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Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

1.) Family traditions play a large role in Xuan’s life. How does her culture compare to yours? Are their traditions that are multicultural?

 

2.) How do her father’s stories bring Xuan closer to her Chinese heritage? What does she gain?

 

3.) How do Xuan’s struggles to find herself parallel those of her father’s?

 

4.) Knowing your self-worth is an important theme throughout the novel. What does it mean to know your worth? Why is this important?

 

5.) Both Xuan’s and her father’s family are surrounded by acts of violence. How does the art of storytelling counteract violence? How does violence ultimately bring Xuan’s family together?

 

6.) Why do you think the author chose the graphic novel format to tell her story? How does it help the reader enter the author’s culture?

 

7.) In Chinese, names are a way to shape a child. How is each of the character’s names reflective of their personality? Do they live up to their parent’s expectations?

 

8.) The women in the father’s story are generally in the background: present but uninvolved. How has the role of women changed since the early twentieth century? Compare Xuan’s mother and Xuan to the brother’s wives.

 

9.) Xuan’s grandfather says, “We are responsible for what happens to ourselves. We bring bad luck down upon our own heads.” Do you think this is true? Does Xuan’s story conform to this thinking?

 

10.) How does remembering the past help Xuan in her present and future? How did her reflection on the past engage your memories of the past?

 

11.) The Chinese language is made up of a series of “pictures” called pictographs and ideographs, and horizontal hand scrolls were an artist’s medium to depict a moving landscape. How might these techniques and traditions relate to the way in which Belle has chosen to tell her story?

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale
by Belle Yang

  • Publication Date: June 6, 2011
  • Genres: Manga
  • Paperback: 250 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
  • ISBN-10: 0393339963
  • ISBN-13: 9780393339963