Forget Sorrow: an Ancestral Tale by Belle Yang
Summary: Belle Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling - both together and individually - to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations - and of possibilities for reconciliation.
Get the Book!: Hardcover
Join in the Discussion!
Week 1: How do her father's stories bring Xuan (Belle) closer to her Chinese heritage? What does she gain?
You Might Also Like:
- Confessions: an Innocent Life in Communist China by Kang Zhengguo, translated by Susan Wilf
- Maus: a Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
- Maus II: a Survivor's Tale: and Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman
- Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
This month we continue to read graphic novels with Belle Yang's Forget Sorrow. We hope aspiring comic artists will be inspired to enter this year's Graphic Novel Contest which runs in conjunction with Summer Reading Celebration.
Belle Yang Answers Your Questions
Many thanks to the author of Forget Sorrow for answering questions submitted through the Online Book Club!
How did your travel to China help in your understanding of your father? Did it give you a new perspective & more sympathy?
Yang: This is certainly true, because I was on his native soil, I ate the food he ate as a child. I've learned that the best way to bring forth my father's memories was through the stomach. I had eaten frozen persimmons, which were sold on the flatbed of a bicycle cart, I had tasted pungent deep fried dough wrapped in a crepe like roll. I could remind my father of these experiences and a whole string of childhood remembrances would come spilling forth from him. Also, my language ability improved and, naturally, we were able to communicate more deeply--beyond the day-to-day household exchanges. I also met my grandparents, who were in their 80s and I had this small window of time to visit. I am sorry to admit I did not know enough about them and their travails to initiate dialogues. But seeing them, I felt I was in touch with the living flesh of those who made my father and influenced him for good and ill.
One scene shows you working at your graphic novel as Baba looks on. Was your father actually observing as you wrote and illustrated? Did Baba provide ongoing critique, nuturing the development of this tale?
Yang: My father provided a lot of comments when FORGET SORROW was a prose book. (Yes, it was only later that my editor at Norton suggested I turn the prose into captions and dialogue for the comics format.) He wanted to make sure I had the politics and history correct. And in the beginning, we'd argue a lot, but we learned to communicate efficiently and there were no more fights toward the end. While I worked on the graphic novel pages, I merely showed him the completed pages, and he would admire the way I worked out the entire page or spread or individual panels. Btw, I didn't thank my father as I should have: he did 99% of the Chinese writing when poetry was called for.
Are there plans for a Chinese translation of Forget Sorrow?
Yang: No there are no plans to translate into the Chinese. It would not be welcomed in the PRC, because I deal with the Tiananmen Massacre. I am ever surprised by how little people understand the extensive thought-control that goes on in the PRC. I have a file on me in the maw of their computers, for having addressed Tiananmen Massacre and having had a documentary made about me by New Tang Dynasty Television, where the images shown were those a friend had taken of the bloodshed.
My editor suggested I do a "This is Beijing" book like the old series done on Paris, London, Tokyo, etc., but I wouldn't be able to return to Beijing without harassment. So my editor said, "What about 'This is Shanghai'?" I laughed. Shanghai is as much part of China's intensive thought-control as Beijing.
FORGET SORROW is translated into Portuguese and will be out also in Dutch.
About the Author:
"It took me 14 years to write/paint and negotiate the publication of FORGET SORROW. I would not let it die before meeting the world, for it was conceived in the heat of revenge against time and forgetting. My great grandfather now lives on through my brush."
Editorial Reviews:
from NoveList Plus (requires sign in with library card)
"With a lilting voice and a strongly etched fairy tale hand, writer/artist Yang weaves a riveting true-life tale of ancestral jealousies and familial woes from her father's recollections of growing up in China. Her book begins with Yang in her 20s, recently graduated from college but unable to get herself out into the world, wounded by self-doubt and bad memories of an ex-boyfriend turned stalker. Back living with her immigrant parents in Carmel, Calif., Yang listens to her father's stories about his grandfather, a man of wealth and stature whose many feuding sons left the family dismally ill-prepared for the winds of change that WWII and Mao's revolution sent violently whipping through the land. Betrayal and infighting pockmark these stories of woe, though they're buttressed with an appreciation of an uncle's Buddhist disavowal of material possessions or desires. Yang's story, which balances her own struggles with those of her ancestors without clumsily trying to equate them, echoes both with the tragic darkness of King Lear and the clean austerity of classical Chinese poetry."
— Publisher's Weekly, March 15, 2010, p. 43
