Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

By Belle Yang
W.W. Norton

I jumped at the chance to review Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale, an unconventional graphic memoir from writer/artist Belle Yang. While I am no expert on graphic literature, I did devour Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series. With this medium, I enjoy (and envy) the way an artist can show emotions through inked illustrations, and use words more sparingly. Further, there is an intimacy created on the page, because the typeface and conversational style evoke a personal journal lying on a nightstand.

Yang is a Chinese-American woman, and her story, in part, tells of the identity struggles she experiences in separating from the Chinese traditions of her immigrant parents. When she travels to Beijing for art school, Yang has a chance to learn cultural history while not being bound to it.

At the outset of her tale, we see the source of Yang’s title: her Chinese name, Xuan, means “Forget Sorrow.” When Yang was thirty years old, she sought shelter from a violent boyfriend by moving back to her parents’ home. While there, she began to give shape to her father’s childhood stories in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, World War II, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Yang writes, “I have a voice in America. I won’t waste it.”

The art in Forget Sorrow is tender, powerful, and moving. One ink illustration that stands out is Yang’s nightmare about her abuser, which captures a feeling of stark terror. In contrast, Yang’s illustrations also evoke tenderness between father and daughter, a feeling of comfort for him as he shares painful memories.

Yang’s story demonstrates ways in which strength comes from relationships. Her father’s tales are painful at times. Under communism, family relationships were made subordinate to party affiliation. Important aspects of tradition, such as honoring elders, did not apply if those elders were deemed to be landlords or capitalists. The political side of Yang’s family story makes it very clear that social change should not come at the cost of human life or dignity.

Through telling her family’s story as well as exercising her voice and her artistic vision in Forget Sorrow, Yang found new freedom. As a writer, artist, and woman, she shapes her own future.

Review by Lisa Rand

Atomic Mom

Directed by M.T. Silvia
Smartgirl Productions



I was born in 1952 and, although I don't remember public service announcements about the atom bomb like the ones M.T. Silvia includes in her feature-length documentary Atomic Mom, I do remember "bomb drills" when I was in elementary school. At least we didn't just crawl under our desks like some PSAs recommended; we went down to the sub-basement and hunkered down in the dark. I don't remember being scared, but then I don't think I had a very good idea of what the hell we were doing.

I'm not sure anyone did. One thing Atomic Mom makes clear is how little anyone really knew about the atomic bomb before and after it was dropped on Japan and effectively ended World War II. Everything associated with the bomb was top secret; there was even a United States-dictated "gag order" on the Japanese from the time the bombs were dropped until 1953. Doctors had no idea what they were dealing with, as they were not allowed to conduct research or to trade information about radiation sickness.

Even those who studied the effects of radiation didn't know exactly why they were doing it or what would be done with the information they collected. M.T. Silvia's mother, Pauline Silvia, was one of those researchers. She was assigned to the Navy Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco during her stint in the Navy from 1952-53, where she conducted research on the effects of radiation on mice and thermal injury on dogs. She was also on site to witness five of the eleven detonations that took place in Nevada during Operation Upshot-Knothole in 1953.

Pauline Silvia compartmentalized her experiences and refused to associate her research with the development of the atomic bomb for forty years. When M.T. herself became involved in the anti-nuclear movement when she was older, her mother became furious and asked her to stop. They didn't talk about the issue for almost fifteen years. Atomic Mom is about Pauline Silvia's journey from denial to acceptance—and ultimately forgiveness.

Interwoven throughout Pauline Silvia's story is the story of Emiko Okada, a survivor of the atom bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. While Pauline Silvia was fifteen at the time and only thought of the bomb in terms of it ending the war, Emiko Okada was only five and lived through its horrendous effects. (Her twelve-year-old sister was never found and her mother died soon after.) Today, she is a peace activist.

M.T. Silvia was introduced to Okada when she was sent to Japan for her "day job" (Manager of Media Sytems for Pixar Animation Studios). Her interviews with Okada and her daughter add depth to the film by contrasting the experiences of the two "atomic moms."

Atomic Mom is about many things: the excesses and irrationality of war, the peace movement, and the legacies that one generation leaves another. But most of all, it is about reconciliation, not only between former enemies, but between mother and daughter. It is obvious that the film is more than an intellectual exercise; it was meant to be a way for M.T. Silvia to learn more about her mother. In the process, they became closer and the world became a little smaller.

Review by Ellen Keim

Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris

By Jennifer Anne Boittin
University of Nebraska Press

Interwar Paris conjures up images of romance and renewal. From the ashes and rubble of the First World War, families reunite and rebuild under what seemed to be the end of the most dire of circumstances. Unfortunately, Colonial Metropolis fails to capture this magic, and yet it is an extremely thoughtful and methodical review of the local primary source material available, and would serve as a very strong academic referral source.

The author, Jennifer Anne Boittin, has a clear passion for the subject matter and conveys this well through her enthusiastic descriptions of the characters of the period who populated the anti-colonialism and feminist movements. The problem, for me, stems from the fact that we never feel the interaction between these players. These characters never seem to weave together into the larger story of feminist and anti-colonial activism, the tale that Boittin is seemed so hopeful to tell at the outset of the book.

Boittin lifts directly from the historical record to bring a multitude of characters from this period to life, but none so well as that as Josephine Baker. Pages and pages are dedicated to bringing her tantalizing and mischievous performances to life. Imagine the dedication and zeal of Marina Abramović crossed with the free wheeling sexual spirit of Isadora Duncan. Who wouldn’t want to be warped back to the front row for that show of an old theater in Paris?

With these high sensory moments scattered throughout, readers catch glimpses of the time gone by that was advertised to them, but even the best of these moments failed to sustain me from page to page. Clearly, Boittin’s integrity to the historical record speaks to her virtues as an academic; it just doesn’t make for a particularly interesting read.

Review by Nicole Levitz

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

By Susan Zeiger
NYU Press

When men are shipped out to foreign locations to engage in wartime activities, it seems inevitable that they will become romantically and sexually involved with foreign women. In Entangling Alliances, Susan Zeiger explores this phenomenon, examining governmental, military, and societal responses to American soldiers’ desires for sex, companionship, and marriage while engaged in combat overseas. She argues that the changing ways Americans treated war brides over the course of the twentieth century demonstrates shifting American sensibilities regarding foreign policy, race, and gender. More than anything, because war brides involved an exchange of women across cultural and national boundaries, American discourse about war brides was ultimately about what constituted American manhood, men’s relationships with women, and the role of the nation in its relationship to other countries.

During World War I, the military preached sexual abstinence while devising methods to keep American soldiers and local women apart, in particular African-American soldiers and white European women. The army’s response to marriage requests vacillated until an official policy was handed down that marriage was a personal, not military, question. Meanwhile, domestic policy concerns in the U.S. triumphed over an internationally-oriented political outlook; xenophobia for newcomers was inevitable and Americans wondered if these foreign women could become good American wives. Though many predicted the demise of these marriages, evidence reveals that the majority made it.

In World War II, military policy differed depending on location. It encouraged marriage in Great Britain and Australia, both Allied countries with similar cultural backgrounds to white middle-class America. Likewise, American society welcomed these brides, suggesting that American women should emulate their domesticity and loyalty to husbands. Alternatively, the military encouraged prostitution, rather than marriage, in both Italy and the Philippines, while American society viewed these war brides as less desirable immigrants. Zeiger argues that both policies—encouraging prostitution or marriage—“shared... the intention to preserve and extend male control over women.” She also points out that though many of these local women showed independence and an assertion of personal freedom by going out with American men, sometimes against their family’s wishes, their stories “end with marriage and dependence.”

Race played a huge role in war bride stories post-WWII and throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Congressional policy actively limited brides from Asian countries, outright barring Japanese spouses for several years, while all interracial couples faced social discrimination and, occasionally, found that their marriages were not legal when they moved from one state to another.

Zeiger argues that the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam saw the “demise” of the war bride as a phenomenon considered and debated by the American public. The military did not provide transport to war brides the way they did in WWI and WWII, and it actively encouraged prostitution rather than marriage, extending its WWII policy of creating red-light districts where prostitutes were regularly examined by medical officials and given “safe” ratings to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Korean and Vietnamese wives were not written about widely in the American press and they have not written about their post-war experiences in America, the way war brides from earlier eras have done. They have been, Zeiger writes, “all but invisible in American culture.” Demographic information suggests that these Asian war brides tend to be isolated, even in comparison to other Asian immigrants though they have sponsored family members to come to the U.S., unlike earlier war brides. Though Asian war brides were an untold story, there was a lot of media attention paid to the mixed-race children left behind in Vietnam and, sometimes airlifted out and brought to the U.S. Zeiger argues that the story of Amerasian children, and the efforts to bring them to the U.S. allowed Americans to re-conceptualize the war, seeing both Amerasian children and American soldiers as victims in the story. “The American nation becomes father and, also, paradoxically, child. Vietnam, the mother, the war bride, is not part of this reconciliation.”

Entangling Alliances is a compelling read, illuminating twentieth century social struggles encountered by men and women on both domestic and foreign soil over questions of gender, race, and nationality. Though Zeiger argues that the war bride phenomenon died out with the Korean and Vietnam wars, clearly, soldiers still took wives and fathered children with Korean and Vietnamese women. More recently, stories of male American soldiers marrying Iraqi women have been exploited in the media. Because Zeiger only covers the period from WWI up through the Vietnam War, she leaves a perplexing question unexplored: What has happened with female soldiers and local men in the conflicts that the U.S. has engaged in the last twenty years? Have female soldiers, like male soldiers, engaged in romantic and sexual conquests with non-U.S. citizens? I suspect their experience has been radically different than their male counterparts.

Review by Jessica Powers

Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts

By Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles
Edited by Sandra Spanier
Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press

It's impossible to dislike a female protagonist who opines, fifteen miles south of the Italian front in the second-to-last year of World War II, "If there's anything I really loathe, it's a woman protector." Delivered by Annabelle Jones, war correspondent for the San Francisco World, in conversation with Jane Mason, war correspondent for the New York Bulletin, this line refers to one of the many well-meaning men who are the butts of the jokes in the play Love Goes to Press.

Longtime friends as well as colleagues, Jones and Mason are globetrotting journalists chasing after war stories when both improbably show up in the same tiny press camp in Italy. There, amid refrains of, "No, I am not a nurse," any time one of them places an intra-military call, each of the two women pursue dangerously-won exclusive stories and navigate surprise romantic encounters, the latter portrayed as considerably more perilous than the former.

The mostly-journalist ensemble draws an easy comparison to His Girl Friday, released six years before Love Goes to Press first appeared on stage. By contrast, the play's pacing and gender commentary read as tersely contemporary, and its production history as relatively dismal. First performed in the summer of 1946, audiences in London packed theaters to see it, taking advantage of the small luxury of cheap tickets, and in co-author Martha Gellhorn's estimation, eager to laugh amid grief, rationing, wide-spread destruction, and exhaustion in the first year of peace after the war.

American audiences, however, did not crave such levity. After only four performances in New York in the first week of 1947 (where, Gellhorn further recounts, the cast was ecstatic to shop and eat as much as they could), the play folded then disappeared. American reviews from the time reflect a limited range of emotions running from irked boredom to disgust: either the veteran lady war reporters who authored the play couldn't get war quite "right," for all of their experience, or they simply had the bad taste to profane such a sacred subject in a three-act comedy. From the distance of sixty-three years—perhaps as cushy as the distance between New York drama critics of the '40s and the European theatre of war—this self-important response seems a bit comical.

Editor Sandra Spanier does a fine job, in this expanded edition of Love Goes to Press, of providing historical and literary context for the play, which did not see a first printing until 1995. Her biographical focus remains overwhelmingly on Gellhorn, whose sixty-year career was comprised of relentless war correspondence, as well as fiction and travel writing. Co-author Virginia Cowles is comparatively unknown, despite being an experienced war correspondent and prolific nonfiction writer herself. (Gellhorn and Cowles met when both women were reporting on the Spanish Civil War—Annabelle Jones and Jane Mason are based on them, respectively.) I

n addition to Spanier's description of rescuing perhaps the only extant copy of the play, and her recovery and reprinting of deleted sections of Gellhorn's war reporting from the Collier's archives, Gellhorn's original introduction to the 1995 edition may be the most enjoyable historical work here. Good-humored but pitiless, Gellhorn's recounting of the more hapless accomplishments of the play's authors, which included fleeing stunned from cries of "Author! Author!" at the close of the play's premier, is like an authorial bow on behalf of both herself and Cowles, albeit regrettably late.

Review by Kaja Katamay