A history within a history within a history.

When my daughter was young, I was intent on providing her with the correct kinds of toys. My first child, a boy, had so many toys. A box full, overflowing with things. Cars, trucks, airplanes,  and little round people to stuff into a bus that sang; blocks of all colors and kinds: squishy blocks with letters on the sides, lego bricks in primary colors, and big cardboard blocks that he loved to watch me stack so he could run through them; singing toys and noisemaking toys; standing toys and a popcorn vacuum. We even have a picture of him staring up from the bottom of the toy bin, drowning in his toys. With his sister, I wanted to be more intentional. One special baby doll, plain wood blocks to foster creativity, a kitchen with food, tactile balls to roll around and squeeze, and a set of nesting blocks with the alphabet, animals, and numbers. Nesting blocks work like this: the child brings the adult one heavy block. The adult tips the block so the open end is on the floor and all the spare blocks are locked inside. One by one, the adult pulls one block off the top revealing the new smaller block inside. Even more fun is to use each larger block as the next step in a block tower. My daughter’s block tower was ten blocks high, each step slightly smaller than the last, like a miniature pyramid reaching to the popcorn ceiling. 

I was reminded of nesting blocks while reading Belle Yang’s, Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale. I wrote in the margins, “A history within a history within a history.” Each history, both personal and familial, reaches into the past and touches another piece reaching farther back and so on. Belle Yang’s personal history of abuse and PTSD is the first history. This more recent history frames the story, both opening and closing the book like the largest block hiding all the rest. “Four years after graduation,” Yang writes, “I returned home, seeking protection from an abusive boyfriend, turned stalker” (11). This return home, in which she is sequestered inside hidden from the person who would harm her, prompts Yang to ask, “Can you tell me more about our family in Manchuria, Baba?” (17). This act of reaching back only begins to tell the history of a family. The history is layered as Yang’s father himself does not even have access to all of it. Yang’s great-grandfather says to her father only two pages on, “Zu-Wu, we must understand the past so that we may understand how became who we are today” (19). This reaching back and back even more continues throughout the graphic novel. 

In the same way that building a tower of blocks taught my daughter a multitude of skills, so to does reaching back help Yang come to terms not only with her immediate history, but also with the history that created her father. There are moments throughout the graphic novel in which Yang presents her father as harsh, perhaps even cruel. He says, “You’re twenty-six. Look how many years you’ve wasted” (12) and “We bring you to America for education. You find Rotten Egg stalker boyfriend!” (37). Yet, through listening to and creating a visual and written record of her father’s history, his father’s history, and the ancestral history of their family, Yang concludes, “I have tried to write sorrow out of Baba’s life. And in giving voice to Baba…I have discovered the strength of my own voice” (246). Reaching back provides Yang with a way forward. 

Yang could have chosen to compose the ancestral tale from the beginning of what her father knew, opening with oldest stories her father told her. In a chronological tale, she might have ended with herself or, perhaps, the beginning of her life. But, in beginning and ending with herself as an adult in crisis and in freedom, Yang creates a sense that the family history is incredibly meaningful to her life now, not simply as a story of where her family originated, but as an active force still helping their descendants by nesting their stories within. Perhaps one of the most moving moments occurs when Yang’s great grandfather dies. His son implores him, “Forget sorrow. Forgive your children. Forgive the world” (241). At its core, Forget Sorrow  is a book about moving forward, about finding a path into the future by understanding the history nested inside ourselves.