An interesting book, but I kept comparing it to [b:The Complete Persepolis|991197|The Complete Persepolis|Marjane Satrapi|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255594900s/991197.jpg|13344769], which is much a better told story. "Forget Sorrow" had lots of gaps in the narrative, many half-finished events and the narrator felt more like a young teenager than an adult woman. ( )

Excellent graphic memoir. ( )

When Belle Yang leaves college to escape an abusive boyfriend, she finds herself back at home with her traditionalist Chinese-American parents and all the passive-aggressive guilt behavior that comes with. Yang escapes to China to try to find herself and, again, ends up back at home. Now she recounts her father's life-story as we see him growing up in war torn China with 3 other brothers and a meditative father.
I'll be honest, I enjoyed Yang's illustrations. But... that's about it. The story sort of feels all over the place. I understand that she is transcribing the story as her father gives it to her, and her illustrations of this are engaging and distinctive. However, I think the mark of a good author who is penning a memoir is knowing how to take all of what is given and put it in some semblance of order for the reader. I have a hard time keeping up with where we are going in the story and when in the story we are. I would have bumped my rating another star if there was a more cohesive timeline. I would have bumped it one more if we had heard more about the abusive boyfriend. I mean, really, that's what everyone wanted to hear about anyway. ( )

Having just finished Wild Swans, I thought this graphic novel/memoir would be a good complement. It is also a 20th century Chinese family story that ends up with the protagonist emigrating, this time not to the UK but to the US. In contrast to Wild Swans, apart from the external misery of 20th century Chinese history, there is a large internal misery caused by sibling rivalry and unhappy extended families. This petty and mean infighting over resources is a clear advocate for nuclear families. One beneficial side effect of the Chinese one-child policy is to dismantle the Confucian sibling hierarchy.

While the author's father's life in China is well-developed, the time he spent in Taiwan, Japan and the US is only given cursory treatment. Given the troubles the father survived in China, I found the meek response to the stalker issue in the US surprising. The tough laws in the US should have cut those abuses short effectively. As it is, the symmetry of a family terrorized by kin or near-kin in China and the US does not point to forgetting sorrow. ( )

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.