A Review By Zoe Boulton 

Guy Delisle is a French-Canadian animator who has travelled around the world overseeing and guiding work outsourced to various animation companies. This is his first graphic novel documenting his time at work in the Far East. His second novel, the excellent ‘Pyongyang: Journey in North Korea’, which I read before this, was about his stay in that city in the early 2000s. For this book, Delisle recollects his time in Shenzhen, a city just north of Hong-Kong in 1997, just after the hand-over.

 As with Pyongyang, Shenzhen is created using pencil and ink pen, albeit in a messier style than his later book. This approach lends itself very well to the predominantly gloomy feel Delisle had during his 3 month stay, although he threw himself with great gusto into everything. He seemed to have a lonely and quite a confused time in the city, struggling with the language barrier and cultural differences. There wasn’t a great deal of opportunity for him to speak English (or French) with his Chinese colleagues, he found the work frustrating, and seemed to really relish his time away from the city on visits to Hong-Kong. There were very sweet moments though, such as on Christmas Day when a colleague invited him back to his apartment on the newly built out-skirts of Shenzhen and went out of his way to give Delisle a good Christmas.

 This wasn’t as good as Pyongyang, the impenetrable strangeness and danger of North Korea was vastly apparent throughout that graphic novel, but this was still a riveting account of time spent in another culture. Delisle has created a third novel about his travels- Burma Chronicles- which I am looking forward to reading soon!

 For anyone who is interested in graphic novels, or travelogues, I highly recommend Guy Delisle’s books to you. They are absolutely wonderful, very different to anything else you will read, the graphic novel medium works perfectly as a means of creating a very honest feeling, personal account. These are books I intend to keep for a long time.