Scene-To-Scene Transition In Vietnamerica By Gb Tran

Vietnamerica by GB Tran is a graphic memoir about GB Tran’s complex family history during the Vietnam war. The death of his maternal grandmother motivates him to find out his grandparents’ and his parents’ experiencing living in Vietnam during French occupancy. The story shows a theme of how migration, war, and trauma affect not only the people who lived through it by the later generations as well. Throughout the graphic memoir, GB Tran uses color to help set the mood for readers, as well as, help readers understand transitions through the panels. An example of this is shown on pages 78 and 79 where page 78 has a black background to create a bad memory of Tri Huu Tran being captured and questioned about his father. On page 79, it is a completely

From Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, McCloud explains that there are six different types of transition panels and each one requires a different level of closure from the reader. On page 109, each panel shows the Tran family’s specific experiences assimilating into the American culture. The panels show a scene-to-scene transition where each event takes place across significant difference in time and space. The panels on page 229 show the similar concept of scene-to-scene and events that the Tran family experienced while living and adapt to their life in South Carolina. The panels are separated by words created with Scrabble letters that form the phrase, “In a foreign culture threatening our own.” There are certain factors that make it difficult for immigrants to assimilate into a host country’s culture, such as language barrier, nonaligned cultural values, and the tendency to stick within in-groups. The color scheme on page 229 is brighter and creates a happier mood and the idea that those were pleasant memories they had growing up while the color scheme on page 109 is dark and showed the unpleasant memories they had in America. The Tran family’s struggle to adapt to a new culture is similar to Marjane Satrapi’s, from Persepolis, experience when she first started living in Austria and experienced a culture shock.