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey, came out in September 2024 from Arsenal Pulp Press. I was excited to speak with her about the book. Our conversation is below.

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Lara Lillibridge: My first question was from the Notes on Language at the very beginning of the book:

“My first language—the language of my family—is Cantonese. And even though I don’t speak it well, you can assume all conversations I have with my parents and other Chinese elders in this book occur in Cantonese. I have chosen to keep some Cantonese words untranslated because I feel they are better represented and more meaningful in their original form. My Cantonese transliterations do not follow a standard romanization system, but they are mainly searchable online. I also use Mandarin Pinyin for many Chinese place names to make them easier to locate on a map. If you find this jumble of language and dialects frustrating, please know that it is even worse inside my head.”

I’m always interested in the decisions writers make about language that might be unfamiliar to the reader, and when you decide like you wrote about, you know, these are commonly Google able, and you know, if you really care, you can look it up. And so how did you make the decision on how to deal with that in your book?

Teresa Wong: I think the main guiding principle I had was keeping an audience in mind. The audience I had in mind was quite specific—people who are like me—second generation Chinese or Asian, you know, Chinese Canadians or Chinese Americans. They would know these words—the ones that I wouldn’t translate. But more specifically, it was written kind of for my brother, who I know definitely would know these words.

I think there’s a risk for writers when they’re people of color, coming from different cultures, to be like a tour guide, someone explaining the culture to readers, kind of assuming a white readership. I didn’t want to do that so much in this book. There is a little bit of explaining, but what I wanted to do was kind of walk that line between writing for people who knew exactly what I was talking about and writing for people who might not. And so in the end, I felt like if, contextually, people didn’t completely need to understand every single word, then it would be fine.

LL: I love that, and I love the awareness of who your ideal reader is and who you’re writing for. I know that a lot of times emerging writers aren’t clear on that, right? Like, ‘my book is for everybody who likes books!’ which is not really the truth. And so I feel like the more you can dial in on who your target audience is, at the very beginning, the stronger the work is.

TW:  I kind of see it as concentric circles too. I’m hoping the widest audience possible will get something out of this book, whether they understand everything in it or not, whether they identify with my experiences or not. But then, as you move in the circles, people will experience the book in different ways. You don’t want to water down the stuff for the inner circle, either. Some people are going to get it and vibe with it right away, and some people aren’t, and that’s okay too. We’re not writing for everyone.

LL: Right! And I was never confused. I might have Googled one or two words or phrases, but the majority of it was understandable through the context. It wasn’t confusing.

TW: I did run the draft by multiple readers, and many readers weren’t from my background, and no one complained that it was indecipherable.

LL: When you talk about readers, do you have a core group, or do you mix it up for different projects?

TW: They were mainly different people for my two books, though there were a couple of people who overlapped. Usually what I think about is, who might enjoy this book as a reader, and I usually try to choose also people who read more than one book a year. You know, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I like to get feedback from people who have read many books in the past year, and who have an understanding of what’s out there in the market.

LL:  Do you interact with other graphic artists?

TW: For my first book, none of my readers were writers of comics or graphics, and that was because I just didn’t know any. I’d show it to some friends who were art directors or illustrators, but that’s a little bit different in terms of really understanding visual storytelling. And then for this book, I sent it to one friend I had met through our being part of the first cohort for graphic narrative at Tin House workshop in 2019. I really wanted her opinion, because she was a writer of graphics. Unfortunately, she only had time to read part of it, but it was helpful.

The other thing I did before I sent the manuscript in to my publisher, because my editor was more of an editor for prose manuscripts, and I had confidence that she could read it as a story and tell me if things were off, and do line edits and that kind of thing. But I really wanted the input of a true comics editor, someone who made comics themselves and also understood how they worked. I actually hired on my own, a comics editor from Hong Kong. I think she’s originally American, but she lives in Hong Kong. Her name’s Kaitlin Chan, and she read through the manuscript and gave me lots of feedback on little things like shifting word balloons, so that they would look more in balance, but also larger things, like breaking down the panels in different ways. I found that super helpful. It made me a lot more confident going into the final draft before I sent it to my publisher, and it just validated a lot of the work that I did, too. Because if someone who reads a lot of comics and does it professionally as well thought it was working then, then I knew it was working.

LL: That makes sense. And that leads perfectly into my next question, which is about structure. I’m always really interested in structural choices. And—as a person who struggles to draw a stick figure—I look at your finished work and think, oh, it just effortlessly came into life this way, this was in Teresa’s head, and then she just drew it, and it was perfect.

TW: Yeah, no.

LL: So I’m just curious what sort of constraints or what sort of formatting you considered. I noticed sometimes you would have a single cell, is that the right word cell?

TW: Yeah, or panel.

LL: Panel, okay, a single panel on a page, and then at a certain point there are no panels, and it’s just like drawn freely on the page and then that continued more in the second half of the book. And I was just curious, you know, how that works for you?

TW: That’s a great question. Sometimes I joke that making a graphic is probably the hardest, longest way to write a book. Part of it is because when you write prose, you’re pouring words into a book shaped container, right? Sometimes people play with how the words look on the page too, especially if you’re a poet or but in general, not as much. Whereas with a graphic, you have to create the container first, because otherwise you’re just kind of floundering.

I was floundering for months, like just trying to figure out, how do I start this thing? How do I tell these stories? And at some point you just have to make a decision, and so I had to think of the container. It’s like, okay, well, the size of the page is going to be seven by nine. And then within that seven by nine, I came up with a grid system. And so if you look at my book, it’s based on three rows, and each row can be split in one of three ways. It can be one long, skinny panel. It could be split into two square panels, or it could be split into three rectangular panels, or the page could be just one full page.

Working from that imaginary grid gave me enough structure to get started. For example, when I land in Hong Kong, I wanted a Hong Kong skyline, and so I let the content dictate what kind of panel it needed. And for a long skyline, to really show it in an expansive way, I chose the long one panel—a skinny rectangle.

If I wanted to show an action, for example, making rice, I chose the three panel lay-out, that’s more conducive to showing little steps. And then from that, I had something standard that I could work from. Part of the joy of writing anything is breaking rules every once in a while too— it really makes the reader pause. You don’t want to do it too often, or nonsensically—you want to do it with some deliberation, and know that you’re doing it for a certain effect at a certain time. And so that the times that I chose to really only show nothing in the rows, were the times of the most I feel like distance or alienation, or solitude.

LL: When there was only one or two panels on a page, it definitely made me step back and pause and consider it a little bit more.

TW:  One of the greatest beauties of working in the graphics medium is that opportunity to show blankness without having to use words or images. And it’s a really effective and forceful way to show silence or distance that a reader can understand really quickly.

LL: Silence and distance are such major themes in this, and inaccessibility of language, and the drawings really add so much. If you were to write this without them, you would have to write so many more words.

TW: That is true, and you know it’s funny you say that because I did try to write this book as a prose memoir about 20 years ago. I had come out of university thinking, ‘here’s a story I would like to tell.’ I’d gotten married, and I’d taken that trip to China and Hong Kong with my parents, and I was just brimming with this story. I took a creative nonfiction certificate through Humber College in Toronto, and—this will make me sound like I’m 100 years old—it was correspondence, because there was no online learning back then.

I worked with a mentor who was Canadian, but lived in France, and I would send her bits of my manuscript each month, and then she would send me back the manuscript marked up with notes. And through that, I ended up with about a 40,000 word prose memoir that was complete in story, but not complete in any other way. And it wasn’t working. There were lots of fundamental problems that I couldn’t figure out how to solve.

Looking back at it, two things had to happen: one was that I had to become a mother myself before I could really flesh out and understand my parents and give more meaning and higher stakes to the work, and two, I had to become a cartoonist. I had to start working in the graphics medium. Not every story from that other book made it into this book. But some of them did, and they were just much more effectively told through a combination of word and image, instead of just words. And maybe that’s my own failings as a prose writer.

LL: Well, I would say that’s your gift as an artist.

TW: Like the story of my mom’s escape and going through the forest. I had written that out, but it fell kind of flat, and it didn’t really have the intensity that I wanted. And being able to do all of her hiking and or laying on the ground to sleep in the daytime, all of that, is so much better conveyed through the images and then than I could have done in just straight prose.

LL: So now I have a million new questions, but I do want to say that your map on page 85 really shows this. You have the bus, and then they are biking, and then hiking, and then swimming. I can’t even imagine thinking, ‘Oh, I could do that.’

TW: Yeah, it’s different when you see it all laid out in front of you.

LL: For sure. So one question I had was about your title, All Our Ordinary Stories, which just sounds like, you know, the quotidian, every day, we do things, almost like keeping house, but you mother’s ordinary stories were like swimming to Hong Kong,

TW: That’s just what everyone did.

LL: Yeah, that is what a lot of people did, but it doesn’t make it less extraordinary. So I was just curious—when did you know that was your title?

TW:  I knew back from the first draft in 2005 or 2006 when I really started working on this in earnest, like I had, I had always loved that quote from Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, “All our ordinary stories are changed intime, altered as much by the present as the present is shaped by the past.” because I just liked how it kind of spoke to the fact that the meaning of stories, change kind of as you go through your life, like as new information is added as you grow up, as you become a mother, that kind of thing. And then I really loved how that dovetailed with the fact that my mom literally thought that her story was ordinary. It was the title from the start.

LL: I am a mother also, and definitely having my second child helped me understand my mother in a way that having my first child didn’t. I had to sort of get to that similar state of chaos. You wrote about your mother saying that you never looked like her, and it sounded like such a mean thing to me as a reader… But then you have this insight of, ‘what is it to look at your child’s face and not see anything of yourself in it?’

That gave me mercy for your mother, and a new way of thinking of it and as a reader. I have brown eyes and had dark brown hair before I went gray, and my kids were both blonde haired, blue-eyed kids, and everywhere I went, everyone said, “Oh, he looks like his daddy.” And I just wanted to hit people. So it gave me a way in to understand your mother that I liked. Now, I was curious about the timing of publication. Do you have the same publisher for both books?

TW: I do—it’s Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver. They’re great. They’re small, like six people or something, but they put a lot of great books out, and they really do get noticed, because they’re championing marginalized voices and really original types of stories. I love them.

LL: Can you talk about the timing of the writing of the two books?

TW:  In 2005 or so, I set out to write the prose version of All Our Ordinary Stories. And then I took that Humber College certificate in 2007 or 2008—before I had kids. I had been married a long time before I had kids—about seven years—and then I had Scarlet. Everything stopped—nothing was happening with writing. And then I had my second child 16 months later, and then my third 18 months after that.

LL: Chaos reigns supreme.

TW: Yes. And in 2012 my house burned down, and I lost my manuscript—all the marked up pages.

LL: Wow, so painful!

TW: Yes, painful, however, I did have a digital version that I had typed out the easy fixes for, so I still had that. I had written to my mentor and said, ‘Did you happen to keep any photocopies?’ And she said, ‘honestly, I don’t. And also, this is kind of a sign that you can start over.’ She was very gracious. She didn’t say it wasn’t working anyways, but I knew that  fiddling and fixing wasn’t going to solve the problems of the book—she knew that, and I knew that. And so the fact that the manuscript was gone really didn’t matter anymore.

The year after, or a couple years after that was when I had my last child, Isaac, and at that point, because everything was gone, I thought I should start something new and maybe a little simpler and easier—a quicker story to tell, not a multi-generational, very tender old story, maybe just a really straightforward one. I thought about my postpartum depression a lot, and I decided I’ll do that. I had him in 2014 and my mom had her stroke in 2014, and in 2015 I started writing Dear Scarlet . It was published in 2019 but, you know, after I reached the point of sending off my stuff to the publisher for Dear Scarlet, I had already started thinking about that lost book. That was the book of my heart, like, the one thing that I wanted to become a writer to do.

LL: That’s beautiful.

TW: I got to that point and thought, well, I think I can solve the problems now, because I’m a mother, and because I’m a cartoonist now. It really changed the nature of the project. I mean, I had that digital copy, and before I started this version, I did read it through, but it wasn’t like I was consulting it.

LL: Just sort of refreshed your mind?

TW: See if I had forgotten anything, or exact details. But really I didn’t need to refer to it—it was enough to start new and re-approach it from the person I am now. I’ve read somewhere, or maybe I heard on a podcast that the writer and director from New Zealand, Taika Waititi, and what he does is when he writes his scripts, he writes a full first draft, and then he puts it in a drawer and waits a few months, and then he writes his second draft. But he doesn’t go back to that draft in the drawer. He just remembers the big scenes that he wrote in that first draft. And honestly, if the scenes are good enough to remember later on.

LL: Right, what rises to the top.

TW: I thought that’s really interesting. I’m not sure that would work for everyone, but it makes sense to me. There were scenes from my memoir that have stayed with me for 20 years, and those are the things that your book will hinge on. I mean, I absolutely ended up working on a project for a long time. The other drawback is it will, you know, kind of drive you insane too.

LL: Now, so much of this book is other people’s stories, and trying to find them, trying to get them. You had this beautiful quote, “How can you ask anyone, especially your mother, to revisit their most traumatic experience and make a vivid, coherent story out of their pain?” And every nonfiction conference always has sessions on the ethics of writing about other people, and everyone makes their own decisions. But I was just curious, how you dealt with that very question that you wrote out.

TW: I had a bit of an out in the sense that  from that first manuscript, I had already set out to write my parents’ stories, and interviewed them, and recorded those interviews. They were not keen, but they had accepted it and they were cooperating. They understood what I wanted to do and so I had their permission. However, I talk about this in the book, I wanted to interview them again to get a new perspective, to ask deeper questions.

And the second time, my mom was now much older, had been through more, and was looking at the past in a different way. And, she got quite upset, and I didn’t feel good about that. So what I told myself was I would just have to work with what I had. I did show them the book before I sent it to my publisher as well. They can’t read it. They’re not English readers, but I tried to walk them through each page, because my fear was my mom would open up the book thinking it’s the story of her escape, and then in the first pages, she sees herself old and in the hospital.

LL: Now, let me ask you—you came to my book group several years ago, when Dear Scarlet came out, and you had said that there was this comfort in people not being able to read it. And then it was translated.

TW: Yes, it was translated into Chinese. My parents did read it. I gave it to them with much trepidation. They have never once talked to me about how they felt about it or anything of the contents, but they just said they read it.

LL: It happened, and we move on.

TW: And you know a bit more about my parents now, so it is not a surprise that they would just read it and say nothing, but I think they’re proud of me for having written it. I went over there one day just last year, and they had a neighbor over. I needed to explain to them some things that were happening with their condo board, so they brought the neighbor over, who is Chinese as well, so I could explain to everyone, and the neighbor said, ‘Oh, I read your book. Your parents gave it to me.’ And so I’m like, okay, they’re proud of me or they liked it enough, like they weren’t ashamed.

LL: If they’re giving it away, that’s tacit approval, and that’s good.

TW: Yeah. I mean, I tried to be sensitive. There are no villains, obviously, in this book, but  everyone’s done a bunch of things that they probably wish they could have done a different way. The person that actually I would have changed the book for would be my brother.

LL: Yeah, I get that 100%

TW: I gave it to my brother very early on. I said, ‘if you’re, you have any problems with how I’m depicting our parents or, you know, their stories, or, you know, even that you’re not in this very much.’ It makes it look like I’m kind of an only child and alone all the time, but he was there a lot, but he didn’t have a problem with it, and so I knew it was okay. I didn’t want him to feel like I had treated my parents unfairly, either. You know, he has a different relationship with them. I mean, it’s similar in some ways, but he didn’t feel a lot of the feelings I felt, and so, I didn’t want to offend him, or, make it, make it seem a certain way if he didn’t feel like it was that way.

LL: We are about out of time, but I want to know what you’re looking forward to now.  Your book came out in September, I think?

TW: Yes, it did. I’m looking forward to going to AWP (the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) in LA. And this my first time at AWP. I hear it’s a really big thing, and that I have no idea. The only other American conference I’ve been to for writing is HippoCamp.

LL: It’s very different!

TW: And I’ve just finished a draft a really kind of, Ann Lamott style crappy first draft of another book, and so I’m excited to fix that up. l I think there is something there, but there’s a lot to do and I’m happy because I haven’t been writing for this whole past year, and so I’m glad to be back into it.

LL: That’s the cycle, right? You write a first draft, but then it’s all editing and revising, and then it’s publicity, and then, finally you start a new project.

TW: Honestly wasn’t sure I would be here again. All Our Ordinary Stories was so much the book of my heart, and kind of the one achievement I really wanted to accomplish in my writing life. I kind of thought, ‘Well, what am I going to do next?  Will I even write another book?’ Like, it doesn’t feel as high stakes anymore. But I feel like with those stakes being removed, I feel a freedom I haven’t had in 20 years, either.  Now I can do whatever, I can do anything. I don’t have the burden or responsibility to tell these stories anymore, because I’ve done it. I hope this book that I’m working on now will go somewhere, but I’m just finding a lot of joy in working on something that isn’t heavy.

LL: Well, thank you. And I loved your book so much. I loved Dear Scarlet, but I can feel it being the book of your heart and the story you’ve carried, and it is just wonderful.

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