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Going Home: Nicole Chung & Navied Mahdavian
PBF PassNovember 4, 2023 @ 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm
Portland’5 Winningstad Theatre
From bestselling author Nicole Chung is A Living Remedy, a searing memoir of family, class and grief, and a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost. This Country is a gorgeously illustrated and written debut graphic memoir about belonging, identity, and making a home in the remote American West, by New Yorker cartoonist Navied Mahdavian. Moderated by Mat Johnson (Invisible Things).
Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she’d long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets. When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world. Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.
“Like the best memoirs, Nicole Chung’s A Living Remedy is both an excavation of the self and the people who sustain it–but also, at its core, a work of art undergirded by a tender, forgiving, and awe-filled gaze at what it means to live and hurt in the human world. The result is a bone-deep enactment of love in all its valences.”
— Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Before Navied Mahdavian moved with his wife and dog in November of 2016 from San Francisco to an off-the-grid cabin in rural Idaho, he had never fished, gardened, hiked, hunted, or lived in a snowy place. But there, he could own land, realize his dream of being an artist, and start a family—the Millennial dream. Over the next three years, Mahdavian leaned into the wonders of the natural Idaho landscape and found himself adjusting to and enjoying a slower pace of living. But beyond the boundaries of his six acres, he was confronted with the realities of America’s political shifts and forced to confront the question: Do I belong here? Mahdavian’s beautifully written and unflinchingly honest graphic memoir charts his growth and struggles as an artist, citizen, and new father. It celebrates his love of place and honors the relationships he makes in rural America, touching on dynamics like culture, environment, and identity in America, and even articulating difficult moments of racism and brutality he found there as a Middle Eastern American. With wit, compassion, and a sense of humor, Mahdavian’s insider perspective offers a unique portrait of one of the most remote and wild areas of the American West.
“In Mahdavian’s hands, comics feel like poetry. Perfect ink drawings bring land, beast, and humans, with all their delicacy and yearning, viscerally to life. This Country… made me want to grant my own surroundings the grace, humor, and dignity of Mahdavian’s observant study.”
—Amy Kurzweil, cartoonist and author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir
Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry into all events. Passes are $15 in advance and $25 day of Festival. Youth 17 & under get in FREE. All full-priced General Admission Passes include a $5 book fair voucher and entry into Portland Art Museum. Passes admit attendees to the Festival; individual events are first-come, first-served. More info here.
Bios
Nicole Chung
Navied Mahdavian
Mat Johnson
