A Review of This Beautiful, Ridiculous City by Kay Sohini

Published on January 28, 2025 by Ten Speed Graphic.

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of This Beautiful, Ridiculous City.

Stunning. As someone whose connection to graphic novels and visual forms of storytelling has weakened with age, I am so glad This Beautiful, Ridiculous City by Kay Sohini has re-introduced me to the genre. But this is not just a graphic novel—it’s well researched in the same way an academic paper is. The graphic memoir follows a woman as she considers her experience as an immigrant, a woman, a foodie, a New Yorker, and a human in the greater context of the world through an economics, literary, and psychological lens.

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City has gorgeous art panels with highly saturated colors. The leaves are not just a regular green, they’re velvety in their teal hue. The sunset sparks a pink that hovers over the street signs and casts blue-tinged shadows on the side of metal poles. An empty photo album marked with empty frames conveys absence in its portrayal of the direct loss of Sohini’s grandfather. The perspective of a pedestrian looking upwards to the NYC skyscrapers creates the sense of unlimited, boundless possibilities. The irregular shapes and pastel smoothness are deeply appealing. Perhaps it is telling enough that my favorite panels are so many in number. The memoir is a love letter to color and to art. It’s tasty. It’s crunchy.

Sodhini starts her memoir with New York City. I grew up there, and while our experiences differ, there exists a constant thread between the two of our experiences—the city itself. She writes, “There was something utterly irresistible about New York from afar-….-[because] more than a muse, it seemed to me that the city served as a fix for slightly broken people. It brought out the creativity in them, it eased their sorrows, it made them forget it, it made them laugh, it breathed new life.” And then, Sodhini explains the ways in which life has broken her, and the way New York breathed new life into her.

The world breaks Sodhini by creating cultural dissonances between her home in India in the 1990s and the immigrant experience. As many immigrants may wonder, she reflects on “how I might have become if I had not grown up in a postcolonial nation trying to find itself.” She explains, “Western cultural supremacy is a complex thing. It takes interest away from local culture, especially for the younger generations, and it is utilized as soft power. Yet I do not know how to reconcile the uncomfortable truth with the fact that this strange cultural fraternization made me who I am.” In the same way, I also, am unsure of how to contend with the way American culture has both demeaned and stolen aspects of my culture, and yet, also shaped and changed me into the “American” I suppose I am. Her lucidity and honesty about difficult concepts are refreshing and thought provoking for everyone, but especially so for someone in a similar position.

From there, she moves into food and grief. Her grandfather dies, and the food portrayed so vibrantly in earlier pages disappears. Food becomes a means of subsistence. Solely nutritional. Perhaps it is because I am in a similar position of processing grief, but learning about her experience is healing. Maybe this is my cynicism, but the grief in this section feels eternal, constant, and unavoidable. Despite this, the story persists, it continues into her past, but the reader’s future. In New York, she returns to food. Food is drawn in a vibrant juicy manner. Food returns to her. She once again eats to taste and to experience.

Eventually, we move into her immigration to New York. A map of the city with Woorijip, a cheap Korean takeout store, accompanies the city’s introduction. I’ve been there during the lunch-time rush and saw mostly office workers taking a quick lunch break. It is, unlike Nobu or Catch NYC, a nontourist, not-flashy destination, because Woorijip’s sole purpose is to serve food with convenience. A kind of cheap, tasty, homemade-in-a-store flavor for the busy “normal” people of NYC. This was the moment I realized I loved this book, because it spoke directly to me. This is not about the NYC of upper echelon finance moguls, but the NYC of the common people. I immediately understood Sodhini has truly lived in New York City and viewed it as her home.

Ultimately, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is a love letter to herself, to her experience, to the immigrant experience, and to New York City. Sohini believes “you belong to New York City instantly or never. I remain a willing victim of the former.” I don’t agree with that. And that’s okay—we have different experiences of the city. For her, it’s a home she belongs to (without roots and all). For me, this is the place that’s shown me the world’s breaks, through experiencing COVID-19, anti-Asian racism, and elitism in many facets (racially, socioeconomically, notions of attractiveness). NYC is the birth of cynic chaos that plagues everyone’s life; it is not a place I have always belonged to. For her, NYC is the place that fights against the “relic of my twenties [that] make me wonder if I am forever doomed to love things and people whose reciprocation is fraught with contradictions.” As such, she refuses to leave the city, because she doesn’t “want [her] New York to turn against [her].” But, I have left. In college, I understood the ways NYC had been against me from the beginning, and I also learned to love it as a place to return to. Perhaps not yet a home, but that is not to say, forever not a home. Perhaps one day, NYC will no longer haunt me, and instead, I will haunt it, where the grime permeates through my skin always, not sometimes. Still, our differences in NYC does not stop me from writing this review as a love letter to this graphic memoir.