Resident Aliebn

Citizenship as Belonging in the Work of Jonny Sun

Guiding Questions:
• How can we distill contemporary notions of American citizenship into feelings of belonging?
• How can we constructively confront exclusive narratives and institutions through art?
• How does author Jonny Sun represent a Ghostwriter of American Ideologies?

Jonny Sun is an interdisciplinary Canadian author, illustrator, and urban studies and planning Ph.D candidate at MIT who is best known for the character Jomny that he developed on Twitter and explored in his 2017 debut graphic novel, Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too.

Everyone’s a Aliebn

Tweeting in character as Jomny, an ingenuous, lonely alien with endearingly funky spelling sent to explore Earth and determine what it means to be a “humabn,” Jonny Sun broached sensitive topics like anxiety, loss, purpose, and compassion for other beings (even when they’re frightening or reclusive, or when it’s uncertain just what creature they are). Illustrating those adventures into the novel, he wove a story about defining humanity and centered his characters’ journey around the critical irony that while it is impossible to define a “humabn,” it is also impossible to not know what it means to be one.

Jomny doesn’t initially belong on Earth, and is not even a prepared traveler — while meeting many other creatures, like a dog struggling to express emotions, an egg afraid to hatch, an owl with impostor syndrome, a tree, a ghost, and an auteur otter, he is repeatedly corrected from assuming that they are human. (The humanity of their quirks and neuroses, however, is beyond question, and guides Jomny toward the answer he’s looking for.)

Even while he is on unfamiliar terrain with these creatures, Jomny is equally alie(b)nated among his fellow extra-terrestrials, who find him “wierd” and fail to share his curiosity about humanity, a set of creatures which they largely dismiss. They leave him without assistance on his mission and question his abilities each time he checks in. The playful tone of the story, juxtaposed with its creative syntax and constant wordplay, adds to the demonstrated absurdity of each case of exclusion — the joke that aliens on a mission to Earth would be so cliquish and passive-aggressive, or the irony that the personified embodiment of Nothingness would have feelings of loneliness and abandonment issues.

The kindness and guidance that Jomny receives from his new friends on Earth is documented heavily in his log in brief aphorisms (one reason why the character found such a good home on Twitter). He considers his friends’ philosophies and anxieties along with his own role in their lives, and comes to the conclusion that even when on the completely wrong planet, “when two aliebns fimd each other in a strange place, it feels a litle more like home.”*

Aliebnation of the Other

Through his Twitter presence, Jonny Sun also discusses subjects like the release of his book, the projects of other artist-thinkers like Eve Ewing and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and issues of social or political significance. In between promoting his new collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda Gmorning, Gnight! Little Pep Talks for Me & You and taking part in viral social media remixes of William Carlos Williams’ famous poem “This Is Just to Say,” he also discusses the Asian-American experience and its intersectional connections to representation, economic inequality, racism, and mental health.

From topics like recognizing feelings of pressure to interact with strangers in such a way as to demonstrate knowing English —

— to addressing race-based bullying, to advocating for mental health awareness and self-care, to fair employment standards in a capitalist economy —

— to homophobia and transphobia, to the dismissal of millennials, to the representation of Asian-Americans in projects like Star Wars, Crazy Rich Asians, and “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” Jonny Sun makes his support and sympathy for all those who have experienced social or race-based alienation. Channeling the aliebn he imagined, he comforts and uplifts his audience.

Citizen? or Aliebn?

One of the three guiding “Ideas that Resonate” of our project, citizenship is a critical albeit nebulous concept when thinking about American identity today. When distilled into feelings of belonging, citizenship can be seen as the distinction between those deemed eligible for civil rights — citizens — and non-citizens, who are often denied those rights. When this idea of “eligibility” is represented in legislation, it becomes clear that many definitions of “America” exist that are intrinsically exclusive.

When legislation is based on definitions of “America” that exclude (and therefore discriminate) on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexuality, or other biological or social markers, it builds upon other exclusive laws and normalized behaviors, creating systemic prejudice.

(Because small acts build over time, traditions of disadvantaging specific groups create prejudicial institutions. That is one reason why the all-Asian cast of Crazy Rich Asians can be seen as a sign of progress, whereas an all-white casted movie following the thousands that came before would be short-sighted.) Normalized exclusivity that breeds systemic prejudice can be as simple as decades of normalizing nondiverse movies. It can also be as insidious as the targeted incarceration of African-Americans and immigrants for forced prison labor inspired by the antebellum normalization of slavery.

When so many “exclusions” to the American dream exist, buried in a difficult-to-navigate institutional fine print, it’s no wonder that Jomny the aliebn’s odyssey in search of belonging would ring true. In spite of never encountering a human, Jomny learns all that he needs to know to understand humanity; if we are able to abandon a fixed and “exclusive” definition of citizenship, the values of liberty, justice, and equality that help define our country will still provide us with an answer to the question, “Who is an Americabn?”

Jonny Sun as Ghostwriter

In light of citizenship’s significance to the consideration of American identity, can Jonny Sun be seen as a Ghostwriter of American Ideologies? I argue that absolutely, he can. Not only has he built a fictional universe and highly-trafficked Twitter presence around the essential ideas of compassion, discovery, and belonging, but he’s also done it in a way to strategically contribute to the reversal of harmful traditions.

Consider this very subtle example — the trend of protagonists in American “adventure” children’s novels to exploit the land they discover. While Jonny Sun’s graphic novel did not have a direct audience of children, his protagonist had the same ingenuous spirit as an American child in a coming-of-age novel, but was focused on developing his empathic abilities rather than taking advantage of those he encountered on the basis of his moral righteousness.

Or consider his comprehensive, sweeping inclusivity — the novel focuses on characters that are largely genderless, entirely nonhuman, sometimes bodiless, and even occasionally nonexistent, and yet the aliebn Jomny learns to approach each of them with the same eagerness to listen and understand. This is directly at odds with exclusive political rhetoric that was heavily present in the U.S. during the creation of the novel.

Finally, not only does Jonny Sun’s graphic novel feature a ghost character, but the subversive element to his Ghostwriter status is evident in his ability to embed less traditional values to American literature, like selflessness, self-awareness, and the passive willingness to embrace the future as it comes, in a format that resonates heavily with the American literary tradition: an adventure-novel odyssey with a bildungsroman-bent that involves a previously dismissed underdog** accomplishing the impossible (sort of).

The legacy he’ll leave is clear —

Sounds like a solid ideology to me.

*1. Jonny Sun, Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).

**There is also a character called updog.