The Virus

Ashley (Qiaowen) Chen

Instructor’s Introduction

Ashley (Qiaowen) Chen submitted this short 4-panel comic as part of a low-stakes assignment in my WR120 ELL course called “The Graphic Self.” After each of the major graphic memoirs we read in the course, I have students complete what I call a Graphic Reading Response. This is a 3-part assignment in which students 1) offer a written response analyzing the significance of a particular theme in the graphic memoir, 2) engage in self-writing by reflecting on and writing about their own experience (whether directly or indirectly) with the same theme, and 3) create a short graphic narrative of at least 2 panels in which students imitate some of the author’s primary graphic strategies while portraying some portion of their personal experience discussed in part 2.

Ashley created her 4-panel comic (part 3 of the assignment) in response to the assigned theme of racial injustice and stereotypes, which we had been discussing in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis, volumes 1 and 2. Because this was a low-stakes homework assignment, offering practice for students’ final projects (the creation of their own short graphic memoir at the end of the semester), there is not an analytical component to this assignment. However, Ashley’s graphic narrative stands powerfully on its own, giving a necessary voice to the fears and injustices of the moment through the portrayal of her own experience as a Chinese student confronting the growing anti-Asian racism and hate speech in the US at the time. This assignment was due just before spring recess in March 2020, when the university (and the entire world) would soon lock down, and the pandemic would soon shed even more light on the tragedies of racial injustice and inequality in the US and throughout the world.

Lesley Yoder

The Virus

Ashley (Qiaowen) Chen is a student in the Questrom School of Business, graduating in 2022.