An Introduction to Americana
by Lauren Pronger
Hello listeners! This is Lauren Pronger from Amarillo, TX for the HPPR Radio Readers introducing our new book for the month: The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito by award-winning graphic novelist Shing Yin Khor.
I knew of the author from her Eisner award winning graphic novel The Legend of Auntie Po but had no idea she also wrote about, let alone traveled, Route 66. As a Malaysian American who immigrated to the US at the age of 16, Khor says she explores “mythic Americana and the American Dream, in conversation with queer immigrant identity, new diasporic traditions, and rituals of labor” (Khor’s website). For this book specifically, she was “curious as to how it'd feel to really immerse [herself] in this highway that's really earned its own place in the American mythos, and in some way make sense of [her] own place as a queer person, an immigrant, and a person of color in the American narrative,” but that she also just really likes tourist traps and silly roadside attractions (Meet-the-Author interview).
The novel certainly interrogates these questions of self and belonging while illustrating some of the most famous stops and landmarks on the route. Even after living in Los Angeles for 10 years and obtaining American citizenship, Khor said her only real concept of Middle America and Route 66 came from The Grapes of Wrath and she wanted to break out of the LA bubble to see it for herself.
As she drives along the route with her dog Bug (which reminds me greatly of Steinbeck’s later book Travels with Charley), she talks with many travelers about the locations and landmarks they find themselves in, investigating their personal connections to these places and to America as a whole. Explorations of ghost towns and dilapidated motels are interspersed with history about the highway, and stops at small family-owned restaurants and gift shops alternate with the bloody history of the American West, with Khor’s inner musings about what it means to be an American, an artist, and an immigrant laid over it all. The novel is a fascinating juxtaposition of idolizing a portion of America’s history while acknowledging the uncomfortable realities that idolatry wants us to forget. Written in April 2016, Khor has stated that she didn’t find her citizenship status during the trip as tenuous then as she does now, yet even during her Route 66 journey, she runs across casual xenophobia in an “American owned” motel sign in New Mexico and feels “foreign and displaced” among the daunting display of religion in Texas (pages 90, 99).
By the time she reaches Oklahoma she acknowledges that her dedication to the journey is wearing thin after camping in her car for weeks. As such, the Oklahoma through Chicago stretch of Route 66 is barely 30 pages compared to Arizona’s 40 pages of landmark detail and history. Thus, a lot of what I was wanting to hear her perspective on, like Tulsa, especially after the two-page spread on the history of Two Guns, Arizona, was never mentioned. I can’t fault Khor for that - Route 66 is almost 2,500 miles and the culture of Americana is, often by its very nature of restorative nostalgia, exclusionary to those deemed “outsiders” and purposefully ignorant of our nation’s violent history and often violent present. Even with the toll of confronting that culture and camping among it for weeks, she seems to have found peace on the open road and enjoyed the unexpected detours and personal connections made, concluding that the idea of home and self may be more complicated than borders and labels allow, with a burgeoning realization that existing “between” is perfectly ok, especially when you have the good company of friends and family along the way.
This is Lauren Pronger from Amarillo, TX for the HPPR Radio Readers.
