The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a beautiful and moving book illustrating the trauma of immigration and all its loneliness and discovery. The book is a graphic novel and utilizes absolutely no written language. There are many peculiar elements and fantastical images within this book that actually relate to the scary and frightening things real people go to that make them want to leave their homes.
The book starts out very realistic and straight forward, showing us a man leaving his family on a train to get to a new country. But right when this first chapter ends, Tan draws the man’s wife and daughter coming back home without him, and long shadows of the spiked tail of some kind of lizard-monster can be seen in the clouds above them. This is the first element of surrealism and for me it set a very ominous tone for the book. I began expecting more scary surreal elements, and I found them. But there are also magical things of beauty and innocence awaiting.
When the protagonist reaches his new city, he is bombarded with new symbols and people and buildings like he’s never seen before. The author created an interesting hieroglyphic written language for the text that makes no sense to either the protagonist or the reader. This was brilliant thinking. In making the book, his goal was really to have the reader feel the experience of being an immigrant in all its anxiety, fear and excitement. That partly why no one in the text speaks: he can’t read or understand anyone, and so neither can we. He draws objects in a notebook to try and communicate with the people he meets, and that is also how we understand what is going on. It is almost like we are the protagonist, since we can only understand what he understands, no more or less.
Because of this idea Tan sets up for us, I theorized that all the fantastic elements were also a device to illustrate things characters were feeling or experiencing. His wife and daughter, for example, were experiencing fear and loneliness after he left them, and we experience it with them because of the visual in the sky. The monster in the skies might represent that the country they are living in is colonized and is in a state of war- like being taken over by a dark beast. That would give them a reason to leave. Likewise, all the unusual food and objects and animals he comes across are to further illustrate how different his new environment is from his old one. In reality, the same kinds of fruit and vegetables and animals are found in many places in the world. It is funny to think that bread would look so drastically different from one place to another but thats how he experienced it being in a new place.
When the protagonist meets new people, he learns of their experiences. One man he meets, a grocer, tells him that he escaped his home country with his wife. In their homeland, giant beings in suits were sucking up his people with machines. My guess is this was supposed to symbolize the implementation of some kind of concentration or internment camp: people being forced to flee or they will be stolen away and put somewhere mysterious. These are a select few of such symbols and elements Tan uses in The Arrival to connote and demonstrate what immigrants go through.
