The Chinese government issued a letter of protest to the Vatican saying that the Roman Catholic Church was honoring people who had betrayed their Chinese culture. When I looked into the lives of these saints, many of them were martyred during the Boxer Rebellion and their canonization was actually very controversial. My home church was really excited about these canonizations because this was the first time that this deeply western church had acknowledged Chinese citizens in this way. I grew up in a Chinese Catholic church that still meets in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized a group of Chinese Catholic saints. Specifically, I’m really interested in the way people who are caught in between cultures end up negotiating for themselves. Issues of identity and how people construct identities for themselves really interest me. Both American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints come from the same root. Is Boxers & Saints also about understanding identity? Shah: American Born Chinese is about identity and stereotypes in a head-on sort of way.
Gene Luen Yang spoke with the “China Blog” about Asian and Asian American identity and how people come to embody their stories, and the empathy he felt while investigating the Boxer Rebellion. When you can imagine China’s history with foreigners this way, it becomes very difficult to oversimplify the mix of views Chinese people might have today about their spectacular entrance onto the world stage. It has the remarkable effect of allowing readers to explore how stories - saints and spirits - can shape physical events - the blood, gore and battles of history.Ī book like this, both approachable and profound, could not come at a better moment. It combines mysticism with the very concrete ways that people decide who they are, in this case a leader in a secret fighting society and a Chinese Christian convert.
It’s not that the concept of Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints is complex: two volumes tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion from two perspectives.īut within this simple structure, Yang’s graphic novels build a compelling story around a war of identity, set 100 years ago in China.
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