Author: Si Kai

This essay fulfills the final portfolio criteria all Emory ENG101 courses demand. More importantly, it serves as my final reflection on the eye-opening course The Secret Language of Comics taught by Professor Morgen in the fall semester of 2024. Before taking this course, I fear I would’ve approached the final portfolio from a barren chronological […]

For Sketch 11, I wanted to express all the lessons I learned in one concise image. I decided to use baking as a metaphor for making an essay since my favorite hobby is baking! The key component to a good essay-desert is words (the flour), that have been refined through the framing sifter to remove […]

For Sketch 11, I wanted to express all the lessons I learned in one concise image. I decided to use baking as a metaphor for making an essay since my favorite hobby is baking! The key component to a good essay-desert is words (the flour), that have been refined through the framing sifter to remove […]

Constructing a halfa kucha presentation was an interesting and insightful experience. It was very different from writing an essay. On the one hand, I was limited by the strict time limit and slide format, alongside the informal rule of not placing word blocks on the slideshow. On the other hand, the freedom to utilize my […]

Having recently watched Moana 2 and a play called Suffrages in New York, I felt compelled to create a playlist of inspirational songs from my childhood. There are famous inspirational songs from old movies like Eye of the Tiger, but what about my generation? Cinema from my era isn’t known for being timeless classics – […]

For this sketch, I decided to recreate the entrance scene from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. The main character was thrust into a new world, similar to how I entered college. He “pokes” his muscles because he never had any in the real world. I thought this would be a funny and ironic scene to […]

Read my Literary Narrative Part 3 Here Converting my literacy narrative into a comic and back into a literary narrative was an eye-opening experience. Returning to the alphabetic version after this exercise felt like stepping into a new creative space, armed with insights I gained through drawing. Distilling my narrative into frames taught me to […]

Dusting off its cover, my father hands me a tightly bound book. Its cold, Soviet-industrial print spelled out three bold Chinese characters: 红宝书, Mao’s Little Red Book. I knew instantly what it was—a relic of my hometown Beijing’s history and a symbol of resilience. For generations, this book rallied the Chinese through war and chaos. […]

As a political scientist researching the relationship between material conditions and human reaction, I immediately knew how to approach this Sketch assignment. It’s a perfect opportunity to turn my research inward and determine how much wealth impacts me personally as a motivating and limiting factor. I had two weeks to collect data. Although not the […]

Read my Literary Narrative Part 2 Here Converting my literary narrative into a comic for the first time was an eye-opening experience. It allowed me to approach my literary narrative from an entirely new perspective. Adding visual components and restricting myself to four pages (per the assignment requirements) prompted me to reduce my original writing […]