Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is, in essence, the framework for nearly every immigration story, from the melancholy departure, to the job search, to the bringing of the rest of the family to the new world. In the protagonist’s experiences in the foreign land he migrates to, a surprisingly essential element of the journey is the companionship by the “pet” he adopts upon moving into an apartment.
I find that the pet is an extension of the protagonist’s self in many ways—his instinctual self. It is the pet that encounters the girl that helps him decipher the map of the city, the pet that finds him food, and the pet that finds him his first job hanging up posters. The protagonist’s pet displays many of the same qualities as the protagonist such as his playfulness and youth-like curiosity, but it seems as though every person the protagonist encounters has a similar pet unique to him or herself. The pet is foreign yet familiar and is the protagonist’s only permanent sense of companionship in the foreign land he’s arrived at.
In general, the immigration narrative is often one of perseverance and survival, and the pet may be representative of the sense of self one must seek in retaining when immersed in a new world. Each character, no matter a recent immigrant or not, originated from somewhere and has a culture and background unique to him or herself that is embodied in that person’s pet. Even when the protagonist’s family arrives in the foreign land, they eagerly adopt the pet as an extension of the life the father has set up in this new world, but more so, the life he has preserved from the old.
