Jean Tran hates eggs

Abstract

Jean Tran Hates Eggs: Sixty-Ten Years of Meals and Moments is a fictional narrative developed to explore non-traditional formats of visual storytelling. It presents itself as a commemorative family cookbook chronicling the life and work of Jean Tran, a fictional restaurateur and the patriarch of a France-based Vietnamese family. The narrative is told through the lens of his family members and the various members of Studio Archival: the fictional Singapore-based graphic design studio commissioned to produce and design the book. The negotiations and encounters between the cast of characters employ 4 main tools—the use of metafiction, the absurd, multiple unreliable narrators, and archival processes to fuel the main objective—the subversion of the archetypal immigrant story, to which further sub-themes are tied and explored, such as the de/exoticisation of foreign culture, the de/romanticisation of family life and the mis/management of neuroses, among many others. The main takeaway is this—nothing is ever as it seems. This is revealed immediately through visual and graphic restrictions placed on the production and presentation of images in the cookbook. Jean Tran has placed a ban on the taking of photographs of critical subject matter—people, animals and food. The resulting visual language is a dialogue between doctored photographs and hand-drawn illustrations of what should have been a straightforward documentary process. The reader navigates through these images and the accompanying transcribed interviews with the Tran family to only encounter further complications resulting from mistranslations, missed cultural contexts, and purposeful logical inconsistencies. This narrative, which closely parallels reality, constantly borrows, subverts, and recontextualises familiar visual language and paradigms to engage the reader in a process of questioning and addressing deep-seated base assumptions about how things are, how they came to be, and how they should be, to solve the final puzzle—why does Jean Tran hate eggs?