Book Review: Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice by Eddie Ahn

 reviewed by Margaret C. Flinn

Eddie Ahn. Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice. Ten Speed Graphics, 2024. 208 pp. US$24.99 (Hardcover). ISBN: 9781984862495; Ebook ISBN: 9781984862501. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/729254/advocate-by-eddie-ahn/

 

The subtitle of Eddie Ahn’s Advocate, A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice kind of says it all. Graphic memoirs are numerous and it’s difficult to stand out. Ahn’s book is an engaging look at a particular intersection of identities and experiences: unique in as much as each individual is unique. The book gives insights into Ahn’s family’s trajectory from Korea to Texas (and return visits for various reasons), and Ahn’s own relocation to California, initially as an Americorps volunteer. The book flashes back and forward between different moment of Ahn’s family history, including a mélange of documents (details from diaries, maps, drawings of photographs) as is frequently seen in the graphic memoir. While the story focuses on Ahn’s own journey, it thus includes stories recounted to him by family members, or pieced together between family stories and material in his grandfather’s diary.

            If Ahn’s story stands out, it will probably be for its ordinary weirdness. He shares the quirks of his life, like playing poker and health issues in law school, and the financial struggles through his life that lead to unexpectedly amusing, if melancholy, details like calculating the cost of everything in its burrito math equivalent (a tank of gas equals four or five burritos)—the burrito being the expensive, filling, and nourishing meal of choice for Ahn, particularly through his early years in the Bay Area. Ahn is at once informative and banal, educating the reader through his own story about the vicissitudes of environmental and social justice, the constant challenges of immigration and racism in the U.S. and depicting a quiet passion and dogged labor that allow anyone to imagine that what Ahn has done is doable, although most of us never will. It also documents recent realities such as the way COVID-19 impacted community organizing and social justice work.

            The self-taught artist’s realist lines are clean and clear, with single color washes in a soft palette changing by page or panel and includes a brief annex regarding the making of the book and environmental justice work. In all, the book is readable and informative. Many readers will be able to relate to parts of Ahn’s story, and young readers may even be inspired by the non-glamorized yet dignified representation of doing meaningful work in today’s world.