The world through the eyes of an Asian American: Exploring verbal and visual expressions in a graphic memoir

This study aims at exploring verbal and visual expressions of Asian American immigrants depicted in Malaka Gharib's / was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir (2019). Telling a story of the author's childhood experience growing up as a bicultural child in America, the graphic memoir shows the use of code-switching from English to Tagalog and Arabic as well as the use of pejorative terms associated with typical stereotypes of the Asian American. Apart from the verbal codes, images also play a significant role in this graphic memoir by providing visual representations to support the narrative. By applying theories of code-switching, this paper examines the types of and reasons for code-switching in the graphic memoir. T h e linguistic analysis is further supported by non-narrative analysis of images in the memoir as a visual representation of Asian American cultural identity. This study reveals that code-switching is mainly applied to highlight the author's mixed cultural back ground as well as to imply both personal and socio political empowerment for minorities, particularly Asian Americans. Furthermore, through the non-narrative analysis, this paper shows that in her drawings, Gharib refuses to inscribe stereotypical racial portrayal of the diverse characters and focuses more on beliefs, values, and experiences that make her who she is, a Filipino-Egyptian American.