Graphic Novel: Boxers and Saints
Jul. 1st, 2014 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackBoxers and Saints are two companion graphic novels, similar in style, but a little different in tone and size, sold in one box set. One covers a chinese girl who joins a christian group just before the boxer rebellion. The other covers a chinese boy who becomes one of the leaders of the boxer rebellion. The stories are interwoven with some of the same secondary characters, but the main characters don't meet until near the end, each book's ending standing alone, but adding a lot of poignancy to the ending of the other.
Like Yang's lovely American Born Chinese about the monkey king, and about growing up in a chinese american family, and where these meet, it has a great way of telling a fairly serious story with an understated matter-of-factness and humour about every day life. Both the main characters are told sympathetically and straightforwardly, even if doing some awful things.
Boxer rebellion
I realised I'd heard of the boxer rebellion mostly from buffy, and I knew essentially nothing about it. AIUI, an extremely potted summary is: Europeans turned up in China and treated it like every other continent, which I hadn't quite realised. Including genuine missionaries who wanted to be nice to people and spread christianity, colonialists who intimidated the government into letting them do whatever they wanted, and everything inbetween. Lots of unrest, contemporaneous famines, and roving gangs of bandits who kind of used christianity as an excuse led to an awful situation.
As with many awful situations, a rebellion arose, which had general aims of throwing out all the bandits and europeans (yay!) and killing everyone who'd converted to christianity, including civilians and children (boo!). They believed they had some sort of spiritual powers which made them invincible to guns, one of the symbols of the invaders, portrayed in the books as possibly-really-possibly-metaphorically being possessed by chinese gods. They also did a lot of martial training, which led to them being labelled by westerners as "boxers".
Eventually, Beijing was covered with rebellion, and christians and westerners withdrew to the foreign quarter for protection. The government vacillated between protecting europeans and joining the rebellion. Lots of people died and lots of things were burned. Then european reinforcements turned up with lots of guns, killed a lot more people, but saved some others.
Can someone make that summary a bit more accurate and try to point out the offensive bits which should be removed?
Like Yang's lovely American Born Chinese about the monkey king, and about growing up in a chinese american family, and where these meet, it has a great way of telling a fairly serious story with an understated matter-of-factness and humour about every day life. Both the main characters are told sympathetically and straightforwardly, even if doing some awful things.
Boxer rebellion
I realised I'd heard of the boxer rebellion mostly from buffy, and I knew essentially nothing about it. AIUI, an extremely potted summary is: Europeans turned up in China and treated it like every other continent, which I hadn't quite realised. Including genuine missionaries who wanted to be nice to people and spread christianity, colonialists who intimidated the government into letting them do whatever they wanted, and everything inbetween. Lots of unrest, contemporaneous famines, and roving gangs of bandits who kind of used christianity as an excuse led to an awful situation.
As with many awful situations, a rebellion arose, which had general aims of throwing out all the bandits and europeans (yay!) and killing everyone who'd converted to christianity, including civilians and children (boo!). They believed they had some sort of spiritual powers which made them invincible to guns, one of the symbols of the invaders, portrayed in the books as possibly-really-possibly-metaphorically being possessed by chinese gods. They also did a lot of martial training, which led to them being labelled by westerners as "boxers".
Eventually, Beijing was covered with rebellion, and christians and westerners withdrew to the foreign quarter for protection. The government vacillated between protecting europeans and joining the rebellion. Lots of people died and lots of things were burned. Then european reinforcements turned up with lots of guns, killed a lot more people, but saved some others.
Can someone make that summary a bit more accurate and try to point out the offensive bits which should be removed?
no subject
Date: 2014-07-03 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-04 09:12 am (UTC)