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This is another page I ended up modifying for the books (though you’re looking at the original). I think Eve is needlessly the butt of a cultural joke, while Hanna comes off as “right”. The intention was to lay the groundwork for their antagonistic relationship ahead, but I don’t much like it anymore. Sometimes my desire for a tight script took the characters in odd directions. |
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Hannah drops SCIENCE on Eve.
I love panel 2, how they gaze lovingly into each other's hair!
Yea–Eve is clearly in the right to me, but I can see where it can feel like Hannah is getting the last word as an editorial decision. I wonder if the last panel was just Eve glaring at Hannah if it would come across as more in Eve's favor?
Honestly, I get Eve's feelings, but Hannah is right in that Eve is really no better than the "white kids" playing on the new playground. She's no more culturally connected than the rest.
On the other hand, Hannah is one of the "white kids" who is using a factoid from Eve's life as a way to disarm her valid argument. You are right that it's a bit silly of Eve to feel any amount of outrage for something that she normally doesn't give a damn about, but it's not Hannah's place to be the one calling her out (especially given the context of the next strip).
Who cares about that though? Eve's words would be just as correct even if it were a white or black kid saying them. You don't have to be an in-group member to care about social justice. The only way she'd be wrong is if it was the primary residents of Chinatown that were choosing to build the arcade, which is not a potential point that Hannah brought up.
Way to shit on the experiences and feelings of second-generation immigrant kids who may have complicated relationships with their heritage, bub. Requiring that someone speak the language to have the "cultural connection" necessary to have feelings about anything regarding their heritage is profoundly callous to the experience of many second generation immigrants whose parents may have deliberately kept them from learning the language in an effort to give them a better future by assimilating.
meant to upvote this, but i've got clumsy thumbs. that hanna is acting as the arbiter 'true cultural connectedness' in this scenario is EXTREMELY off-putting, and that she locates said connectedness in the ability to fluently speak chinese is reductivist in the worst way.
one thing i disagree with you about, though: not speaking the language of your parents or grandparents IN NO WAY entails that you have a "complicated relationship" with your heritage. great comment, nonetheless!
Hannah is being so libertarian here.