Belle Yang's Forget Sorrow

You have read about her graphic novel Forget Sorrow in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal, and now Belle Yang will be coming to Kepler's this Thursday. Come see her speak about her critically acclaimed novel at 7:30.

Kepler's buyer and 'well read donkey' Aggie Z. raves: Yang chronicles tales of her Chinese heritage woven with her own life story. The beauty of her language and her illustrations are breathtaking: weeping willows, cypresses, and ancestral burial ground as elegant as calligraphy.

Belle studied art in Beijing at the Academy of Traditional Painting where she moved to hide from her California boyfriend, a stalker, nicknamed "Rotten Egg." After Tiananmen, she moved back to her parents' home in Carmel, CA and began listening to her father's family stories. She retells them with beautiful brushstrokes of her pen and brush: the life and death of her Manchurian great grandfather, the wealthy family patriarch, Famine, Wars, family feuds, Misery, Anger and, finally, the Solace of mediation through Buddhism and Taoism. Her poetic storytelling made me yearn for my childhood home, friends and family. This poetic eulogy memoir will make your heart sing and forget its sorrows.