18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY november 7-13, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com was working on, on his tiny desk,” she says. But it turned out that coming home to Carmel didn’t bring full safety. The abusive ex-partner followed her, going as far as to rummage through the family garbage for information about her. He shot up an attorney friend’s office. In search of safety, Joseph Yang sent his daughter to China to study art in a prestigious school, one of many institutes of higher education she attended. “I studied under Chinese contemporary masters, which was like a dream,” she says. She studied under president Xi Jinping’s daughter, an art instructor who sent Yang to travel, for example to the Gobi desert and to the Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes. In that period, Yang went to Manchuria and met her father’s relatives, who survived among broken windows. She traveled through Manchurian villages that foreigners rarely come to, bypassing big cities, staying in little inns with her traveling companion. Both were landscape painters. Many of her works from that period are included in the current exhibit. Soon, after Tiananmen, things got difficult and Yang decided to leave China forever. She couldn’t stand the tanks and the authoritarian regime. Even if there are only two people waiting for the bus, they will still shove each other to get in, fighting for a seat, she recalls. “When I go back there, I feel connected but there’s still a political fear, maybe less now than then,” Yang says. “But I remember a policeman going through our stuff, checking for contraband books. I wanted to bite him from under the table. I know the language, but the aggression of the country that lived with so little for so long is still there.” She settled down in Carmel again, in a garage with Chairman Mao, a cat who appeared exactly 100 days after the Tiananmen massacre, and gave herself to a deep practice in calligraphy. That era resulted in the publication in 2010 of Forget Sorrow, a blackand-white graphic novel. “I like fine art, but ink work forces you to roll up your sleeves and get dirty,” Yang says. Forget Sorrow confronts many of her inner thoughts, puts them out in the open—her abusive relationship, her anxiety in the years after it, her frustrating relationship with her parents living back under their roof. But there was still this one big challenge in her life that had not shared until 2024, when this exhibit went up in September. With it, she publicly announced her HIV/AIDS diagnosis for the first time in the exhibit catalog. Back in California, Yang, an only child, once again discovered that her parents were the most important part of her life. “Dad’s dragon, mom’s monkey and I’m a rat,” she says, using Chinese astrology. “They are all companionable animals. We get along.” It’s dinnertime. Yang is sitting in a warm and crowded Sur restaurant in The Barnyard, eating fish, rice and steamed vegetables. She wears a fluffy white vest that makes her immediate environment softer. “I didn’t want to stick with the identity of an AIDS victim,” she says. “There’s life after AIDS; now it’s a matter of a shot every two months. When a viral load of the carrier is undetectable, you can’t contract it even via sex.” Yang contracted AIDS from her boyfriend in the ’80s, but did not know it until she was diagnosed 12 years later, in 1999. Only now, she has decided to disclose it. “AIDS is a hard subject,” she continues. “Stigma is terrible. Some people are afraid to take the test to find out if they have it.” It was late June 1999 and her parents took her to the ER. She was down to 80 pounds and looked deathly ill. She had slowly lost weight until her parents finally awakened to the fact she may be dying. A husband-wife team, Dr. Allen Radner and Dr. Dawn Mudge, saw her. It took three days for the test result to come back, showing that Yang had full-blown AIDS. Two years would pass until she learned how she’d contracted the virus—it was from an ex-boyfriend. “Only after I had gotten well did I learn, on Sept. 11, 2001 that Carlos had died,” she says. The news was delivered by a mutual friend. According to Yang, people should both fear and understand. She is an example of a straight woman having AIDS. She never really followed the epidemic, not fitting the profile of a probable victim. But it turns out that AIDS was not only for people engaged in risky gay sex or who were using drugs; if you are a human being, it’s possible for you to catch it. According to Yang, the health care community knows how treating and living with AIDS has changed, but the larger community still doesn’t. She wants them to know, so she is now sharing her story. After her first exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art, between her first and second book, Yang started getting blisters, shingles and infections. She partially lost her eyesight, and had a rash all over her body. Still, she wasn’t diagnosed until her weight dropped to below 80 pounds. How to remain calm? As Confucius teaches, there are many layers of peace. Meditate and achieve. Radner is hesitant to talk (due to patient confidentiality, but he agrees to a brief interview per Yang’s request). “She was as sick as one can be,” he recalls. “It took two years to get her where she is.” Radner says treating Yang was a challenge because she was diagnosed so late. Today, HIV tests offer quick results; there are selftests, blood tests and oral fluid tests. These tests can be done readily at most clinics or labs. (Today, there are two clinics that treat HIV/AIDS in Monterey County, one in Monterey and one in Salinas. They assist about 200-300 patients. “Now, medications are easier,” Radner says. “There are less side effects, and we have more choices to treat patients.”) It was not obvious to the medical team at first that Yang would survive. “But I never thought I would die,” she writes. “I had work to do.” After a period of serious infections and not responding to a certain treatment, she was offered another cocktail that worked. “The approach was the same, we treated the infections,” Radner says. “We treated it aggressively.” Yang showed a lot of will, says Radner, who is now the CEO of Salinas Valley Health. “He is a wonderful doctor,” she remembers. “He would even come to my house when I was not able to get up or even put my socks on.” How did the experience of being sick influence her life? “It made me feel the unconditional love of my parents,” she says. “They are gone and I feel they are still with me. Sometimes there is a flash in the house, an electrical shock, that one of them is here.” After Yang’s health stabilized, it was her time to take care of her aging parents. “We are Chinese and we have our own ways,” she says. “I don’t know This 1997 gouache and pencil piece, “Untitled (Granddaddy Hill),” is included in the current exhibit Imagining China. Granddaddy Hill refers to place in Manchuria where some of Belle Yang’s ancestors were buried. Courtesy of the Yang Collection. © Belle Yang
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