Mother Tongue

This graphic memoir was simultaneously a love letter to Teochew-Cambodian food and a critique of the normalization of fatphobia in Asian communities and its impact on how second-generation diaspora interact and participate in their culture.

Food is so intrinsic and integral to how many of us feel connected to our family, culture, and heritage. Food and language are used to show how fatphobia presents itself as a barrier to forming deeper familial and cultural connections and the effects of fatphobia on health discourse.

Fat Asian people are often absent from conversations about fatness, especially fat Asian women. In media, there continues to be a lack of larger body size representation, and even more so, a lack of positive or neutral portrayals that give agency and dignity to fat characters.

This graphic medicine piece also features a spoken Chinese dialect, Teochew. Considered to be an endangered language with no standard writing system, it uses Chinese characters with unique pronunciation. More specifically, the Teochew in this piece is Cambodian-Teochew. This piece employs a unique method of color-coding the Chinese characters, Teochew romanization, and English translation.

Click the image below to read the full comic!