The Arrival by Shaun Tan

My eight-year-old daughter Emma was fascinated by a book she got from the library about immigrants and the history of Ellis Island. So this past Christmas I bought her a book called The Arrival by Shaun Tan.

The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages.

Yesterday I sat with Emma and Joshua Quinn and we "read' the story as we looked at the beautiful, even magical pictures. The brilliance of Tan's approach is that he conveys the sense of bewilderment an immigrant would feel in a foreign land. Everything in the new country is different and strange. None of the symbols or buildings are familiar. Even the vegetables at the store are exotic.

The immigrant starts out with nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency and must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.

Reading it reminded me of how important it is to show kindness to internationals in our communities. And it filled me with fresh gratefulness to live in a nation of liberty that has welcomed people from around the world, my ancestors among them. My great-grandparents came to America from Japan.

If you get a chance, take the time to soak up Tan's book. It's a wonderful story and a beautiful work of art.

You can buy the book here. You can read more about Shaun Tan at his website.