Braddy Reads Boxers & Saints

Gene Luen Yang wrote an amazing book a couple of years back called American Born Chinese, a story about the son of first-generation immigrants from China interwoven with the Chinese legend of the Monkey King and a hilariously racist sitcom charicature of a Chinese boy named Chin-Kee.  The three different stories draw tighter and tighter together as they progress, until they are completely pulled together in one of the best executed endings I've ever seen in a comic.

Now Yang's done it again with Boxers & Saints, a two-part comic that tells the story of the Boxer Rebellion in China.  The first volume tells the story of Little Bao, a young man who is able to invoke the spirit of the first Chinese Emperor and fight against the poisonous presence of "foreign devils" who have invaded China.  The second volume follows an unwanted child known only as "Four-Girl," who embraces the religion of the foreigners as an act of rebellion against her family.

The two stories proceed roughly independently of each other, only brushing together in small places, scenes which seem unimportant in the narrative as a whole.  Both stories offer fascinating perspectives on what it was like to live in China during such a turbulent, difficult time.  Most impressively, neither story completely villifies either the invading foreigners or the Boxer rebels.

In this regard, Bao's story is probably the most engaging, as his struggle to accept the sometimes horrifying violence he feels he must perpetrate in service to his cause is the chief conflict of the first volume.  Boxers, by itself, is a compelling read - it's violent and grim, but it's never so oppressively dire in its portrayal of war that the reader wants to take a breath.  My only real complaint about Boxers as a stand-alone graphic novel is that the ending feels too abrupt.

Of course, the true ending isn't found until the reader gets through Saints. Personally, I feel the story here is a bit weaker - but that just might be me bringing my preconceptions to the novel.  I expected the main protagonist, Four-Girl, to be a devout Christian convert in order to better contrast with the devotion Little Bao brings to his cause.  Most of Saints seems to revolve around how little Four-Girl actually believes in the Christian faith of the foreigners.  Her interactions with the visions of Joan of Arc are certainly compelling, and they mirror similar mythic experiences from the first volume, but the story as a whole just doesn't feel quite as emotionally charged as the first.

...well, until the ending.  Boy, that ending.

Boxers & Saints does historical fiction right, inspiring curiosity about the real-world events which inspired the story while advocating a message which still feels applicable over a hundred years later.  The books also do comics right - I used to dismiss Yang's art as "simple," but now I find it refreshingly unpretentious.  It takes real skill to make something so compelling look so easy.  Finally, the two-book story does storytelling right - deftly weaving bits of thread around the others in a manner that looks random and insignificant until the time is right to pull it all together and BAM!  Tapestry.

That is how weaving works, right?