[4] Her experience growing up in an immigrant family in the US is shared throughout her graphic novels, often depicting South Asian characters searching for identity, and belonging in a foreign world.
[7] In Som's words, she attributes the intention of her work as, "being able to jumpstart the images of queer/femme utopias into being, to have joyous femmes fully inhabiting, dancing, frolicking, thriving in a queer landscape.
[9] It is a graphic memoir, which she draws from her own life experiences, particularly processing her identity crisis and turning that into a story, a relatable instant for many immigrant children growing up in North America.
Nostalgia for a past that never existed.” Through her art, Som has been able to “create small worlds that kick against the ugliness, hostility and mediocrity of 21st-century life—to manifest characters, words, colors, forms, symbols, patterns and rhythms that point to an aesthetic, one that has been shaped by all the visual and cultural touchstones that I’ve collected in my experience.”[5] She also contributed to The New Yorker, We’re Still Here (The first all-trans comics anthology), Beyond, vol.
[11] Later, her graphic-novel, Apsara Engine received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel in 2020 and the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Comics.