What is your emotional relationship with China?

I have a love-hate relationship with China. I love China from afar. I was in China for three years, studying art, language, traveling. I was also an eyewitness to the Tiananmen Massacre and came home late in 1989 disheartened, exhausted, disgusted with the current regime. I study Chinese history and admire the ancients, but the atmosphere of present-day China makes me extremely sad. The environmental degradation is terrifying.

I continue to have nightmares about trying to escape by train, plane, boat.

I'd have to say most of what I feel is envy. Envy that they have such a beautiful, rich culture and history that I know nothing about.

China. I love it but I'm too scared to live there. I'm afraid I'll just be too much of a foreigner. Probably I'm afraid to fall in love too!

Yup, the pollution, as you say Belle, is terrifying. I saw some shots of Paris in the news just today, and for a big European city, the quality of sunlight on faces of its people hanging out in the street suggests how crisp the air is there on a Spring afternoon in 2007. Not so China. Most of Southern China seems smothered in a heavy layer of smog, most of the time. Even beautiful Beijing in the north is pretty smoggy even on the coldest winter day. You almost have to cross the Gobi desert to see blue skies in China. I know first-hand because Hong Kong is wrapped in that same smouldering grey haze many days in the year. Cough!

Hi, My "Washington Post Book World" comics for the ongoing series, "The Writing Life," came out early to be in time for the Fourth of July. Marie Arana, the editor, wrote a profile on my work. Cut and paste the link below to read the piece. Marie is the highly respected author of "American Chica":

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/28/AR2007062802211.html

When you get there, click "Against Forgetting," and you'll get the image below. I was asked to do this in color, but I wanted to use pure b&w to depict the Tiananmen Massacre.

Hello Belle,

I got my copy of the Washington Post this morning and found your cartoon and article as the centerfold! It grabbed my attention right away. I hope you have great success with your graphic novel. I expect you will.

From the little I see here and in my paper, I think it will rightly hold a place with other esteemed "ethnic" graphic novels such as Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, La Perdida by Jessica Abel, Palestine by Joe Sacco, A Contract With God by Will Eisner, and The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar. The drawing and colors of the graphics are lovely, and the topic is one of great importance. The Tiananmen Massacre is always on the minds of those who care about East-West relations and censorship.

To others,

My interest in China came from when my daughter (of European/Jewish/Central American ancestry!) wanted to study Chinese in high school. I wanted to know why. It was because her school didn't offer Japanese when she was interested in anime. At that time, we both were learning about China. We enjoyed seeing a few Chinese films. I started reading a few books related to China, both fiction and non-fiction, and passed them on to her. I found the culture fascinating although I've always been interested in world-wide cultures in general and not specifically in Chinese culture.

One book that captured my attention about China was Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman. That book was a nonfiction which described the author's experience teaching English in a small town in China with such love and respect for for its people.

As a Chinese person who grew up questioning my own identity and race, and sometimes wishing in my young tormented mind that I was not from that despised race, I am fascinated by what you have done in capturing your memories in so many creative ways. You have given me inspiration that I too should do the same so that my children and, one day, theirs as well, can relive these memories.

Good luck on your venture. Maybe you can be a mentor to others who want to walk the steps you have taken!

My views and feelings toward China have changed over time. I first was enamoured with the Chinese people and culture by my exposure to Chinatowns on the west coast and by my first color drive-in movie in 1962, Marco Polo, which I now know was far from historically accurate. In the late 1960's or early 1970's, I began to understand just a little bit more of the culture and history through a book entitled The Small Woman. In 1992, with the birth of our youngest son, and his need to stay in the hospital, I checked out several library books on Chinese characters and fell in love with the characters, especially the ancient ones. I read them beside his crib. Then in 2004, when our oldest daughter studied at the University of Nanjing, I went to visit her and fell in love with the people and their diverse culture in a whole new way. I especially enjoyed visiting Yunnan Province and seeing some of the tribal peoples there. I have all kinds of mixed emotions about all that this country and people have been through and all that it appears they are becoming in the world.

>7 yangguy: Thanks for sharing that! I can't imagine having the concentration to read while sitting in a hospital with a child. I'd have no attention span!

I just spent an evening helping a friend look up characters in small seal form. I'd never looked at it before and it was very interesting. I'm almost sorry we found what we were looking for, as now I have no 'project' to drive me to look at it further.

You might also look at the ancient china talk group. It's been very quiet there lately, but the focus is on older stuff.

>8 mvrdrk: You're welcome. I would be interested in your take on a technical paper that Kui Shin Voo and I wrote back in 1996, if I'm remembering the year correctly. It was entitled, "The Lamb of God in the Ancient Chinese Characters". You should be able to find a copy by "googling" Voo's name. I'll look at the ancient China talk group. Thank you.

Thanks for the pointer to your article! Dr. Voo is very prolifically published, but searching for the title took me straight to a copy of the article.

I've not had a chance to read it carefully yet, but it looks like a very unusual way to super-impose one culture onto another.

Belle, that is the coolest comic! Thanks for sharing.

#7 --

Copied from another thread:

During the last two years in high school I read only everything I could get my hands on by Mark Twain. Among that was some of his anti-imperialist writings about the actions of the West in China (and in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War).

When asked by newspaper reporters for his thoughts -- the "Boxer Rebellion" was still fresh in the news -- he responded, "I am a Boxer."

The horrors inflicted on the Chinese people, in their own country, by Western foreigners who acted as if they had greater right to be there than the Chinese, forged a view of the Chinese people as a long-suffering good people who humble one with their endurance in the face of the worst sorts of calamities and oppressions. They and their history define the phrase, "Keep on keeping on".

And my immersion in Chinese film during the past year or so has reinforced that sense (see as example "Purple Butterfly") in view of the unspeakably horrific sufferings imposed by the Japanese.

And most recently I've begun gathering materials concerning the "Rape of Nanking"*.
_____

*Primarily DVDs. I learned last night that there was a film made in tribute to Iris Chang -- URL being irischangthemovie.com -- by a Canadian group/company, but alas it seems not to be available. She was a good and extraordinary person who deserves to be remembered; so that film should be made available on DVD.
_____

Only within the last 36-48 hours I read a lengthy, wonderfully detailed tribute to Iris Chang in the online edition of a San Francisco newspaper. (I had heard about her some years ago, and her book about that horror, and was shocked and deeply saddened about her suicide. The lengthy piece provided much more detail about that, and about her difficulties leading up to it. And about her life, and her as a person.)

Simply and more generally put: I'm always on the side of the harmless underdog who is only minding his own business, and against those who are doing him harm. I am a Boxer, regardless the country and people resisting the invader.

#1

My first impressions of modern China came in my early teens when I started listening to shortwave radio. This was in the late '60s, when Radio Peking (as it was then known) was too hard-core Maoist to leave objective listeners with any illusions about the leadership.

My feeling, then and now, is that China is a great nation with a glorious culture saddled with an government wholly unworthy of it. Of course, that government makes every attempt to hide this from its citizens by blurring the distinction between it and the nation, and the people seem to fall for it. It is sad.

#13 --

"that government makes every attempt to hide this from its citizens by blurring the distinction between it and the nation, and the people seem to fall for it. It is sad."

The Republican party in the US does the same thing: presents itself and the country as the same thing.

And the US inflicted upon itself a criminal enterprise that instituted torture as official gov't policy -- which enterprise, and its party and supporters, labeled anyone who criticized its actions as being "unAmerican".

For those interested in balance, I recommend looking into the faction the US supported during WW II -- the Nationalists -- and its head Chiang Kai-Shek.

First see the segment of the WW II US propaganda series "Why We Fight" about the war in China (#6 of the 7 segments), probably posted on youtube.com, in which he is portrayed as defender and champion of freedom and democracy. However, though not the only faction fighting against the Japanese in China, there is no mention of any others who also did so, including Mao's.

Then see the new film "The Founding of a Republic," the foci of which are Kai-Shek and Mao.

Then see the film "The Soong Sisters" (Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, and Vivian Wu), about their father, them, and their relationships with H. H. Kung, Sun Yat-Sen, and Chiang Kai-Shek.

Then delve into the histories and bigraphies of the Soongs, H. H. Kung, and Kai-Shek, reviews of which can be had on Amazon. That can begin with a google search on "soong sisters".