www.montereycountynow.com november 7-13 2024 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 17 land, considered wild and nomadic even by the Chinese. It was around that time Yang’s grandfather’s family got united, just to experience more poverty and governmental abuse. Because of the hardship, Yang’s father, Joseph Yang, traveled through China and settled in Taiwan, where he got married and where Yang was born. But there was yet another big family move, decisive in Yang’s life. This one was permanent—to California, eventually to Carmel. Her father didn’t want to get in trouble for just living and reading what he wanted. “I don’t belong anywhere, really,” Yang says. “Everything feels kind of like home, but not quite.” During her school years, Yang was not interested in her roots; she was more interested in rooting herself in American culture. Her attitude toward the latter changed after an 18-year-old Yang experienced an abusive relationship with a Western man with whom she lived in Los Angeles, where she also had a chance to experience cultures of the world, broadening her interest in art. When it comes to relationships, she still has nightmares, decades later. Looking for safety, Yang came home, a 25-year-old moving back into her parents’ house for rescue. The time of big ancestral stories began; she spent weeks and months listening to stories told by her father and mother. Soon, those stories started to populate her art, which is unique in content and also coloristically, combining California culture with a migrant experience. “Populate” is the word that comes to mind when looking at her pieces, most of them untitled, full of people and animals with human facial expressions. “It gave me a platform,” she says about her art and her books. “An artist is one who takes his own life and makes it into art. Now when I’m in the final chapters in my life, I want to clean things out.” It’s not a coincidence that, all together, Yang wrote and illustrated nine picture books for children and three adult books, to date. Her children’s books have titles such as Hannah Is My Name, A Young Immigrant’s Story about a girl waiting for a green card to arrive, or Angel in Beijing, a story about a girl and a white cat united in their hatred of fireworks. “Publishing is stressful,” Yang says. “It kills you. After I finished writing, I spent the next two years drumming up a contract. I was very lucky.” Her first adult nonfiction book, which took 14 years of work, was Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders, a collection of short stories and illustrations based on Joseph Yang’s tales, which came in 1996. The book was followed by The Odyssey of a Manchurian, and finally Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale in 2010, this time a graphic novel retelling her father’s family’s story of displacement and also internal strife, alongside Yang as a mid20s character probing her parents for her past, and grappling with the continued trauma of a violent ex-boyfriend and her own isolation as friends withdrew, afraid for their own safety. “Baba named me Xuan,” she wrote in the caption on one of the opening images. “It means ‘forget sorrow.’” We are looking at a girl with dark, medium-length hair drawing on a meadow. She shows us an image that demonstrates how to write Xuan in Mandarin. Yang’s drawings express big emotions, for example a sense of being cornered and persecuted portrayed as an actual corner in the house that is being shaken by a bald giant, the Big Abusive Boyfriend. Yang, her parents and their parrot are huddled inside. Yang is walking through her family house, where she spent most of 64 years of her life, excluding international travels between 1986 and 1989. The house is almost exactly how her parents left it, a prolonged rectangle with a living room in the middle. There are soft armchairs in light colors, contrasting with bold-colored art, flowers and a splendid view of greenery behind the house. The space feels cosmopolitan, yet many conventions of 19th-century Western tradition are preserved: an impressive wooden magazine holder, a few writing stations, each a combination of a desk and a chair. At the east end of the living room lives Ruby, a large black-and-red parrot. Family treasures are placed comfortably around. Yang is moving among the objects carefully, as if she is meditating, slowly, because she is blind in one eye. She looks very delicate, slim, porcelain doll-like, which makes her appear much younger. That said, Yang is quite fragile and not sure when she will have strength to paint again, even though she no longer has to spend time taking care of her parents. But even if she is not creating new artwork, she is telling her story anew. “Now, without a single person left to worry or embarrass, I can be honest to the bone,” she wrote in the catalog accompanying the Imagining China exhibit. “I was a terrible child,” Yang says, taking a seat in a dark chair covered with soft materials, not fully realizing that her art proves that’s just not true. This is the same house she returned to from Los Angeles seeking safety in her 20s, then again from China, after the violence against protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. This is where she listened to stories told by her father and Taiwanese mother, and then illustrated them. Finally this is a place where her father, when he retired, painted many pieces and hid them—left as a gift to his daughter after his death, as Yang is convinced. “He would never show us what he Joseph Yang spent years drawing and painting landscapes. His daughter, Belle, discovered his work after he died. This untitled landscape was made between 1996-99. Courtesy of the Yang Collection. © Joseph Yang
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