Shaun Tan

Elizabeth Jocelyn Kurniawan

JFT Thursday 10AM

In the beginning, the world was divided into many parts and those parts have their own characteristics; that is when the world got its beauty. In other words, it is not necessary to be the same nor it is important to live similarly to others. Shaun Tan’s stories depict suburbs differently from the outside world. He illustrates suburbanites to have quality of uniqueness. Despite the monotonous landscape and lifestyle, he implicitly says there are unique beauties hidden, waiting to be found.  Also, Tan’s description of suburbanites to have their sui generis in terms of their landscape architectures and cultural things with the people from the ‘outside’. As written in ‘Our Expedition’ and ‘No Other Country’, Tan defines suburb’s landscapes and its people with their compacted common life. This essay will critique the suburbs with two main aspects; the landscape and the suburbanite’s culture in both positive and problematic ways and also examining Shaun Tan’s drawings that depict suburbia.

Tan (2008: 56) states clearly how exasperating can one’s life be in his story ‘No Other Country’; it is plain and the people are not that joyful. Suburb dwellers are lack of money, they even save money for gardening and just put “green painted concrete…” everywhere in places of real grass, in front of their houses, which seems more melancholy the more they see it. Consequently, every front yard of suburbanites has the same “green painted concrete…”. What is more, “hot water came reluctantly…” and sometimes have “…pale brownish colour…”, which explain that suburb is literally far away from the source of water or maybe, even the source of everything. Even the pipes are rusted and defect the water. Also, flies are inside out their houses. Usually, flies come to a place that smell unpleasant; the smell of something “dead”. This connotes that many things are dead in the suburb, whether is it a dead life functions or dead souls resulting from the monotonous life there. Moreover, “…a small cemetery of disappointment…” denotes the dead fruits of newly planted trees all-over their backyard (57). This place and its hostility seem to resist life.

Similarly, in ‘Our Expedition’, Tan illustrates suburb as a place that has nothing to offer, as it is an unadorned distinct dwelling. It is “[m]ysterious outer suburbs[.]” (89) for the missing map 269, map 268 was crammed by “streets, avenues, crescents and cul-de-sacs..” (84). Tan and his older brother were fighting over a lost map. Thus, finally decided to have a daring expedition to find answers. They catch a bus as far as it can go and “…set of on foot…” which means that there are still places the bus can not reach and the only way to get there is on foot. In other words, suburb is still inaccessible, as described in ‘No Other Country’. Moreover, Tan (89) writes that suburb is full of hills and valleys; they have to “…hiked [their] way through…” and in the same way as an abandoned territory “…overgrown alleys…” he said. Relatively similar with ‘No Other Country’ the brothers discovered that the more they explore their suburb the more “…everything looked the same…”. They says it was made out of the same “…assembly kit[.]” and only the names for each construction were different. Then, the boys discover that the suburb has come to an end, the world was flat and they finally find the end of the world as they walk along the suburb. The way Tan scrutinize suburb’s landscape is ingeniously in both ‘Our Expedition’ and ‘No Other Country’ but in a similar way. While ‘No Other Country’ depicts suburbia as a place that resists life, ‘Our Expedition’ sets up hope and wonder to the possibility that there are more that meet the eye in suburbia.