Saturday, November 4, 2023

Gene Luen Yang, _Boxers_ and _Saints_

 SAD TO SAY, all I knew of the Boxer Rebellion before  reading these graphic novels was what I had gathered as an 11-year-old from a comic book based on Thirty Days in Peking, a schlocky Hollywood historical epic starring Charlton Heston--which was probably worse than knowing nothing at all.

So, I picked this up not only because I was impressed by Yang's previous book, the graphic memoir American Born Chinese, but also just to make up for some gaps in my own historical knowledge. Turned out, there was also a Joan of Arc bonus.

The Boxer Rebellion was not only an uprising against the European colonizing presence, the "foreign devils," but also a sort of civil war, since the Boxers also declared war on the Chinese who made alliance with the foreign devils by, e.g., converting to Christianity. Yang cannily gives us two stories. Little Bao is a young villager who, inspired by stories of the gods and demi-gods of Chinese mythology, learns martial arts and joins the uprising. Four-Girl, who takes the baptismal name Vibiana, finds in Christianity a kind of sanctuary from her brutal upbringing, and is inspired to protect her new community by the example of...Joan of Arc.

Little Bao's and Vibiana's stories intersect in a couple of spots, accidentally when they are children and then dramatically when Little Bao's campaign takes him to the mission compound where Vibiana lives and works.

Yang's spare, unfussy style works as well here as it did in American Born Chinese. Historical graphic fiction creates an impulse, I suspect, to go into maniacal detail about buildings, armor, dress, and such, but Yang did well to keep things clean.

The greatest success of the two stories, though, is Yang's ability to convey the spiritual reality of the two characters, different as those spiritual realities are. He makes the divinities of the two characters as real for the reader as they are for his characters.

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