Welcome to Saturday Morning Cartoons, a segment where four artists take turns delighting you with their whimsy, facts and punchlines on Saturday mornings! Our esteemed cartoon critters are Cameron Glavin, Anna Bongiovanni, Megan Prazenica and Yao Xiao. Today’s cartoon is by Cameron.
Bonus behind-the-scenes frame:
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Cameron is an illustrator hailing from Ohio. When she’s not drawing, she’s probably very, very quietly having loud thoughts about: queer things, her eventual shop, what to watch next on Netflix, food, names for her future pets, and tumblr.
Cameron has written 76 articles for us.
aww my girlfriend is from taiwan, so cute!
omg. that bonus panel. <3
Not pictured: avoiding having to explain to my mom why I was writing “You’re an idiot” over and over (badly, I guess?) for a comic for the lesbi thing* that she has negative interest in.
*any and all queer things I’m involved in are the lesbi thing
<3 Loved.
I think your child handwriting (in the cartoon) is cute af.
Hahah, thanks! But the sad thing is that my Chinese “child handwriting” is literally just my terrible adult handwriting. After multiple tries to make it nice. My mother is very disappointed.
“I didn’t know how to appropriately respond to a jab at the non-white half of me that was tailored to get a laugh out of the white half.”
YES. so well said.
and yeah, bonus panel wins.
Having fine motor issues one of my pet peeves is people getting nosy and rude about eating utensil usage. Little cartoon Cameron is making the face I make when people get all “y u need spoon u has fork, no srsly y?”
Sigh.
This just in! My sister had this to say:
“It WAS traumatizing, ok? [Friend’s] mom threatened to put me in the corner for 10 minutes if I kept picking up my bowl… I was eight, goddamnit!!! How was I supposed to know American table manners were different!?!?!?!?
The “Bowl” incident happened when you were three. But all the chopstick trauma is real. It just that melds together in a non-chronological blur. The struggle was REAL dude! I remember. I REMEMBER.”
Trauma is a strong word, but…
Omg adults punishing kids (or warning to) for things like that infuriates me. When I was in like fifth grade this kid in my year ate with the fork in his right hand and the knife with his left (even though he was right handed and apparently it’s only acceptable for left handed people to eat with the fork in their right hand). A teacher who knew he was right handed stood over him and told him to switch hands, and upon refusing to do so he was sent OUT OF THE DINING HALL without getting to finish his lunch. I also remember strongly feeling like there was a racial element to the condescending way the teacher was talking to him before grabbing him and sending him out, but can’t remember if she actually said something or if that was just due to living in a very white municipality that one could always wonder if white people were better treated than oneself. Anyway, I ate with the fork in my right hand too but pretended to be super into my glass of water instead of eating until I felt like the teacher was a safe distance away from my table.
Oh my god! My dad still tells the story of when he was about six years old and was invited to “Sir Richard and Lady Plimmer”‘s house for lunch because he was schoolfriends with their son. He picked up his bowl of tomato soup and slurped the final mouthfuls aka THE SENSIBLE WAY TO GET THE FINAL BIT OF SOUP INTO YOUR MOUTH and got a shocked and horrified response from Lady Plimmer
Hahaha! This was adorable. I only learnt Arabic as a teen, but the little I knew as a kid was mostly my father’s swearing. I called people dogs a lot. Donkey and shit, too. I wish my mother swore in Afrikaans and Urdu, but she’s too good for that. She wouldn’t even give us a shut up.
P. S. the bonus comic is my life, just in other languages.
We also ate with our hands. Not exactly the same experience as chopsticks, but I hated eating around other people. Shovelling curry and rice into your mouth with three fingers in front of other races/cultures was not fun. Not “oh, so are you Chinese?” but rather “oh, so you’re a barbarian?”.
Mini-Cameron’s internal monologues are fantastic! I love your comics.
Have to chime in to defend your sister: I’m white, and I’ve never seen anybody freak out about a bowl being lifted off the table while eating. I personally would rather have someone do that than spill food on the table or on themselves. It’s just PRACTICAL!
Yeah, my family is the whitest of white. Like major viking ancestry white. And my mom has definitely harped at my brother to pick up his bowl and eat closer to his mouth so he doesn’t spill.
That woman was way out of line for getting mad at a kid over something so silly.
hahaha I can relate to “it translates literally to stupid egg” because as a child I always felt like I needed to explain the literal term into english as if whoever I explained it to would actually go check out if that’s what it meant.
I think I had the exact opposite problem, chopsticks-wise. My grandmother cut her family off long before my mom was born. Part of rejecting everything about them, she refused to let my mom use chopsticks at all. I ended up teaching myself in a Chinese restaurant my mom and I went to once a week.
My mom still asks for a fork.
I love this so hard. yay for the Saturday morning cartoon series! <3
Coming to check out the Saturday Morning Cartoon and got a huge popup ad. Seriously?!!! Is this going to be a thing now?
I mean, I’m sure donating to Autostraddle would lower their need for ad revenues.
nope, it’s not gonna be a thing. we told the network that feeds ads onto our site that we don’t run pop-ups, period, under any circumstances, AND YET. alex reached out to them this morning about why this ad is running and we hope it’ll be taken care of soon.
however if you want to keep autostraddle pop-up-ad free, i’d suggest joining A+. our dedication to not running pop-up ads is part of why we need reader support so badly, and without it, we won’t last!
bless all of your comics
but also: literal translations are hilarious! 番薯 especially is best yelled out from a car by an angry chinese lady at passing motorists
I can’t read Chinese anymore because I’m the worst, but I’m going to assume that this is one of those things I shouldn’t just go around asking about.
Naw it translates into potato. Which is hilarious. Good job angry chinese lady!
Most excellent gif usage.
Wait, does it mean something other than potato, figuratively? If so, I have been missing out on insult opportunities!
I loved this comic so hard (and my Asian scrawls* look like that too!)
*it would be unfair to claim them as writing just yet… :-P
Haha, yay half asians! My mother is off-the-boat from Japan. I may or may not have said “I don’t need to prove how asian I am” when given chopsticks.
My wife is half Chinese and I KNOW I’ve heard her say that when given chopsticks.
great comic. also, I never knew the literal translation was “stupid egg”, so i guess i learned something too. the more you know…