Forget Sorrow, Forget Who is Responsible

Forget Sorrow wasn’t particularly long or dense, but it took me longer than it should have to get through. As I set it down to take breaks I was asked by friends, partners, house guests if it was “good.” “I don’t know yet,” I kept responding. And then the book ended without me discovering the answer to this question. Was the story illustrated well? Did it convey details of landscape, dress, character emoting, food and time period? Absolutely. Was the story interesting? Important? It was. But something in the delivery of it all felt really off to me. 

For one, the introduction of Rotten Egg was terse and unemotional for how crucial of a role he played in this story. When he was mentioned so quickly, I thought he must be a detail to be considered but not lingered upon because of how little weight had been put on him and the abuse he inflicted. Belle is illustrated leaving her parents’ home for college and the next frame reads, “Four years after graduation, I returned home, seeking protection from an abusive boyfriend turned stalker” (pg 11.) At first, I wondered if this was just tension that had been lost in the translation of prose form to comic form (which sounds like an incredibly difficult task for anyone, to be fair.) There had been many other scenes and memories with a noticeable lack of clear transitions to assure the reader knew where they were placed or who was in the first frame of the page. And if the reader didn’t know, understand a reason why. But as the father in the story repeatedly brought up Rotten Egg as a mistake made by the daughter, I figured out that my discomfort was not from his introduction and repeat appearances placed out of context of his wide-reaching terror. It was simply that Yang was treated as a co-conspirator in the abuse. Page 12 is dedicated to her personal failure in having suffered this abuse. Her father says, “From graduating top of your class, you became a gofer to a rotten egg. Now you’re twenty-six. Look how many year’s you’ve wasted. You need to depend on your own talents. Not a man.” Her response? “I know, I know… I don’t want to be a failure” (pg 12.) 

Throughout the book she is blamed for his violence and violation of her and her family’s personal space. Her father demands she find her way, get a career, a passion but also forbids her from leaving the home because of her stalker. He refuses her request to wear the jade ring as a necklace because she is not responsible enough for this heirloom; how can a responsible daughter be so careless as to have a stalker? It isn’t until the end of the book that she is allowed to wear it because Rotten Egg is mentioned to have found “more interesting prey” (pg 256.) This is when she’s recognized by her father as mature and having “grown strong” (pg 256.) What? 

This isn’t the only instance women drawn the short straw in this comic. Throughout generations of family members, angry or fearful women are illustrated with sharp teeth and bloodshot eyes. They are cruel and dishonest. Even the men who share these traits are not painted with this imagery and are often found redeemable by their positive traits before they die. Second uncle’s wife is deemed disrespectful and unruly for not breastfeeding in private and not having full control over her children while doing domestic work (pg 138.) And instead of placing this discomfort in context of the customs of the family at that time, Yang reinforces it in her story telling with phrases like, “The woman continued to flop out a breast in public” (pg 139.) Really, this story is kind of a bummer in how much unexamined misogyny made its way onto these pages. So, I did love this graphic novel format, I did love the mixed media story telling, I do value this story as an important history to be told. I would however, have been less distracted by the raking of women over hot coals if there had been any awareness of it along the way.   

Panel Bleed in Forget Sorrow

    In Belle Yang’s powerful graphic novel, Forget Sorrow, Yang utilizes the form of comics to articulate the familial structure she is showing readers through her memoir. Throughout the novel we see time and time again the rigidity and piety that accompanies the Yang family as the father is recounting the tales of his childhood. Recall the scene in which Yang’s father tells her that when his grandfather passed his oldest son on a walk through their property both men would simply nod to each other. You can also see this in the scenes where the patriarch and his eldest son fight. In order to restore peace within the family the eldest son must apologize, but his children must also supplicate the patriarch. There is a harsh strictness within the family which relies on Confucian ideals such as filial piety, and this is reflected within the structure of the artwork as well.

    One technique of comic art is utilizing gutters and spilling between frames. Yang rarely does this. Each frame is clear and separate, organized with respect to each frame that comes before and after it on the page. To me, this reflected the structure of the Yang family itself. Seldom in this novel will you find bleeds, and when you do it seems to accompany a moment of intense emotion, such as when Yang’s father tells her that the comic she produced based on his story is inadequate, or when second uncle’s wife yells at the patriarch. But this it also arose in softer emotional moments, like when Yang’s father admits that his own father did not live up to the expectations of the patriarch. These moments of emotion that seem to break the fierce organization of the art draw attention from the reader.

    Another technique around frame I noticed was in Yang’s dream sequence where she is running away from rotten egg. In this scene it seemed to me that instead of frames bleeding into the gutters, the gutters were bleeding into the frames. White space began to encroach on the black space of her nightmares, which to me created a feeling of suffocation or claustrophobia. Why draw these panels in this manner? Why not let her nightmare seep out of the lines of the frame instead of the other way around? This reversal caught my eye specifically because I was tracking bleeds. I feel that this returns to the familial structures of the Yang family as experienced by Yang’s father. It reminded me of the scene in which the patriarch is eating well, but all of his sons refuse to mention that they are going with less to eat than years before and instead insisted on isolating themselves. I saw these frames as replicating this self isolation.

    Through her design of this graphic novel, Yang illustrates on the page the restrictions faced by her father and grandfather as well as the rest of her family. In the moments where bleeds appear, or in the moments where the frames seem to be ready to collapse in on themselves, the reader is able to get a sense of how powerful these emotions are in an environment which prioritizes piety and respect are valued above all else.

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.


   

Arc, On Ramps, Rebellion/Survival, Random Tidbits

Arc, On Ramps, Rebellion/Survival, Random Tidbits

by Hannah Jane

Arc:

We don’t find out in the middle of her father’s narrative that Yang has survived an abusive relationship. We learn in the first three pages that this is part of her experience. This story is an ancestral tale, and it would have felt different, or been about something else, if Yang revealed this to her reader by pivoting from her father’s story to her own.

Because Yang situates the reader in the heart of her present pain -- not looking back, and not revealing Rotten Egg through flashbacks mixed in with her father’s narrative -- we are able to trace how Belle Yang’s personal story exhibits a similar arc to that of her family history.

In a short span of time, Yang has gone from an abusive situation with Rotten Egg to experiencing freedom for three years in China; but not too long after, the political environment turns violent in the late 1980’s and she has to come home and start all over. This is where the book starts. Belle Yang’s up-down, up-down arc is parallelled by her family’s rise from poverty to wealth, and wealth to poverty again.

On ramps:

There are many on-ramps for the reader of this graphic novel:

- An empathic on-ramp is Yang’s abusive relationship with Rotten Egg and the reader’s desire to see her heal and grow, tracing that progression.

- There is a historical on-ramp with WWII and her father’s recollection of the past that makes up the bulk of the graphic novel.

- There is a cultural on-ramp between Yang and her father’s different experiences (Belle Yang grew up in America, her parents grew up in Taiwan, and the byproduct of their different cultural experiences creates tension).

- There is a HUGE artistic on-ramp literally on every page… the layout is like nothing I’ve seen before, how Yang moves between frames… and how a whole page could be one illustration, filling your entire visual field with intense emotion (either terror with Rotten Egg, or the feeling of peace with a gorgeous landscape).

- There is a poetic on-ramp as Baba remembers poetry his father recited to him growing up (p. 208) as well as Second Uncle’s recitation of a Tang Dynasty poem (p. 151).
- I am sure there are more on-ramps, so I'm eager to hear others' thoughts!

Rebellion/Survival:

Those thought bubbles stood out to me as critical moments when Yang fights back against the oppression she is experiencing. Yes, her parents take her in and help her heal, but they also blame her and make her feel worthless during a critical point in her recovery. The moments when she “talks back” in thought bubbles feel like the self breaking through.

When other characters display thought bubbles, I feel a nudge of “who is the narrator, and how does the narrator know this?” I feel as though it is the presence of Yang, here, as the characters in the story “talk back” the way she did. This is another way that Yang’s journey parallels that of her family history… She feels herself in her ancestors, has her pulse on their pain and their survival. She is able to capture the emotional truth of their thoughts…

Random tidbits:

There is a video of Yang speaking at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop in 2010 in which I learned that prior to the Immigration Nationality Act of 1965, only 145 Chinese immigrants were allowed into the country each year. Yang and her family came to the U.S. in the early 1970’s. She talks about her artistic techniques for this graphic novel -- I was freaking out a little when I found out she wrote the whole thing in prose first, and then trimmed it down to fit its current form. Isn’t that wild? Also, the typeface is based off her own handwriting, which according to Yang, peaked in third grade. Ok, last random tidbit: she used a brush rather than a pen and ink, and she comments in this video that “black and white have a color of their own.”

Visual Communication, Discussing Forget Sorrow

Visual Communication, Discussing Forget Sorrow

By Jamie Harper

Upon first opening Belle Yang’s graphic novel Forget Sorrow, I was initially very excited by the style of art she utilizes in her panels, and the depictions she fills them with. Yang’s first few pages incite readers with the images of a E gui-like depiction of her stalker (p.10), playfully melancholic drawings of ghosts and bottles full of bones (p.15), and landscapes clearly inspired by traditional Chinese art (p.21), all promising an imaginative depiction of a generational story. But in reading further in, I found the storytelling to be a little flat in comparison to the bold black and white illustrations. Like many memoirs, Forget Sorrow does not have the steepest of plot arcs, rather instead focusing on the journey of paralleled traumatic periods and cultural parental expectation, as the main plot “wiggles” (as Oliver so aptly coined in our second class), I take no issue with this, but without Yang’s strongly defined art and visual communication styles, I doubt the memoir would have held my attention.

Graphic novels are known for their use of art and panels of visual action as a means of not only representing, but also enhancing a storyline, allowing for a greater amount of subtext, subplots, and subliminal symbolism to saturate the reader’s mind. We can easily see Yang following in this trend with some of the choices she makes in what to depict and how, such as in the oversized, corpulate, looming, and infantile E gui figure of her ex boyfriend now stalker, the humerus, shocked face of the caped bull held up by its wrists (p. 165), the demonic silhouettes of the bandits (p. 159), the squashed Hitler under the boot labeled “Allies” (p. 143), or the face she gives herself after a nightmare, clearly inspired by Munch’s painting “The Scream” (p. 132). Each monochrome frame of these highlights bring extra emphasis to the emotions felt by the narrator, the fear of her stalker, the disbelieving surprise at the disemboweled bull, making them that much more salient to the reader.

The formatting of this story as a graphic novel also allows for the inclusion of cultural influences Western readers may not be previously clued into, such as style of dress (p.77), or language and etiquette (p.18). Historical information is also readily available through the visuals of the novel, as we see Yang depicting the execution of “Devil Guo” and his wife (p. 109) or the effects of labor camps (p. 202-203) and Stalin’s invasion of Manchuria (p. 143). All of this is included without “bogging down” or slowing the story in anyway, it is all right there for our eyes to scan over at our own convenience, be we reading for leisure or carefully analyzing for a class.      

The art style remains consistent and thus familiar throughout the novel, so even when she distorts or morphs the style a little, such as in the dream sequences, Yang still ensures we remain comfortable with the characteristics of her images, lending the sort of security commonly felt when we know a narrator is a reliable one. This trust in style and therefore storytelling allows the reader to feel that the narrator, and Yang as an author, is telling us this story with as much emotional and environmental truth as she possesses. We of course do not know for a fact that this story is true, but we feel mostly secure in believing that Yang believes in it, even if we may wonder how much of the father’s story is true, how much is misremembered or embellished through a sense of pride or loyalty to family and culture. Alternatively, the father could have also embellished things to worsen the experiences of the family, either as means of bolstering or shaming his daughter (p. 177, p. 69-70, p. p38), considering how much emphasis the father places on failure. Either way, we as readers can only place our trust in the consistent style and narration we see throughout the graphic novel.

While there were some moments when I cocked my head a little at Yang’s choices for panel content (the repetitive facial close ups, for one), I was generally sold on her take on visual storytelling and the implicit communication contained there in.

Monsoon Mansion

In writing a memoir, the question of plot and the author’s power over it comes to question. The writer has no power in creating plot, only in what is included and what is left out, and how it is presented. Thinking this way, I have never felt like writing a memoir was a feat I would be able to do. It would mean revisiting the painful moments I would rather leave forgotten, and revealing the people in my life the way I see them. Not to mention depicting myself as I see me. By choosing to write about my life, a story that is already set, I forfeit my power to alter facts to suit the plot and ending. But whether or not memoirs need a plot, the narrative form will bring about one. The power authors have in writing memoirs, then, is in the style and introspection revealed. Cinelle Barnes includes recurring motifs and comparisons that encapsulate her family’s downfall living in the mansion.

Barnes’ memoir has a plot revolving around the mansion the speaker was trapped in and her experience living in it. Barnes chose to end the novel with the escape with the last chapter showing a glimpse of her life in the future. It’s a coming of age story within a despairing environment. Her family’s plight is mirrored in the house, which becomes embodied in her mother. In fact, the mansion itself, Mansion Royale, is the core of the plot alongside the speaker, detailing the rise and fall as the overall arc. The entire prologue is a description of the mansion, room for room, and its function in the lives of the inhabitants, each room a trigger to a memory. And the last word in the prologue, a one-word sentence, “Falling” foreshadows the trajectory of the mansion through the years. Barnes made a choice to integrate the mansion’s state with her life. By calling her memoir a coming of age story, it makes sense that it would end with the speaker maturing, not physically through her period and what it entails, but by leaving the mansion and her mother forever. 

One of the most intriguing recurring motifs is the orchid and the color purple, both always concurrent with the speaker’s mother. Barnes makes the connection immediately with her mother describing them as, “real, graceful, delicate, and rare. She called them ‘exotic’ and explained that the orchid’s purpose was purely ornamental” (page 27). Then with the speaker admitting that she confuses the flower’s smell for her mother’s perfume. Her mother is connect to this flower and to the house, all of them representing the ornamental qualities, and it comes up again throughout the novel. The biggest connection was in the line describing her mother, “she was part of the house. Her weeping was the mansion’s very voice” (page 87). Barnes engineered these connections to show what the speaker needed to escape. The line conflating the mother and the mansion is repeated in the last chapter, cementing the deeply rooted connection between the two in the speaker’s mind, one that Barnes needed us to make. 

Memoirs will have plot. Even if done through vignettes or mixed scenes, connecting threads will appear that weave the whole collection into a plot, straightforward and simple or not. What I pay attention to is how the author portrays, stylizes, or reveals the narrative. The author’s introspective depiction and how the scenes or events are tied together are what shine through. Barnes memoir is not only her narrative, but Mansion Royale’s and her mother’s.

Monsoon Mansion - Plot Choices and Memoir

One of the first things we learn about stories is plot. We are told that in order for a story to go somewhere, anywhere, there have to be events which happen and move the story along to get us to the place where the story ends, where some kind of resolution is reached and the character can say, “look how I’ve grown and the lessons I’ve learned along the way!” Of course, this is what occurs in fiction. When it comes to memoir, there is that question of, “what is the plot?” But in memoir, this is the writer’s life which they are writing about, so while they might write a conclusion, an ending, to their memoir, the end is only one of many beginnings. In this memoir, Barnes uses plot devices that we are familiar with to craft the way she recounts and presents to us the time in which she lived in Mansion Royale.

Her use of descriptive language to recreate Mansion Royale and its surroundings draws us into her narrative and makes the mansion itself into a character which morphs and mirrors Barnes’ mother. Like the mansion, Barnes’ mother is presented with two sides: the first being “soft like the curves of her teaspoon and the collar of her robe” (24) while the other, “made of cosmetics” (28) who “smiled the smile she used for the press” (30). These two versions of her gradually become less balanced with each chapter as the state of the mansion also goes from one which hosted garden parties and is gilded with golden tassels in her attempt to keep up the upper class appearance which the mansion offers to one which is “always dark” and “always sad” (139). In doing this, Barnes amplifies our emotional response as readers by dropping us into this once opulent home which has begun to decay over time due to neglect followed by the actions of her mother which, more often than not, put the wants of others and greed before the needs of her daughter.

Barnes furthers a facsimile of plot by her use of chapters with titles to organize the varying events which move the narrative along through time. While not all memoir likely needs to use plot or a variation of it, this choice in particular keeps the reader grounded in the large span of time in which the events take place rather than simply having sections with dates. I could say that she didn’t need to use chapter titles, which is true since she does make a point to include the year for each section as it occurs, however the titles create a focus and tension within section which organizes the flow of time into concise and purposeful sections and creates those events we are so familiar with in plot. This becomes most crucial with the chapter “Sleep Now.” The overall content of the memoir is heavy, but the events of this section occur later in the same year as the previous section, “Woman at the Well” in which Barnes gets her first period and finds kinship with Diyosa. In “Sleep Now,” the vulnerability and solitude which she experienced in the mansion really weighs on us with lines such as “I knew to flee before the men arrived [...] But that didn’t mean they never came” (173, 175) and “I drew X’s and O’s [...] Hugs and kisses. Death and dark wishes” (177). These lines in particular punched me in the gut and touched me in familiar ways which I have wished to forget and in this way built tension not with the initial trauma but with the ways in which she coped following. This tension is eventually resolved (as in other chapters) with the speaker in the moment calling back to the chapter titled “Falling” when she “remembered not bleeding [...] not showing signs of trauma besides lying still, being unable to move, and, seemingly, deceptively, as only a kid can do, appearing tranquil” (178). This moment mimics in fiction when the character recalls an earlier obstacle which they then use overcome the challenge at hand. But then, fiction reflects real life, so it’s not much of a surprise that memoir would mimic plot.

Barnes, however, breaks from what would be a facsimile of plot in her final chapter “The Season of the Sun.” If this were fiction, it would end at “I was going somewhere” (226), but in a move to remind us that these events happened, that they happened to her, she chooses to give us a glimpse at her life after Mansion Royale in which she fulfilled her dream of becoming a writer. Some might think that this chapter was unnecessary, that it makes the work as a whole not as strong as if she had ended it sooner. But it makes it stronger because recounting events which have caused harm, tried time and again to break a warrior’s spirit, and tried to make them give up hope brings about a healing, a forgiveness which Barnes has come to terms with. This is not a forgiveness that is “everything shitty and awful you did is okay because I forgive you!” but rather one which says, “none of it was okay, but it wasn’t my fault.” It gives light to the future that is real and not some intangible possibility where we assume that everything turned out okay once she got out of the mansion. It’s something that gives hope to those still in the dark, to those reading books by the dim light of leftover mosquito coils.