Framing in Forgetting Sorrow

     One of the first things I noticed in Forgetting Sorrow is how Yang frames the narrative. It took me a minute to truly pinpoint what this story was about because there are constant shifts in place. We open the novel/comic/memoir with Yang returning home after an abusive relationship. The narrator's relationship with her parents and herself at this moment is two-fold. They clearly care about her, but there's some disconnect between East and West. Her parents then send her off to China in hopes that she'll find her way. China proves to be unfruitful as history unfolds in the form of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but not before Yang becomes interested in her family stories.

That's where the first frame is constructed, ironically enough, though, the form in which the ancestral stories starts is the opposite. When Yang begins her family stories, the images on the page are often unencumbered by a larger frame. They're not stationary tales bound by space and time -- or in this case frame. This suggests movement, which is fitting because the ancestral tales are what eventually lead to Yang. We see this most around pg 42. These are the beginning of Yang's dive into her family history, however, so the the frames are allotted the room to be lighter and unimpeded. At this moment, we've just been introduced to the Yang family and history - both ancestral and country - isn't as complex as it is say around pg 141. After the Yang patriarch has given control of the land over to his third son and the rations the son sends back are meager/inadequate, Yang fills in the political history surrounding the family's situation (WWII, Japanese occupation). The frames here are heavier, more menacing. Yang relies on lots of shadowing and more contrast in images.

I keep thinking about whether or not I would read this memoir if it wasn't told in this form. I can't quite decide. At the beginning of the book, Yang's narrator comments that she wants to preserve her family history. She says this after her father essentially tells her she's a failure because she's done nothing unlike her successful friends. In thought bubbles the narrator says how she wants to give voice to the forgotten and assert her own own voice in the process. But do we ever get Yang's voice is the question? The memoir takes place over a large span of time. She goes from her twenties in the 80s all the way to mostly modern day America. We also watch her father grow from pre-communist China to fleeing to Taiwan to escaping to America to current(ish) day. Aside from a few mentions of the rotten egg, her eagerness to write down her ancestry, and then end where she declares triumph, I don't remember really seeing Yang. It makes me think about how heavy this memoir would be in plain text. I'm not adversed in the Eastern world. Yang's story about the Rotten Egg acts as a backdoor into a cultural tale I might not read otherwise (self important Americans, I know) and the images/format keeps me grounded.