Abstract
In his reading of Quan Zhou Wu’s graphic novel Gazpacho agridulce, Collado highlights both personal and societal tensions inherent in transcultural encounters, particularly those related to the Chinese and Spanish. By examining Quan’s personal stories of being raised by immigrant parents in southern Spain, Collado looks at how Gazpacho agridulce sheds light on the stereotypes, crises of identity, and cultural integration faced by Spaniards of Asian descent. Collado concludes that Quan’s work reformulates the autobiographical genre by combining family melodrama, tragi-comedy, a coming-of-age story, and the artist’s diary.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter is part of my doctoral thesis: “Caricaturas del Otro: Contra-Representaciones Satíricas de la Inmigración en la Literatura y la Cultura Visual Española Contemporánea (1993–2017),” UCLA, 2018.
- 2.
Two of the most recent works on migration studies in the Spanish context include Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain (Vega Durán, 2016) and Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music (Bermúdez, 2018).
- 3.
The term “post-immigrant” refers to second-generation immigrants in Spain; in other words, the children of immigrants born in Spain.
- 4.
Over 70% of Chinese immigrants in Spain come from this region (Sáiz López 154).
- 5.
Amy Chua (U.S.A., 1962) coined the term tiger mother in her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). Chua, born in the United States of Chinese migrant parents, defends in her work a severe (for some even cruel) method of education that contrasts with the supposed permissiveness and freedom of Western parents.
- 6.
Interested readers should refer to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge UP, 1983), for more on this topic.
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Collado, A. (2020). “I Hate Being Chinese”: Migration, Cultural Identity, and Autobiography in Quan Zhou Wu’s Gazpacho agridulce. In: McKinney, C., Richter, D.F. (eds) Spanish Graphic Narratives. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_7
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