A Look at Laura Gao's The Gee Family of Houston
Written by Vi-Linh Nguyen | April 15, 2026
“The Gee Family of Houston” is a nonfiction work by Laura Gao. This web comic covers the impact and continued influence of the Gee family in Houston. Readers will see how they laid the groundwork to fight against racial discrimination and segregation into what Houstonians know today as Asiatown. Laura Gao’s expressive artwork woven into their storytelling allows readers to walk through the lives of Houston’s earliest Asian American immigrants, and witness their efforts to improve the lives of their respective communities.
The first story follows Albert Gee and his brothers, back before Houston was home to 655,000 Asian residents, according to Rice University’s Institute of Urban Research. In Albert Gee’s time, about one hundred years ago, there were only 30 Asians in the entire city. Gee and his brothers, Wallace and Gordon, were three of the 30. Three men dreamed of opportunity, persuading them to leave the home they knew in China and travel to Houston, where they worked in the restaurant business among relatives who established themselves in the West. Despite the harsh obstacles resulting from the Jim Crow era, Albert Gee prevailed. His status as the first Chinese person to be elected president of the Houston Restaurant Association, and his friendship with Julius Carter, (founder and publisher of the Forward Times), gave him the tools needed to unify more communities than anyone could have expected at the time. The subsequent liaison between the Asian American and Black American communities show the resilience of a community effort and what it can achieve.
The second story covers Martha Wong, maiden name Gee. She was the first Asian American woman to be elected to Houston’s City Council. Her family moved to Houston when she was still quite young, where they lived in the storeroom of the family’s grocery mart due to the housing discrimination her parents faced. But Houston provided better educational opportunities than the segregated schools the family knew back in Mississippi, and little Martha would learn more and more in this new city. The relationships the family built throughout Martha’s life highlight how building a solid, supportive community alongside the value of hard work, positively impacted her growth and the path she took. Martha Wong’s work in education and the Asian American Coalition rippled enough for Martha to be elected into the same district that had denied their family housing decades before. The members of the Gee family have paved the way for the vibrant diversity Houstonians know today.
Gao’s art is expressive, breaking the rules of conventional sequential art to give readers an experience through the artist’s soul. The variety in line thickness already gives the story visual depth, but the limited color scheme pushes readers to focus on the mood and atmosphere rather than specific characters or even setting. It helps that, as a nonfiction work, the settings and characters of these stories are limited; this is about Houston’s Gee family after all. Readers get to see the good moments that add color to people’s lives in a literal sense. This lets readers feel the impact of these moment, empathizing with the joy felt by the people in the stories. The texture in the background is reminiscent of traditional artistic media, fitting to show history in web-comic form.
Even after years of living in the Lone Star State, there continues to be something to discover of the fabric which stitches Texan culture. Foreigners coming to Texas can easily carry a preconceived notion that the Asian American influence is downplayed, but the reality is that the influence of the Asian diaspora reaches farther into Texas history than those preconceptions can lead to believe. Reflecting on the evolution of racial relations over decades through Gao’s stories, readers can fully grasp the value of unity between different communities. We can learn from each other by coming together, working together to create change for the better. Gao’s visual portrayal of Asian influence in Texas touches at a very universal truth of the individual gaining more power by coming together with others. This is why comics will always have an innately human quality to them; it is the power to convey universal truths in ways only a comic can.
Follow Laura Gao!
Instagram: @heylauragao
Website: www.lauragao.com
