This is How Cis Always Are

I can't decide whether or not I like This Is How It Always Is. I sort of trust the narrator, but my trust is limited. Let me explain: I don't really trust cis folks to tell trans stories. The trouble is that you are just bad at it. Even when the writing is lovely (in Trumpet, for example), all the research in the world isn't going to make up for lived experience.

Luckily, I guess, this isn't so much a trans story as the story of the parents of a trans child. And honestly that annoys me, too. I'm getting the same vibes here that I get off so many parents of disabled children: they are making it all about themselves. And I guess as more and more kids come out as trans, the "disability mom" phenomenon is going to spread so we'll have a "trans mom" phenomenon. And meanwhile we'll have whole populations of kids who are perfectly capable of talking about their own lives but who aren't being listened to. But their parents are being listened to! And I guess that matters more?

While it was nice to see trans representation, and I enjoyed the book in a lot of ways, I was also very frustrated by it. The Jane Doe scene seemed like trauma porn--it was entirely possible for Rosie to reach the same conclusions about needing to protect Poppy and to treat the trans woman in her emergency room without her imagining this horrible assault on and murder of a trans woman. She didn't even get a name. That scene really bothered me.

The book also seemed to have a misunderstanding of transness and how it works. I understand that Frankel referred to Poppy as Claude in the beginning because she hadn't come out yet, but having the parents misgender her afterwards and calling her Poppy-Claude later was not good. And having the parents out Poppy to the neighbors then feel guilty for not outing her to the whole school (when, as was made clear earlier in the book, people are literally killed for being trans, and coming out is a very personal decision) seems really questionable. I'm actually a bit uncomfortable with Frankel outing her own child in the Author's Note.

Ambiguity and Story editing, discussing This is How it Always is

Ambiguity and Story Editing.

By Jamie Harper

As a gender nonconforming child who grew up to be, well, still gender nonconforming, I felt a lot of different emotions in reading Laurie Frankel’s This is How it Always is. I had a lot of thoughts about a lot of things, both good and not-so-good, but what I have decided to focus on for the blog this week is ambiguity and the concept of story editing. Frankel makes it clear in her author’s note at the end of this book that the story, while based on some of her experiences as a mother with a trans child, is also firmly a work of fiction, which means she possessed the ability to tell the exact story she wished to tell, without being as beholden to the ideas of “truth” that many memoirists must grapple with, and be ready to defend. As such, Frankel could form her story and the way it is told, and utilize ambiguity of storytelling, in ways that allowed her to neatly parallel the editing and changing of life and the expression of personality and personal history.

Throughout this novel there is much debate between parents Rosie and Penn about how to handle the fact that their child is trans, in a world that is dominantly unfriendly to such children. Should they disclose this incredibly personal and private fact about their child to everyone, to only some people, to no one? How much of her story should they edit out, and who gets to make that decision? The optimist, writer father, the practical, medical mother, the older siblings, young Poppy herself?

In reading a story, the reader implicitly wants to trust their narrator, which is often what makes or breaks a memoir, or genre stories such thrillers and procedurals. When the reader feels intentionally betrayed by the narrator, they lose trust in not only that narrator, but in the author and any messages, or morals, they may be trying to get across in their work. Then you have stories like This is How it Always is and Forget Sorrow, which both portray stories from narrators that place trust in the story’s truth, for different reasons. In Forget Sorrow, we are given a generational story told through the passing on of the family history, a father telling his daughter about the past. Here, Yang as the narrator presents the story as true, because she has no real proof otherwise and must place faith in the word of her father, but we as readers do not. We can question moments that seem impossible, or themes that would suggest embellishment or a twisting of fact, based upon whatever questions we may have of the father and his motives. In This is How it Always is, on the other hand, we have a fully fictional story, wherein we are blatantly reminded of the power of editing. Penn often tells and retells fairytales and bedtime stories, changing them as needed (p.187), while working on his novel and striving to find a balance with Rosie in how much information to give out about Poppy. This informs the reader that, this story too was edited, edited for a peaceful, hopeful, “happy ending,” most likely for Frankel and her own daughter. Throughout the narrative, Rosie is constantly reminded of the ambiguity of life by both her storytelling husband, and the overly peppy, yoda-like guru of Mr. Tongo (suffer or suffer, there is no do not), which in turn reminds the reader of not only life’s ambiguity, but that of novels. “Yes, it’s true. And no, I made it all up,” Frankel says in her author’s note, much as Penn tells a bereaved Poppy that “just because it’s made up, doesn’t mean it isn’t real” (p. 216). Just because Frankel created a whole new narrative out of some of her experiences as a mother of a trans child, doesn’t mean the story is not true, in one way, shape, or form for someone out there going through a similar experience. So should we as readers invalidate or distrust her messages and efforts just because we recognize her narrator as unreliable, both in that it is a close third focusing on the more selfish mother, and that it is a fictional piece rather than a memoir, as we might do with the father in Forget Sorrow  or the author of a crime novel that straight up lies to it’s reader (an example being the The Wave at Hanging Rock by Gregg Dunnett)?

Personally, I don’t think so. As the Walsh-Adams family discovers, there is a middle road to walk. A middle road based on ambiguity, be it the ambiguity of a story, like Penn’s published book about Prince Grumwald and Princess Stephanie, or the ambiguity of a life history, like that of the family collective, or of gender, like what Poppy chooses to settle on for her gender “label” (p. 285)

There are moments when it becomes clear to gender nonconforming readers that Frankel was cherry picking the subjects and realities depicted in her story and sort of diluting them as a means of making them more palatable to a broader readership (*coughs* Mr. Tongo *coughs*), but she was also leaving it ambiguous enough that those who know better, would know. An example of this can be found in her depiction of Rosie and Penn’s fight on page 208, or the incredibly brief mention of gender reassignment surgeries in Thailand and the negative, fetishizing culture that plagues the “Kathoey” there (p.288). Then of course there is the problematic matter that it never occurs to Rosie or Penn to ask Poppy her opinions on things directly relating to her truth and story, such as if she might one day like to have a reassignment surgery, or hormone blockers, or what pronouns to use. She may be “only” five or ten or however old (which will continue to happen to her until the day she dies as a female presenting and therefore a socially infantilized individual), and her opinions may change as she ages, but she is still her own autonomous person and should should be respected as such.

In general, I think Frankel had good intentions with this novel and executed a lovely “fairytale” moral about the ambiguity of the experience of life, and I respect her for that, even if I don’t agree with all of her choices within the plot or characterization.                        

Memory as Narrative

Interesting how Forget Sorrow skips around in time to tell the history of the Yang family. The story is delicately predicated on the idea that Rotten Egg (Belle’s stalker) will come after her if she leaves the house, so she must occupy herself living at her parents’ house. Thus she begins cataloguing the stories of her father’s life and his forebears in comic form. Quite an undertaking, with such a dire predicament.

I found it puzzling how the narrative jumps from subject to subject. Just when I think I’m starting to get to know a character and understand their motivations, the narrative switches to another member of the family, often leaving behind threads that are unresolved. One place this was particularly hard to follow was the discussion of Belle’s father’s uncles. Third uncle is devising a plan to hoard all the family resources in the country to himself, working on convincing the Grandfather of the superiority of his plan, and (eldest) First uncle tries to talk Grandfather out of this, noting that the family who has been stewarding the rural industry has been successful at it for a generation, and they always have enough to eat. Further he casts aspersions into Third uncle’s character and intentions, thereby confusing Grandfather and convincing him it’s best to wait to decide what to do. Before we find out what becomes of this situation, the narrative switches to Fourth uncle and later to Second uncle. It’s hard to follow individual threads with this much jumping around. However, I find that the disjointed storyline perfectly mimics the pathway of memory. Belle’s father is attributing significance to individual moments in his memory, and through time his perceptions of these events has unraveled to crystallize only certain points of reference. He can recall certain aspects of these moments but not necessarily the bookend events that led to them or happened afterwards. Consequently a lot of significance is placed on the memories he does share, whether they ultimately had a large role in the unfolding of other events or not. Much of the tragic story of the family's loss of land and animals cannot be attributed to Third uncle's mishaps, but the progression of the Communist uprising. No matter who was tending the land, the resources would have been appropriated by the revolutionaries.

Naturally, if I am patient, a thread will unwind and be picked back up in the larger narrative. A long sweeping saga is dealt in short breaths, and the inhalation parts are when we are back with Belle and her father, poring over some small aspect of the larger legend of the family history. The family fight isn’t about who looks after the farmland, it’s about the wills of the brothers who are battling out their egos. Third uncle is pugnacious and overbearing, while the eldest uncle (Belle’s grandfather) lets his anger get out of control and strikes out against Grandfather, ultimately needing to apologize to move forward. It is always disrespectful to disagree with an elder, so no matter what he felt, he should have gone along with Grandfather’s vision. The end result is that the family relations are strained. Sadly this disruption is never fully mediated, leaving Grandfather estranged from the rest of the uncles, ultimately leading to him being cast out of their homes when he is in need of shelter and care. How sad that his selfish life led him to be wandering alone looking for a sympathetic family member to care for him in his final days. It didn't surprised me that eldest son was the one to take him in, and allow him a dignified ending.

Baba (Belle’s father) had such incredible hardship making his way once Xinmin was too besieged to stay in. It’s a wonder he survived at all—sleeping tied to bamboo in the river so that he wouldn’t drown. Being homeless in several different situations, but still managing to find work and make his way to America. It's sad that he had to leave the family behind to survive and ultimately lead a new life. Belle would not be able to tell this story without Baba's survival, so it is as it had to be. I was also happy to know that Rotten Egg moves on and Belle is released from his stalking. So that she can finally be free.

Forget Sorrow

History weighs heavily in Belle Yang’s graphic memoir. Political and familial history both are blended together so Yang’s family narrative cannot exist outside of its historical context. The narrator's name too, Xuan meaning “forget sorrow” is ridded with historical context, a phrase spoken towards the end, “forget sorrow. Forgive your children. Forgive the world” (page 241). The first page begins with Yang giving a short bio, introducing the relationship between herself and her father, the last two panels revealing her name. What follows is what could be the meaning behind that name and what it means to “forget sorrow,” or what sorrows were supposed to be forgotten.

Although Yang is the story’s true narrator and writer, the role of narrator is passed to other characters. A great portion is told through her father’s, Zu-Wu, perspective. It’s interesting that Yang’s story is the one that interjects, breaking Zu-Wu’s narrative. Adding more to the layers, Zu-Wu’s narrative does not detail his life, but that of his family, including his grandfather and his grandfather’s children. A majority of the conversations and conflicts arise from the older generation with Zu-Wu acting more as a spectator with little control over what happens. Zu-Wu’s grandfather also takes over the narrative to provide the beginnings of their family, the first Yang. I thought this was an interesting approach, but the narrative worked, for me at least. The graphic novel read as if it was being spoken out loud. What I was reading was what Zu-Wu said to his daughter on that night the power went out, when they were planting outside, or taking a walk out. And like oral tales, they are sometimes broken by “real life” which, in this case, was the interjections Yang provided. The breaks made the “oral” aspect of the narrative feel more organic because of its smooth transitions. On page 47, for only one panel, Yang interrupts to ask a question, “Your grandfather and this beggar became friends?” not for clarification or as a cue for more exposition, but to express her disbelief. It is the type of question I ask when listening to stories. My favorite example, however, is on page 60 where Zu-Wu pauses the narrative himself. He provides his insight and all that’s shown in one panel is he and his daughter sitting on the grass while Zu-Wu heaves a heavy, “Sigh” just as the sun sets behind him. 

 These voices are all filtered through one another: the grandfather’s through Zu-Wu’s, through Belle Yang, and exist because they are passed down. It is Zu-Wu’s grandfather that proclaims that, “we must understand the past so that we may understand how we became who we are today” right before he details his family history (page 19). This line, I believe, is the core of preserving family history and of Yang’s graphic novel. Yang carries these voices of her past in her name and her person as she struggles to find who she is. Her main conflict lay in reclaiming her life after being terrorized by Rotten Egg, the stalker ex-boyfriend. Her past is so tightly intertwined with her family’s past that through her father’s stories, she is able to break away from her fear. She “tried to write sorrow out of Baba’s life” and was able to write out her own sorrows and fears (page 246). 

What had been an oral tradition of passing down the family story, Yang chose to write down. With the grand blend of characters, by utilizing the visual style of a graphic novel, it is easier to recognize and remember these characters. I can follow the stories and characters because of their distinct profiles that match their personalities. For me, going from oral story to graphic novel worked. 

One last line I need to share. Off all the panels and all the dialogue shared, my favorite has to be Baba’s “Me, Killjoy? We bring you to America for education. You find Rotten Egg stalker boyfriend!” (page 37). I can just feel the loving, brutal honesty in their family bonds. 

Forget Sorrow

For a comic book, I found Forget Sorrow very dependent on the words of the narrator.  The narrator, weather it’s the daughter or her father, does a lot of the work of explaining what’s happening, the images often lean on these descriptions like a crutch.  When the narrator says she left China, an image will show her with a suitcase.  The narrator and images seemed to have a call and response relationship, instead of a trade off between narration/dialogue and images that I see in many other comics.  I like comic books that let the images speak for themselves, let the reader explore the cells for more information about the story.  Here, I often felt the images were more like illustrations that accompanied the narration and didn’t always have a lot to say on their own. 

            What I really liked about the images was when the author used more abstract drawings to show concepts or feelings.  On page 79 there is a memorable drawing of the body-less heads of children gnawing on a skeleton.  I thought this showed the character’s fears in a creative way.  The author also uses this to bring her poetic lines to life.  When the grandfather is wandering and begging, we see his limbs sticking out of a river he can’t swim free of.    

            The author used this same technique to portray bad deeds.  Her stalker ex, Rotten Egg, is portrayed as very large, inhumanly tall, and he reminded me of some kind of evil spirit.  I really loved the full-page illustration of him on page 11 that showed him as big as the house the narrator’s family is hiding within.  Characters doing bad things are often shown as larger than life or with demonic qualities.  When the narrator’s father yells at her, he sprouts devil horns, page 70.  When the narrator’s father returns home to China to visit, his relatives have giant heads as they badger him for things, page 196.  I also really liked, on page 200, when the family feels they are being spied on.  We get large eyes at the top, and the pigs for slaughter right above them.  This could be considered too literal for some, but I really like the bold imagery in this cell and it really stuck with me.  Also, when the narrator dreams that her mother in stuck in a pagoda, the drawing was so beautiful that I found myself wishing it was a whole page.  These images took on a life of their own in my head, and added depth that the written text hinted at.

            I think the most consistent theme that kept coming up for me was nature.  The narrator’s father grows up with a garden, and the narrator is constantly taking walks outside.  I found the animals in the text would mirror the human characters.  Cats killing mice when family plots were unfolding, the family of rabbits while the narrator is walking with her family, and the lone fox when the grandfather is on his own. 

Weather often helps show the character’s emotions.  The character’s faces are not always brimming with emotion, and so the background of thunderclouds or shadow helps reinforce the feelings they are having at the moment.  When the narrator is mad at her father, on page 38, there are heavy clouds behind her.  When there is family strife over the decision to let Third Uncle take over the countryside land, the characters are shown with lightning and rain in their backgrounds.

The dialogue could be a little too on the nose sometimes, the narrators did a lot of the work while the dialogue, especially in flashbacks, didn’t always pack a punch.  I did really like the thoughts of the narrator’s father as a young man.  In these he was honest and funny.  I felt like knew him best from these moments, not necessarily what he said during his recounting.         

-Iris 

Forget Sorrow - A History More Than Black & White

When it comes to the comic form, the placement of each panel as well the characters and objects within them is intentional as well as the placement of dialogue and narration. The artist, as they construct their story, consider the most effective way for all of these elements to interplay with each other in order to have the correct effect on the reader while they experience the story playing out before them. So it is also important to consider the use of color or the lack thereof (such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home in which the images are all in shades of blue). I thought it was interesting initially that Belle Yang chose for her graphic novel to be depicted in black and white. But isn’t it just easier that way? Less coloring to do and less likely for her father to come back with “Here, illogical [...] This wrong, too” (37) if she used a color that wasn’t accurate? I’m glad you asked! To which, I say, maybe. It’s possible that in her debut graphic that she wanted to get back to the basics and focus more on the story rather than the images. But that would also be ignoring the art of the comic form.

Let’s take a step back into our own histories for a second - remember history class in high school? Did you about a seminal event in history in which you were also taught the facts from the other side? If you were, you’re lucky. Despite this black and white teaching of history, we know that what’s taught to us is not always that simple. Similarly, as Forget Sorrow begins, a lot of the interactions between her and her father seem very unfair - how was she to know that Rotten Egg would have been that way? True, we don’t see the events that led her to meeting Rotten Egg, but her father’s reaction to her bad decisions seems unfair and not taking her sorrow and fear into account. However, as the memoir continues, we begin to see Yang and her father growing closer as they begin to understand each other more. While they still fight, their arguments “go only hours, not days” (134) as her father’s stories of his family history and Yang’s documentation of them brings them closer together. This very much mirrors his own father’s relationship with his brothers and father (the patriarch) when it came to Third Uncle taking over the management of the land being farmed. When the teapot is thrown and the Patriarch calls Father “ingrate” (87) it is colored *wiggles eyebrows, throws some finger guns* with the knowledge that Father knows Third Uncle will likely keep the best of the harvest for himself as well as the knowledge we bring to the situation of what is to come in the future with the rise of Communism in China and the famine. However, as the narrative continues, both Father and the Patriarch eventually reconcile. This is done first with the apology required by the culture to make peace in their family (121-123) and later with the end of the Patriarch’s life in which Father is the only one of his children to take him during the famine (241). In both of these moments, we as the reader bring the color to the panels based on the semi-omnipotent knowledge of the history that Yang’s father’s narration gives us as he describes the situations of each family member during his lifetime.

In addition, the choice to have the panels be black and white rather than colored in also mirrors the state of politics through the narrative (both familial and national) since whoever is in power decides history and how it is presented and read by others. The previous examples give us a sense of those familial politics so I won’t give anymore (though I definitely could). The main example that I want to look at is when the Patriarch goes to Fourth Uncle’s house and expects to be taking in since he has his own grain ration tickets. This expectation, which would be expected of Fourth Uncle under familial politics, is countered with national politics instead because of Fourth Uncle’s application into to join the Communist party. Because of their application and the Patriarch having been labeled a Capitalist, the black and white view of the wife says that they cannot associate with the Patriarch lest he put their application at risk. This artistic choice deepens the experience and meaning behind the narrative as it is being told.

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.