A review by whimsicallymeghan
All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey by Teresa Wong

4.0

This was Teresa Wong’s memoir told in graphic format. It was a good way to tell a very visual story. The illustrations were really well done and painted a picture so clearly for the reader. As much as this was Wong’s story of growing up in Calgary with immigrant parents, this was also very much her parents story, too. Each chapter had some sort of starting point which she would lead her reader through. From dealing with her mother who just had a stroke, to her own upbringing trying to find her identity as a Chinese Canadian. As we dove deeper into the book we got deeper into her history, learning about her parents and the type of people they are, how they fled China to Hong Kong to finally arrive in Canada – both her mother’s story and her father’s; she even took it back to her grandparents and great-grandparents to really show the multigenerational strength and trauma. Some of it was so heartbreaking to read because you really felt for her parents and what they had to go through, escaping a country. So many emotions went unsaid; we could see that Wong really tried to bring her parent’s story to life, to show the importance of it, and how her parents were very reluctant to want to share what had happened to them. This also touched on the mother-daughter relationship and how evocative and relatable it could be. She touched on her father-daughter relationship, but it was nothing compared to the relationship a daughter has with her mother; when she wrote about her mother, you could feel the emotion behind it. In the end, this was a moving story, in which Wong really captured her parents story with her own in a beautiful visual.