Boxers & Saints - An Interview With Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang being previously interviewed by our own Alcblueyes Amanda Cohen at this year’s SDCC (video coming soon)

Comic creator, Gene Luen Yang, is a talented man who both writes and draws many brilliant graphic novels. Yang created the Eisner Award winning graphic novel, American Born Chinese, and has recently written the incredibly popular Avatar: The Last Airbender comics from Dark Horse. But last week, Yang took a leap into historical fiction with two original graphic novels being released from First Second, Boxers and Saints. The two stories focus on China’s Boxer Rebellion, with each OGN following a different protagonist during that time, sharing two very different perspectives on the era. Graciously, Yang has taken time out of his busy schedule to share a little about Boxers & Saints with us today, and will be coming back next month to talk about his newest volume in the latest Avatar: The Last Airbender series, The Search.

Speak Geeky To Me: Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us, Gene. Can you tell us a little about Boxers & Saints?

Gene Luen Yang: Boxers & Saints is a two-volume graphic novel project about the Boxer Rebellion, a war that occurred on Chinese soil in the year 1900. I first became interested in the Boxer Rebellion in 2000, when Pope John Paul II canonized a group of Chinese Catholic saints. This was the first time the Roman Catholic Church had acknowledged Chinese citizens in this way. I grew up in a Chinese American Catholic community. Naturally, my home church was super-excited about it. When I looked into the lives of the newly canonized, I discovered that many of them had been martyred during the Boxer Rebellion. The more I read about the Boxer Rebellion, the more fascinated I became. I feel the event embodies this conflict between East and West that Asian Americans, especially Asian American Christians, sometimes struggle with.

SG2M: What led to you write a comic about this historical part of Chinese history, which is unfortunately little known here in the west?
GLY: I think it’s understandable that the Boxer Rebellion doesn’t get much coverage in American classrooms. Many scholars argue that it’s a harbinger of the World Wars. It was the first global conflict involving both Eastern and Western nations. It was the first war in the age of media, the first war people followed in their daily newspapers. And it’s been overshadowed by the wars that followed, which were longer, more bloody, and more costly.

In China, folks are still very much aware of the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxer Rebellion stands in the middle of China’s Century of Humiliation, when China’s view of herself was flipped on its head. The West and the Japanese fought and defeated the Chinese military over and over again. The Boxer Rebellion was almost like a last straw. Because the official military couldn’t defend their nation, a bunch of peasants decided to take things into their own hands. In many ways, the incident still affects Chinese foreign policy today.

I felt a personal connection to the events on both sides. I’m a Chinese American Catholic, so I felt sympathy for the Boxers’ Chinese Christian victims. But I also saw connections between the Boxers themselves and modern day geek culture. The Boxers were these poor, illiterate teenagers. They felt powerless, hopeless, and angry about the foreign aggression into their homelands. So they did what modern day geeks do to deal with powerlessness and hopelessness: They turned to their pop culture. For them, it was Chinese opera. Chinese opera has a lot in common with American superhero comics. Both feature colorful heroes with superpowers engaging in epic battles. The Boxers watched the opera and wanted to become their heroes. They devised a mystical ritual that would call the Chinese heroes - the gods of the opera - down from the heavens. The gods would possess them and endow them with superpowers. Armed with these superpowers, they marched through the countryside fighting European soldiers, European missionaries, and Chinese Christians.
SG2M: Obviously, from looking at the vast details and further reading references provided in the back of both books, you did a fair amount of research before writing this comic. How was this research different from that done in writing any of your other comics?

GLY: This was my historical fiction project. I was intimidated by the research involved. To be perfectly honest, I’m still not that great of a researcher. I have a hard time keeping track of all my notes. But prepping for Boxers & Saints was very different from my other projects. All my previous graphic novels were set in present day America. They were set where I lived. I researched by looking around me and talking to friends. For Boxers & Saints, I read and read and read. I went to my local university library once a week for a year. I visited a Jesuit archive in France, where they kept letters and photos of French missionaries to China.

SG2M: How well versed were you on the Boxers and the Boxer Rebellion prior to researching and writing Boxers & Saints?

GLY: I didn’t know much about the Boxer Rebellion at all. I was vaguely aware of it from high school history, but that was about it.

SG2M: Now Boxers & Saints are two complete graphic novels with two unique protagonists sharing the same setting. What drove you to share your story this way?

GLY: The two-volume nature of the project is an expression of my own ambivalence about the Boxer Rebellion. The more I researched, the more ambivalent I felt. I couldn’t decide who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. I found the motivations behind each side not only sympathetic, but similar. Doing two books allowed me to take a look at the Boxer Rebellion from both sides.

SG2M: Which really does a good job of showing us both perspectives, not just in this rebellion, but as often exists in all walks of life. On that note of showing two different sides of the story, in Boxers the character of Little Bao has a very appropriate Chinese spirit guarding him. In your other book, Saints, Four-Girl/Vibiana has a rather unique spiritual guardian in France’s Joan of Arc. Why did you choose Joan?

GLY: Joan was essentially a French Boxer. Like the Boxers, she was a teenager. She was angry about the foreign incursion into her homeland. She was empowered by strange spiritual beliefs to fight for her nation. And she was an underdog all the way through. I was intrigued by the fact that within the stories told by the Boxers’ enemies was a figure who mirrored the Boxers. I also thought her presence would provide an interesting moral dilemma with Four-Girl. What was Four-Girl’s calling? To defend Joan’s faith tradition? Or to follow Joan’s example and defend her own nation?

SG2M: I guess that is something readers will have to answer for themselves. Now generally the focus of the Boxer Rebellion and the boxers are on their rituals and fighting, especially during the siege in Peking. While this is of course incorporated into the story, you focus more on the individual protagonists and their humanity during the time of the Boxer Rebellion, which comes out as being more of a backdrop. Tell us a little about your choice to tell the story in this manner?

GLY: We already have American stories about the Boxer Rebellion told from the Western point of view. The 1960′s Charlton Heston movie 55 Days in Peking is an example. Most of the material I read was about the Westerners’ experience. This makes practical sense. Unlike the Boxers, the Westerners were mostly well educated. They wrote about what they went through, so the information was there. But I wanted to throw a spotlight on the other side. I had to do it as historical fiction because we don’t know all that much about the Boxers’ experience, at least compared to that of the Europeans. The Boxers were poor and often the history of the poor goes unrecorded. I hoped to humanize them, to make the reader feel for them the way I did when I was researching.

As I’ve already said in my review of Boxers & Saints, Gene Luen Yang did a brilliant job of capturing this very human story from both perspectives. If you would like to see for yourself, head to your local book shop or comic store to pick up your own copies of Boxers & Saints, which is in stores now from First Second.