A Complicated World in Clean Lines: Gene Luen Yang's 'Boxers & Saints'

The spread of Christianity, to me, is a terribly interesting topic, particularly as far as the Jesuit missions go.  The Jesuits were famously well-learned, but are perhaps less well known as being the ultimate pragmatists.  Wherever they went, their strategy was to save as many souls as possible, and this often involved two things: tailoring Catholic teachings to concepts that would be easily grasped by the natives, and converting from the top of society, down (much to the chagrin of other orders, particularly the Franciscans).  The latter part of the strategy meant that their success at converting people would trickle down in any society where the government had control of its people. 

The former part of the strategy—tailoring teachings to already existing concepts in native societies—meant that almost everywhere the Jesuits went, one-of-a-kind mythologies began to spring up.  Fusions of Catholicism and more rudimentary theological elements from the native culture would sometimes go as far as becoming recognizable, theologically developed religions of their own (this happened in North America in a few places, perhaps the most recognizable being the Peyote Church, which developed much later). 

Another tangential element of the spread of Christianity was the religious reawakenings that happened in the places which were either confused or reacted negatively (usually a lot of both) to the circumstances of European arrival.  A prime example is the increase in depictions of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl’s return from the east right when Cortez showed up.  The Aztecs had absolutely no reference point for the arrival of strange, imposing foreigners from the east, and so they dipped back into and reaffirmed coincidentally salient aspects of their already existing mythology.

Enter Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints and its tale that takes place during the Boxer Rebellion.  The history of Christianity in China is uniquely long and interesting compared to many other places where it hasn’t done so well.  If you want to read more about it, I recommend googling The Chinese Rites Controversy and reading about the pretty incredible Matteo Ricci.  In any case, the tension between Christianity and the collateral European influence that it brings was at a fever pitch leading up to the Boxer Rebellion.  The Chinese government was almost non-existent during The Century of Humiliation, and Yang distills this large continent and complicated set of historical circumstances into the splintered desires and hopes of a handful of desperate young Chinese teenagers.

Gene Luen Yang is able to take very big, very interesting, but very complicated and important historical and theological elements and distill them into small, bite-sized, almost relatable pieces of his narrative.  We see Bao dip back into his rudimentary understanding of Chinese folklore through opera in order to reintegrate it into his nationalistic purposes.  Yang presents this simultaneously as something immature and wholly adult.  The cartoon depictions of famous cultural figures like The Monkey King, Guan Yu, and Qin Shi Huang look like things you’d normally see a kid staring at in the mirror in a much less violent, more languidly paced coming-of-age story.  Next thing you know, these macho-mythic projections are swinging swords, piercing flesh, and towering over fields of corpses.  Yang depicts this unsophisticated sort of mythologizing through his choice of a simple cartoon medium and his insistance in staying with that style through violent scenes we would normally never seen drawn with such joyful colors.

Additionally, Yang gives things a fair shake.  While he always stops short of lampooning the boys for believing that bowing to a bean garden and eating ashen paper will make them bulletproof, he at all times takes care to make the reader understand that this is what they really believed.  Born out of desperation or not, motivated entirely by a destitute government and a foreign invading force or not, this crude mythologizing was the result.  Importantly, he also doesn't limit himself to a brief dissection of the Boxer's beliefs.  He also takes time in Saints to put us in the shoes of That Kid in Sunday school.

  

 

Here we see Four-Girl asking about the Trinity, the Eucharist, and the Person of Christ, all of which are really wacky metaphysical things when you actually talk about them.  The teacher responds not with an explanation or an account of the Christian ontology that would help one understand just how God can be three things but those three things are not each other, (or how a cracker could also be part of a dude); no, the teacher just lets Four-Girl know what the Correct answer is.  Again, Yang is not lampooning his own faith, but he is at the very least doing the same kind of elbow-nudge we see with his depiction of the Boxer psuedo-faith.  And he achieves this by narratively and visually laying out aspects of the faith as simply as possible, so that the reader can't help but scratch their head a bit.

To me, this is the great thing about Boxers & Saints, and one I wish I saw more explicitly stated in earlier discussions of the work.  It is not just that Yang distills a complicated and interesting period in history into his own well-crafted fictional tale: it’s that the simplicity with which he depicts these big historical, anthropological, and theological concepts is in perfect harmony with the visual simplicity that drives the work.

Certainly it helps that Yang is very good at what he does independent of his being suited for this particular project.  Think in abstract for a moment about just how hard it is to pack a human emotion into a face drawn on a page.  Boxers & Saints is more or less defined by its ability to externalize the otherwise unseen emotions of its various protagonists.  With only as many clean, intensely deliberate lines as you can count on two hands, Yang cartoons characters who leave absolutely no mystery as to how they’re feeling.  More importantly, he juxtaposes these emotive characters often to the point that sometimes the most powerful imagery on a given page is a furrowed brow, as it represents the climax of an internal storm shown to the reader through facial expressions.

One image in particular, at the climax of the Saints half of his work, represents one of the biggest things Yang seems to have taken away from having researched and created this work.  Earlier, in Boxers, we see Bao and Mei-wen juxtaposed against a backdrop of the goddess of compassion, Guan Yin.  Other than being gorgeous, there is nothing really special about this depiction of Guan Yin, a goddess developed in Chinese Buddhism on the foundation of its original Buddhist depiction, Avolokiteshvara.  In Saints, there is a companion depiction of Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t have hundreds of arms, nor does he have eyes in his hands.  Vibiana has felt very much like an outsider her entire life, and has fallen more-or-less ass-backwards into becoming a Christian.  But in this moment, it’s very clear that she has her first and most important epiphany wherein she really identifies with this man’s teachings.  The borrowed elements from Guan Yin represent the true essence of this religious awakening: in a realm of familiar concepts, she has found a lens through which to view Jesus.  Through Guan Yin, through understanding his compassion through hers, she has found a way to appreciate what Jesus had to say.

In just a few pages, Yang is able to depict what must have been reality for millions of Chinese converts to Christianity.  Wielding the power of story by image, Yang demonstrates up until the very end of his story just how much you can say with a simple series of pictures executed well.