Had the opportunity to talk about my work with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) during an interview with Shira Laucharoen from the Sampan Newspaper.
Lillian Lee, a Boston based cartoonist and illustrator of the comic “Empty Bamboo Girl” published by Sampan newspaper, will also be creating artwork for MAPC. She will be developing three pieces of digital art in Chinese, advocating for people to get vaccinated and providing information on how to do that. These will be sent to local community and health centers, where they can be printed out and posted, as well as disseminated through social media. Lee will also make a comic strip intended to dispel vaccine rumors, which she has encountered in her personal life.
“Promoting equity and representing the people in our community are part of the project,” said Lee. “If people see themselves in the artwork, that’s going to help as well, and I think that’s a big thing about representation.”
She added, “My comics for Sampan mostly talk about the immigrant family experience and celebrating that relationship. But it also touches on things that are happening in the moment. My recent, new comic strips have been talking about that, in terms of stopping Asian hate. My most recent one was talking about the small microaggressions that people don’t think about, that are the building blocks to what happens, how [racism] starts, and how it gets spread. I do weave that into my work, and things that happen in the news affect me, so they definitely affect the work that I put out there.”
Sampan Newspaper (Printed on May 7, 2021)