“Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some”
Khiêm is kind of a three-tiered biography/autobiography, as Yasmine Trinh Phan Morissette writes about her grandmother, mother, and herself through the lens of Vietnamese history and what it means to be a refugee. She’s abled assisted by her brother, Djibril Chu’o’ng Morissette Phan, who draws this, while Nikki San Pedro is credited with “adaptation,” but I’m not sure what that means (I assume it’s the translation from French, but anything else?). 
This comes to us from Fairsquare Comics.
I live in hope that any biography/autobiography I read will be great, and it so rarely happens, but I keep trying! Khiêm, unfortunately, isn’t one of them, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a pretty good comic, and you can take my lack of overwhelming love for it with a grain of salt, I suppose, because I don’t love biographies/autobiographies in general. Trinh (I’m not sure how I’m supposed to address the creators by their surnames, so I’ll use the names their mother gave them) does a good job with the three generations of women, and she brings in some of the history of Vietnam in the process – she really couldn’t help it, after all, as her grandmother (after whom the book is named) lived through World War II and her mother was born right when the Americans were beginning to get involved heavily in the country’s travails.
The book is split into three sections, which makes sense. In the first and second, Trinh’s grandmother and mother are the narrators, as it appears Trinh is using letters her grandmother and mother wrote to her as the framework on which to hang the story. She uses short chapters as vignettes, showing the progress of the women (and herself) as they move through life, and only in the third section, about herself, does it become a bit more of a straight-forward narrative (Trinh is only 30, so she’s lived less than the other two women and can therefore make her section a bit more condensed). 
The book begins with Khiêm selling her younger brother, which sounds like a joke (Khiêm assures us it is not and asks us not to laugh) but is really more a savage indictment of how Vietnam had been impoverished by the French and Japanese. This section is about how Khiêm tries to make sure her brother (whom they do get back) makes a favorable marriage and how she tries to survive in the post-war Vietnam until she eventually finds a husband, and it’s interesting because of the sense of impending doom that hangs over her life. There’s violence, certainly, but Trinh makes sure to show how these people lived their lives with that violence hanging over them. It’s never a bad thing to show how society functions in a place where the threat of violence is present so much, as it gives us a sense of the indomitable spirit of humanity.
Trang’s story is about her flight to Canada when she’s a teenager. It’s not political, but social – her family is very poor, her father isn’t the best dad, and her mother despairs of giving all her children a good life. It’s a devastating scene, as Khiêm ends up selling her daughter and son just like she did her brother, and for the same reason. It’s a horrific choice she has to make, and while her brother would have gone to a rich Vietnamese family, Trang and her brother end up in Canada after they work on fishing boats for a time (Khiêm sells them to the fishing industry, basically). Once they arrive in Quebec, they are, of course, “assimilated,” which Trang doesn’t understand. It’s not so different from Vietnam, she realizes – there are still men who abuse her, and there is still horrible poverty. The idea of “rich” Western countries having poor people is a big part of the rest of the book, from Trang’s story to Trinh’s. 
Trinh’s story is mostly about her reconnecting with her roots, and it’s better than I thought it would be. A lot of times with these kinds of stories, the West is demonized while the traditional place is lionized, but Trinh doesn’t necessarily do that. She wrestles with her privilege as a “rich” Westerner (she is, of course, born in Canada) and how she views the world through that prism, and when she does go to Vietnam, she doesn’t necessarily love everything about it, although she gains a much greater appreciation for what her mother and grandmother went through (she also gets to meet her great-uncle, the one Khiêm sold in the first chapter, which is nice). She’s just trying to figure out who she is, as a refugee in a country where the people don’t look like she does, in a world that doesn’t necessarily understand what her family has endured, and it’s interesting that she doesn’t condemn them, because she, ultimately, also doesn’t know what her family had to endure. Everyone has to become who they are on their own, and Trinh does a nice job showing that.
Her brother, who’s in the book only briefly, does really nice work with the art. He is very much influenced by Sergio Toppi, but if you’re going to be influenced by someone, that’s definitely a good way to go! He uses a thick, heavy brush to hatch, which adds weight to the characters and their surroundings, but he’s skilled enough that he can thin out the line to create wonderful details even in background characters and buildings so that, while they might be a bit abstract, they fill the scene nicely. He doesn’t use a lot of traditional panels, choosing instead to move from one scene to another through overlapped characters, which doesn’t inhibit the storytelling at all. A few scenes are horrific, but he doesn’t show a lot of violence, leaving it up to our imaginations, and one interesting thing he does is warp the characters just a bit, elongating them or changing the shapes of their faces, so that it becomes less real and more part of how the affected characters choose to remember things. 
This is a book about memory, after all, and the characters are telling their stories, so it’s a neat trick that Djibril uses to create that effect in our own minds. He does a very good job showing the contrast between relatively poor Vietnam and relatively rich Canada without being too obvious, and he also shows that despite the differences in the wealth of the characters, things are often wonderful in Vietnam and not so wonderful in Canada. It’s well done, as it helps Trinh’s narrative without being too on-the-nose. It’s a beautiful book.
Khiêm is a good comic, and while I don’t love it completely, it’s still pretty interesting. Yasmine and Djibril do a good job showing us two cultures, neither of which they feel completely at home in, and I do like that Yasmine doesn’t dismiss either one of them. Some scenes are superb, but the narrative always feels a bit … distant, perhaps, as Trinh doesn’t experience what Khiêm and Trang go through and she writes about her own feelings somewhat clinically. But maybe that’s just me. It’s a feeling I get with a lot of biographies/autobiographies – the actual experiences are supposed to be enough for the reader, without the writer imbuing it with any narrative tension, and too often, I don’t connect with that. It’s frustrating, because the book looks great and, as always, I appreciate learning about different cultures and seeing what people have to go through just to live their lives, but it feels like I’m missing something. Again, maybe this will work for you. It’s certainly not a bad book by any means! And, of course, you can find it on Amazon!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
