Of Mufflers and Men: A Comic
Adapted and reinvented and reborn—not venerated, but persistent, present, iconic. Is this such a bad fate?
This is Curiosity Americana, a column in which Shing Yin Khor explores icons, roadside attractions, and various objects of Americana as part of their effort to find and assert their place as an immigrant within this country’s mythos.
Shing Yin Khor is a cartoonist and installation artist exploring collections, memory, immigrant identity, and new human rituals. They founded the immersive installation art group Three Eyed Rat, which has built large-scale space desert apothecaries, decrepit space salvage stations in the forest, and lumberjack-themed bars.
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How Did Chop Suey Become a Staple of Chinese American Cuisine?
The authenticity of chop suey was always the authenticity of survival, of adaptation. And so, like generations of Chinese Americans, chop suey stayed.
Get Your Kicks on Route 66: A Comic
I’ll drive with that tender balance of guilt and curiosity and a lifetime of learning and unlearning, still looking for an America that was there, is there, and will be there.
Stone Fruit Season: A Comic
Yes, I dared to eat a peach. And I had to live, so I could eat another.
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Citrine and the Cost of Happiness: How Conflating Money with Success Keeps Us All Trapped
If citrine is supposed to bring you abundance, what might it bring if you didn’t need so much wealth in our capitalist hellscape?
Learning How to Be Gentle in the Face of Trauma—Others’ and My Own
Bees do not attack—just as trauma survivors do not attack, but rather defend. She will not sting you unless she believes the colony’s life depends on her defense. Because when she stings you, she dies.
We Lined Up for Bread and He Massacred Us
Here in Idlib, Syria, we have gone back to the most primitive ways of living: We cook on coal. We wash our clothes by hand. But we are surviving. Some days it feels like a miracle.
