Gene Luen Yang and his view of the Boxer terrorism of China

Cecil Brewster
   Before there was ISIS in China you had a group called Boxers who fought with fists and Kung Fu hand-to-hand training. training gene Luen yang is a Chinese-American graphic artist and author of some books dealing with Chinese history. He penned a violent book called "Boxers" which looks at the story of the Boxer Rebellion from the rebellion side and did another called " Saints" which looks at the Chinese Christian conversion side of this refit in 1900 China. Boxers is obviously biased and looks at the story of a character called Little Bao who had enough and summoned the powers of past opera Gods of Chinese culture to fight the foreign European devils and their converts to Christianity. this is a real ugly book with many death scenes and Mr Yang seems to enjoy killings and so bloodletting battles in this book. the idea of a guy becoming a God and having immense power is the basis of this book although eventually the power of the foreign armies sent to quell this insurgency proves to be too much. little bao is trained by someone called Red Lantern and the resemblance of rural Chinese peasantry with Native Americans in the time period is startling and perhaps knowledge of what was committed on the other side of the planet to people who looked like them explains the immense xenophobia of this rebellion against foreign and Christian presence in the areas around Peking. despite their poverty even the Chinese peasantry had a bloated self-centered importance of their group and china's place of superiority in the world and the growing presence of outside influence was apparently to much for the Chinese and lead to this murderous violent rampage.

No comments:

Post a Comment