Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

Be the first to write a review
Pick Up In Store

Pick Up in Store

Reserve and pick up in 60 minutes at your local store

Paperback
$12.31
BN.com price
$15.95 List Price (Save 23%)
Marketplace (New and Used)
from
$1.99
$15.95 List Price (Save 88%)
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
All (22)  
Used (8)  
New (14)  
Close
Sort by
Page 1 of 3
Showing 1 – 10 of 22 (3 pages)
$1.99
(Save 88%)
SellBackYourBook
Seller since 2008

Feedback rating:

(839)

Condition:

New — never opened or used in original packaging.

Like New — packaging may have been opened. A "Like New" item is suitable to give as a gift.

Very Good — may have minor signs of wear on packaging but item works perfectly and has no damage.

Good — item is in good condition but packaging may have signs of shelf wear/aging or torn packaging. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Acceptable — item is in working order but may show signs of wear such as scratches or torn packaging. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Used — An item that has been opened and may show signs of wear. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Refurbished — A used item that has been renewed or updated and verified to be in proper working condition. Not necessarily completed by the original manufacturer.

Good
0393339963 Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc... All day low prices, buy from us sell to us we do it all!!

Ships from: Aurora, IL

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$3.57
(Save 78%)
Horizon Books OH
Seller since 2005

Feedback rating:

(3953)

Condition: New
New Book and Cover in Excellent Condition

Ships from: Cleveland, OH

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$3.93
(Save 75%)
PlumCircle PA
Seller since 2005

Feedback rating:

(4429)

Condition: Good
2011 Paperback Publisher overstock. May have remainder mark. Somewhat damaged. Issue such as: bumped corner, torn DJ, dust soil, etc. GOOD reading copy.

Ships from: West Mifflin, PA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$3.95
(Save 75%)
spellbound PA
Seller since 2005

Feedback rating:

(9713)

Condition: Like New
6/6/2011 Paperback Fine 0393339963 LIKE NEW/UNREAD! ! ! Text is Clean and Unmarked! --Be Sure to Compare Seller Feedback and Ratings before Purchasing--Has a small black line ... on bottom/exterior edge of pages. Read more Show Less

Ships from: McKeesport, PA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$3.95
(Save 75%)
PlumCircle PA
Seller since 2005

Feedback rating:

(4429)

Condition: Very Good
2011 Paperback Very good Publisher overstock. May have remainder mark. Unread book with minor shelf wear.

Ships from: West Mifflin, PA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$8.21
(Save 49%)
Extremely_Reliable
Seller since 2007

Feedback rating:

(3184)

Condition: New
Buy with confidence. Excellent Customer Service & Return policy.

Ships from: Richmond, TX

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
$9.61
(Save 40%)
Buybreak
Seller since 2010

Feedback rating:

(359)

Condition: New
h*a*r*dc*o*v*e*r DIFFERENT COVER SAME TEXTBrand New Book! Unread and in Perfect Condition! NO Remainder mark. Ships out the same day from our warehouse.

Ships from: Deer Park, NY

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$9.61
(Save 40%)
Buybreak
Seller since 2010

Feedback rating:

(359)

Condition: Like New
H*A*R*D*C*O*V*E*R same text cover varies Brand New Book! Unread and in Perfect Condition! NO Remainder mark. Ships out the same day from our warehouse.

Ships from: Deer Park, NY

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$9.75
(Save 39%)
PaperbackshopUS
Seller since 2009

Feedback rating:

(4793)

Condition: New
Shipped from US in 4 to 14 business days. Established seller since 2000

Ships from: Aurora, IL

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
$9.75
(Save 39%)
ExpeditedBooksUS
Seller since 2010

Feedback rating:

(887)

Condition: New
Shipped from US. Express shipping in 3 to 6 business days. Standard shipping in 4 to 14 business days. Established seller since 2000

Ships from: Aurora, IL

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
Page 1 of 3
Showing 1 – 10 of 22 (3 pages)
Close
Sort by

Overview

When Belle Yang was forced to take refuge in her parents’ home after an abusive boyfriend began stalking her, her father entertained her with stories of old China. The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents.

In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels ...

See more details below
Sending request ...

More About This Book

Overview

When Belle Yang was forced to take refuge in her parents’ home after an abusive boyfriend began stalking her, her father entertained her with stories of old China. The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents.

In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations—and of possibilities for reconciliation.

Forget Sorrow demonstrates the power of storytelling and remembrance, as Belle—in telling this story—finds the strength to honor both her father and herself.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
East meets West in this occasionally playful yet profoundly moving graphic memoir. Though she has drawn from her life in her popular children's books (Foo, the Flying Frog of Washtub Pond, 2009, etc.), Yang has never offered the level of psychological reflection and familial revelation shown here. The subtitle, "An Ancestral Tale," tells only half the story. The author narrates her own story, which encompasses the story of her father, who tells the story of his ancestors that his daughter then mediates through her artistry. The impetus for the project is the stalking of the thoroughly modern and Americanized author-then a recent college graduate-by a former boyfriend referred to throughout as "Rotten Egg." To protect herself from what appears to be the real threat of physical harm, she retreats to the home of her far more traditional parents, who emigrated from China before her birth. She also makes a pilgrimage to her family's homeland, where she attends the Academy of Traditional Chinese Painting and experiences the late 1980s political upheaval and repression firsthand. Returning to her family's house in California, where her parents claim that she has wasted her education because of her bad boyfriend experiences, she coaxes stories from her father on his family, which are filled with tales of familial conflict and oppression that resonate with her own feelings of living in a prison imposed by circumstances. It's a tale of Taoism and Buddhism, with the meditative state wondrously captured by the artist, and of the tension between the seeming passivity that spirituality appears to instill in some and the personal ambitions of others. The narrative seamlessly shifts between present andpast, and between America and China, mixing the intimacy of a memoir with the artist's visual allusions to such sources as King Lear and The Scream. A transformational experience for author and reader alike.
Publishers Weekly
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. (May)
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
The Barnes & Noble Review

The graphic memoir is a form that seems particularly well suited to conveying what is, to us, a foreign experience. The visual yin marries the verbal yang to yield a full round, each half of which contains a small portion of the other. In their totality, they cannot be unlinked, nor can the book be imagined in any other figuration. Such is the case with Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and the picture books of Allen Say and Shaun Tan (The Arrival without any words but imagined ones, yet no less powerful an immigrant saga for that). Likewise with Forget Sorrow, the first graphic memoir by illustrator Belle Yang, who describes the complex history of her prominent Chinese family through the glass of her father's reminiscences after his emigration to California.

Her great-grandfather in Manchuria tells her father, "We must understand the past so that we may understand how we became who we are today." That is the purpose of the "ancestral tale," and it may also serve to elicit in American readers some amount of regret that many of us are increasingly ignorant of our own generational curriculum vitae. It is a loss we may not even feel until we are made witness to the rich and byzantine genealogical tapestry of someone who feels driven to know whence she came.

For Yang, the desire is pressured by her unhappy situation in America: she is being stalked by a violent ex-boyfriend (here named Rotten Egg) as well as by the disapproval of her often distant father. As we learn when she interviews him about his life as a member of the formerly great House of Yang, with its passage through the world war and Communist terrors of the twentieth century, he has abundant reason for bitterness. But to speak of the unspeakable becomes an act of renewal, through which Belle Yang's life is given new purpose as graphic memoirist while her father, her Baba, finally lays down the burden of the family's past, which has bowed his back under its sad weight.

The experience of turning these pages, like troweling deeper and deeper into the earth, is hypnotic, perhaps because the author takes us to a place that is not only far removed from anything with which we may be familiar (replete with exotic customs and festivals, unusual terminology and familial relations, a strange political order, and ancient ways of life) but is refracted yet again through retelling. Slowly we are immersed in the foreign as in a watery pool, to become a fish unaware that a hook has got us by the mouth because it is at the end of such a gossamer line.

Our raptness is also the result of the varied and peculiar characters that appear and disappear, transform and age, through the progression of panels in which Yang expressively -- magically, almost -- renders entire personalities with extreme artistic economy. There is the suave Third Uncle, who cunningly manipulates his father into giving him control of the family's distant farmlands, and thus its wealth; there is the odd duck of a Fourth Uncle, who was the only one allowed to smoke and who rigged radios to spy on the doings of his siblings; there is Second Uncle's cross-eyed wife, who became more and more unhinged until she exploded in a harridan's forbidden rage at her father-in-law. Even a sad-eyed donkey attains a measure of eloquence as a symbol of the family's decline.

Yang's expressive drawing is the same bold and earthy black of R. Crumb, but thicker -- in a metaphorical sense, as well as a literal -- and done with a rougher, hastier brush, as if something imperative were pushing it from behind. And so it is: through writing the story of her family and its travails, she explains, "I have tried to write sorrow out of Baba's life."

The story he tells his daughter -- of life compressed on one side by the internecine machinations of brothers trying to take charge of a powerful family's wealth (in the end lost to all when the tides of governmental change surged dramatically), and on the other by the privations, fears, and dangers of a time when Nationalists and Communists fought each other only to destroy the old ways of a vast country -- becomes more and more incredible. On one page alone, successive panels describe harrowing episodes, each of which might have killed a lesser man: "The Gan River in Jiangsu had flooded. I tied myself to bamboo culms so I could rest"; "The Communists pressed south. I crossed the Gan on a log. Many drowned in the attempt"; "I was conscripted by the Nationalists in Canton and shipped to Taiwan, there to defend Chiang Kai-shek's island refuge . . ."; " . . . and became a street person in Taipei, the capital, with no place to sleep"; "Then I went deep into the mountains of the aborigines to teach Chinese to the children and contracted malaria." The movement alone, from Manchuria to Taiwan to Japan to the U.S., bespeaks a fortitude, and a terrible necessity, that few contemporary readers will ever know.

After Baba entered the U.S., in 1971, the family left in China in effect retreated behind a blank Communist-drawn curtain. In 1979, Yang's father returned to try to discover what had happened. And, under totalitarian rule, what had happened was shocking. The once rich House of Yang had been reduced to begging -- that is, the members of it who had not been carted away to labor camps and buried, in the end, in mass graves.

"Forget sorrow" is both a Buddhist mantra -- the thing needed most by a family that came to suffer so much -- and the name (Xuan) given to the girl, Belle Yang, born in Taiwan in 1960, who would feel compelled to learn of the family's trials and triumphs and then commit them so movingly to paper. Through a felicitous act of remembering, forgetting is finally achieved.

--Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780393339963
  • Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
  • Publication date: 6/6/2011
  • Pages: 250
  • Sales rank: 453,510
  • Product dimensions: 6.90 (w) x 9.90 (h) x 0.70 (d)

Meet the Author

Belle Yang is the author of the popular illustrated books Hannah Is My Name, The Odyssey of a Manchurian, and Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders. She lives in Carmel, California.

Customer Reviews

Be the first to write a review
( 0 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(0)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines
Add Recommendations
Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

  • - HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
  • - Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
  • - Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
  • - Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
  • - Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
  • - Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
  • - Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

  • - By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
  • - Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
  • - See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.
Search for Products You'd Like to Recommend

Recommend other products that relate to your review. Just search for them below and share!

Create a Pen Name

Your Pen Name is your unique identiy on BN.com. It will appear on the reviews you write and other website activities. Your Pen Name cannot be edited, changed or deleted once submitted.

Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously

We're sorry, but penname is already taken.

Please select one of the following:
Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously

penname is available!

By visiting the BN.com website or marking a purchase on BN.com, a User is deemed to have accepted the Terms of Use.

Continue Anonymously

Welcome, penname

You have successfully created your Pen Name. Start enjoying the benefits of the BN.com Community today.

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble
Why is this product inappropriate?
Comments (optional)
500 character limit