Laura Gao (they/them), a Chinese American comic artist and the author of Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American and Kirby’s Lessons For Falling (In Love), came to Mission High School to do a special comic workshop, taught by them!
During lunch on March 6th, 2025, Laura Gao gave background information of how they got to being an artist and publishing their comic books.
During Covid, there were a lot of things going on in the world. Their family was in lockdown and many of their family members also caught Covid early on.
They said that at the time, they had so many things going on in their head that they couldn’t live with all of those thoughts. So they found that through comics, they could put down all their conflicting feelings about being Asian American in this country on paper.
That’s when “The Wuhan I Know” was published on Twitter. Later on, NPR and The New York Times did a feature on it, and Laura had the eyes of big publishers. Soon, their first book, Messy Roots was published on March 8th, 2022.
Many students had important questions and thoughts to share with them.
Shayne West, a junior, asked, “Did you always see yourself becoming who you are today?”
“No, Not at all,” they responded, “I always feel like there are people who are born dying to be an author or an artist, I was definitely on the latter half. That switch came until my comic went viral and I started to connect to people in the publishing industry, then that’s when a dream became reality.”
Rex Moore, freshman, asked, “You never said you came out to your parents, so did you come out through the book?”
“My thought process was either they find out through Barnes and Nobles or they find out through me… before the book came out I did tell them. It went probably as well as I would have thought it would.”
“Inside of Messy Roots, you say that you have a given name to you at birth. Why do you just still go by Laura?” Shayne asks again.
“Around college, I decided to officially change my name (to Laura) and put it as my middle name. By then I had already gone by Laura practically from when I was six to now. That’s what everyone knew me as.”
“At that point, I think the interesting thing about being someone who is between two cultures, is that a lot of times people are telling you to choose one team or the other. That’s just pretty unfair. For folks like us, we are made with the essence of the combinations that we have grown up in.”
As powerful as their words were, their workshop is definitely one to remember. Laura Gao has taught Mission High School students to embrace their names, their meanings, and their backgrounds.
