Nothing is ordinary about the narratives we encounter in All Our Ordinary Stories, the second graphic memoir by writer and illustrator Teresa Wong. When her mother appears to grow despondent and melancholy after suffering a stroke, Wong contemplates her family’s story of uprooting from Guangzhou, China, to settle in Canada. Using the comic form, Wong illustrates ruptures and pauses in outsider lives. We learn about the long arc of suffering and triumphs endured by her parents during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Wars, societal conflicts, and oppressive regimes led her forebears to leave their homes and find better lives in distant lands, a journey that inspires hope and resilience.

I engaged with the book from my perspective as a first-generation immigrant. The themes of self-sacrifice, ambition, and loss surface throughout Wong’s narrative, and they are intimate and familiar. Wong shares the legacy of family separation from ancestral lands and fractures across the diaspora. Fellow immigrants may find solace in Wong’s confession that she harbored guilt for losing fluency and faculty in her mother’s language, thus limiting her ability to connect emotionally. Wong tells this story with plenty of heart and a deep sense of gratitude for where her ancestors have been and the heritage of generational grief and survival.