“Saigon Execution”
One of the most dramatic points in the entire book is the recreation of the iconic photograph now as “Saigon Execution” which shows the moment just before a South Vietnamese general pulls the trigger of his piston and executes a Viet Cong prisoner. Anyone who few up in the 1970’s is familiar with photograph; there was no escaping its omnipresence. The photo is very accurately recreated in the book in spite of the overall lack of specific detail in the artistic expression of the book. The panel featuring the execution is therefore powerful because it is quite likely that a number of readers who will be tend to be younger because of its format are not as familiar and may never have actually seen the actual photograph. In this way, the book bridges generations, filling in the gaps in knowledge.
Adult and Child
Another striking visual image is situated as two panels as the narrator describes her relationship with her parents. The words are those of an adult recollecting the past and contemplating how she is now older than her parents were when they made the desperate escape from Vietnam to freedom aboard a crowded boat and yet they possess the power to make her feel like a little girl even to that day. This narrative is divided into two square panels of equal size. On the left is the author has drawn herself as an adult while in the right she is a little girl. In both, she is alone, dominated by empty space and the dialogue box.
Parents were Children Too
A kind of thematic companion to the example described above is another two-panel section. On the left, the narrator is a little girl holding onto a doll and looking at her father sitting at a table smoking. She is thinking that in order to understand why her father was the man he was, it was essential to learn what happened to the boy he was. She is still a little girl in the panel on the right, but she has dropped the dollar to her side and is looking at the same chair and same table only it is now occupied by a child. Who is still smoking.
“Masking”
Probably the single most important element related to the visual imagery of the illustrations in this book take us back to the recreation of the execution photo. As mentioned in that section, the human faces do not feature a great attention to detail, but are composed in a minimalist style taking full advantage of a just a few lines, some shading and open spaces. Faces are really more suggested than faithfully recreated. This is an effect that is sometimes referred to as “masking” which purposely avoids detail in order to reduce the impact of certain prejudices and biases. Softening the presumably “Asian” features and facial characteristics without utterly dissolving them opens the door to the possibility of greater identification and empathy than might be accomplished otherwise.
