A great graphic novel about the New China

[Xavier_Onassis]

Forget Sorrow, by Belle Yang. The New China could be the PRC, Taiwan or Carmel, California. Belle Yang (whose Chinese name translates "Forget Sorrow") wrote this about her father's Han Chinese family in Mongolia, from the 1700's until the present, focusing more on the 1930's-1950's. I think her father is also an artist of some kind as well, though she only implies this.

She deals with her great grandfather (Yang Junchen), and his four sons, whose names translate
1. Embrace Achievement
2.  Embrace Determination
3.  Embrace Honesty
4.  Embrace Integrity

None of these names seems to have been realized by the men who have them, in fact, sort of the opposite. One of the women is named "Toils tirelessly" or something like that.

Americans name their kids as they do just because they like the sound of the name, and only occasionally look up the meaning.

Fidel Castro means "Faithful to the battlefield"
Salvador Allende, "Savior from the Other Side"

Not that all Spanish names are that fraught with meaning. But still, more meaningful than Ray-Bob, Keisha, or Tammy-Lee.

Her father is I think the third son of the number one son of Junchen.

He eventually makes it to Japan, then Taiwan, then California.
His daughter, who seems to be an only child, attracts a stalker boyfriend called Rotten Egg, who shoots up the office where she works and forces her to live at home. She goes to the PRC in the late 80's and studies art under Den Shao Ping's wife.

This gives a really, really great view (at least to a Westerner such as myself) about Chinese life and culture, and above all the family. A terrific book.
 
Similar in some ways to Marjane Satrap's Persepolis, but in several ways, better, as it gets into Buddhism, Taoism, the Japanese occupation and the Revolution.

The author has a website: www.belleyang.com.
ISBN is 978-0-393-06834-4 WW Norton, 1st Ed., 2010.

I just chanced across this at the South Miami Public Library, where is is listed as fiction, which is not quite adequate. I guess the LC does not have a category for graphic tales of family legends other than fiction.

I assume that Belle Yang speaks Mandarin, rather than Cantonese, as that is what they speak in Manchuria, which is no longer called Manchuria, but is the area between N. Korea and Mongolia. The same area that Pu Yi, the Last Emperor was from.

[Michael Tee]

I loved Persepolis, so I'm gonna look out for this one as well.  Thanks, XO.

[Xavier_Onassis]

It's not exactly political, but, of course, since the Yangs were landowners and were pretty much driven off the land, it is hardly pro-Mao. It doe jibe with other stories of Taiwanese exile that I have read, it's just done from a more personal perspective.

[Michael Tee]

It's very possible to tell a balanced story of revolution even if the protagonists are land-owners.  Dr. Zhivago was told from a bourgeois perspective and was not entirely unsympathetic to the Revolution and Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard even more sympathetic.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Yang's goal in writing this was not to put down the PRC government, but to tell her family story. Politics are peripheral to the main story, as they are in most people's lives. I agree that Zhivago was somewhat sympathetic to the Revolution, but he also was thoroughly Russian. Yuri Andreievich This is a lot more obvious in the novel than in the film. In the novel, Zhivago lives with five women, in the film just Tonya and Lara.
Zhivago was the son of a failed capitalist, which is rather symbolic, and his uncle Andrei Gromyko is a sort of Christian idealist. Zhivago is a doctor as well as a poet, which are seen as rather noble professions in both regimes.