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Adeus Tristeza: A História Dos Meus Ancestrais (2010)

by Belle Yang(Favorite Author)

3.38 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Quadrinhos na Cia

review 1: Interesting graphic novel rendition of Chinese ancestral stories, told to a Chinese-American woman by her father. The book goes through the early settlement of villages outside the Great Wall, then skips to just before the Japanese invasion and World War II. The author's father managed to escape to Taiwan, then made his way to Japan to get an education before arriving in America. But the rest of his family was trapped in China, former landowners in a country that now hated capitalists.The story was good, but I didn't feel like the graphics added much. They weren't the simple-yet-poignant pictures of, say, Persepolis. They were loud and Cubist-style, and they didn't really speak to me. Besides, I couldn't tell any of the people apart; other than Fourth Brother (who wo... morere glasses), everyone else (male and female) was dressed in long, flowing robes and a hat. I never quite knew who was speaking.
review 2: This is an interesting graphic memoir in which Belle Yang tells not only a bit of her own story (she's turned to her parents for refuge from a dangerous stalker they've nicknamed "Rotten Egg") but also shares her father's family's history. Her father's ancestors settle in Manchuria and build a prosperous life there, but by the time her father and uncles are young men, their comfortable lives are in jeopardy -- first from the Japanese and then from the Communists. Some of the relatives Yang describes are interesting because their lives are guided by philosophies that I might understand in an innate way (e. g. Taoism), because they so permeate Chinese culture, but that don't influence me as deeply. For example, Second Uncle seems content to let the winds blow him this way and that without struggling; yet he survives. Meanwhile the Patriarch (Yang's father's grandfather) ends his life going from the door of one child to another seeking shelter after the Communists expel him from his land and label him a "Capitalist." Yang's images appear to be painted and they serve her story well. But I almost think that this might be a longer book. There are a lot of siblings to keep track of and their stories are fairly complicated. It seems to me that Yang might devote more time to each one. (I think that perhaps she has shared her father's story in other books.) Still, I know from personal experience that anyone trying to retrieve family stories is sometimes limited both by the capacity and willingness of her source to share information and as well by the desire to tell stories honestly (and not make up things that didn't really happen). I'm grateful that Yang made this book. less

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