Week 1: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Sometimes a wordless illustration or drawing can give you a message by making you interpret it although there is no word that explains about it instead it allows you to expand your thought. The message each person understand might be different since every person's perspective is different. The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel by Shaun Tan, leads the audience to understand the story by using emotion and body or visual language.

This story is about a man who migrated to whole different world, where everything is so different from the place where he lived that he's struggling. Anything, such as food, animal, or a building looks so odd compared to his homeland. He had difficulty as an immigrant. He sometimes had a flashback of his old home where there was war. However, he slowly adapts to the new place; making friends, get a job, and finally brings his family to the world he's living at. At the end, it shows his daughter helping other immigrant. So all the process of what he was doing was getting prepared for his whole family to move.

I think this graphic novel is doing a great job sending messages to the audience- about immigrant's difficulty of adapting. There is no literal words that can read but the author uses symbol to show the foreign language. By creating a whole different surreal world from where we live, the author creates sense of difference to both character and audience. The whole story is pretty similar to what actual immigrants go through. When you move outside your country, there is cultural and language difference that makes you subside and scared especially when you have no one to help you. So the author has deep understanding towards what immigrants are going through.