From the paratext, content, and style, it is clear that The Arrival is meant to mimic a photo album or more broadly, an era of photography. Tan’s skylines and photo-realistic portraits are obviously alluding to the early 20th century photographers who were interested in cities and immigrant populations. The allusion to photography is an interesting one; since both photographs and graphic novels are ‘still images,’ the connection raises the question of what it means to freeze an action and why it is that we do this. Further, given the theme of the immigrant’s journey, the allusion to photography is also an allusion to the journey of memory and history.
We typically think of memory as beginning at the point of absence: the moment something is removed from our present state by any span of time is the moment when we say we ‘remember’ it. So memory is like a mental journey in that it traces our lineage through time up to our present point. The story of The Arrival evokes a journey from its title onwards. We start at the beginning, at the point of assimilation and new experiences, rather than beginning at the point of departure and leaving behind the past. Yet the journey is not as straightforward as a move from past to present because the nameless protagonist is pulled back to his homeland by the ties he has to his family. Though he has begun a new life in a strange and unfamiliar land, his ties to his past are not severed but very much present. This is emblematized in his photographs of his family. Tan also uses the imaginative form of his story to give the reader glimpses into the protagonist’s mind. At the moment when he opens his suitcase to unpack for the first time, the panel shows his inner desire through a miniature version of his family and old home that appears to be inside the suitcase. The next panel, a close-up of his face, is followed by a smaller panel showing that the contents of the suitcase are just ordinary clothes. The sequence reveals that the miniature of his family inside the suitcase was the product of his imagination or memory, triggered by the contents of his suitcase which represent his past.
The panels in The Arrival are reminiscent of photographs in that they are always rectangular or square. Though some of the splash panels or pages stand alone, others are arranged in a grid that progresses action-by-action or even moment-by-moment. One sequence in particular stands out: when the protagonist is going through the immigration process, Tan uses a full-page grid to show the character’s mounting frustration. Each panel is slightly different than the subsequent ones so that the variation in the character’s expression is the most prominent change. The result is that the supposedly static images take on motion as each ‘freeze frame’ becomes part of a cumulative experience of the man’s confusion, frustration, and disappointment. We typically think that photography ‘captures’ something, which implies making the subject still or motionless. Yet Tan creates motion out of these still images, not just in the sense of time progressing, but in the greater journey of memory.
Time, as much or moreso than distance, is a separating force. It divides past and present, where we were from where we are, the beginning from the end. We take photographs to memorialize things, to aid our memory, to make time still so that it cannot intervene and separate us from whatever it is we are memorializing. But even though we freeze moments as emblems of memory, the act of memory is human and imperfect: it appears to make static something that is in actuality fluid.
