Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China (Pantheon Graphic Novels) - Hardcover

Pingru, Rao

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101871490 ISBN 13: 9781101871492

Verlag: Pantheon, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Begun by the author when he was eighty-seven years old and mourning the loss of his wife, Our Story is a graphic memoir like no other: a celebration of a marriage that spanned the twentieth century in China, told in vibrant, original paintings and prose. 

Rao Pingru was twenty-four-year-old soldier when he was reintroduced to Mao Meitang, a girl he’d known in childhood and now the woman his father had arranged for him to marry. One glimpse of her through a window as she put on lipstick was enough to capture Pingru’s heart: a moment that sparked a union that would last almost sixty years. 

Our Story is Pingru and Meitang’s epic but unassuming romance. It follows the couple through the decades, in both poverty and good fortune—looking for work, opening a restaurant, moving cities, mending shoes, raising their children, and being separated for seventeen years by the government when Pingru is sent to a labor camp. As the pair ages, China undergoes extraordinary growth, political turmoil, and cultural change. When Meitang passes away in 2008, Pingru memorializes his wife and their relationship the only way he knows how: through painting. In an outpouring of love and grief, he puts it all on paper. Spanning 1922 through 2008, Our Story is a tales of enduring love and simple values that is at once tragic and inspiring: an old-fashioned story that unfolds in a nation undergoing cataclysmic change.

(With gorgeous full-color illustrations throughout, and a distinctive exposed spine emulating the original Chinese design.)

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RAO PINGRU was born in 1922. He lives in Shanghai, China.

Translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

My first clear memories are of the ceremony that marked the formal start of my schooling. I was eight years old.
 
First, the right day had to be chosen. When it arrived, I was woken by a servant at about three o’clock in the morning. I washed and dressed, and went to the main hall of our house, where everything was prepared: my father, mother, and the gentleman who was to initiate me into the mysteries of education were standing by the tablet that honored Confucius. In the stillness of the night, the candlelight lent an air of great solemnity to the occasion, and I felt a thrill of excitement. But what really made me happy were the Four Treasures of Study, the brand-­new brush, ink, paper, and inkstone laid out on the writing desk. The gentleman in question was my “Uncle Huang,” and we were related by marriage: his eldest daughter was married to my big brother. His full name was Huang Xiaopu and he was at that time chief judge at the Hunan Province Supreme Court. His calligraphy was beautiful. He grasped my hand and together we traced the first lesson: lines of characters dedicated to the greatest educator of all, Confucius. He gripped my hand painfully hard, but I did not dare make a sound.
 
It was the custom for the very first characters written during this ceremony to be put away carefully by one’s mother. Afterward, we went to the sitting room, where an array of drinks and food were laid out down one side of the room. The steam which rose from the dishes of hot food seemed especially designed to dispel the seriousness of the moment. After our meal, my big brother took me to school. As we walked through the silent streets, the first light of dawn was visible in the sky. It was bitingly cold.
 
That was our first year in Nanchang city. My father was a lawyer and we lived in a house by Chenjia Bridge. It was not a good location, but there were complicated reasons why we were there: my father’s younger sister had married a man from a wealthy family. But unbeknownst to her family, the man to whom she had been given in marriage was in poor health, and, scarcely a year later, she was widowed and mother to a baby daughter, my cousin. For this reason, my father was determined to take good care of his younger sister. One evening when my cousin was five, on the anniversary of her father’s death, her nanny, a fearsome old woman, took the little girl to the ceremonies that were being carried out to placate his spirit.
 
“Go on! Go and see! Your daddy’s come!” The old woman screamed at my cousin and pushed her forward. My cousin was so traumatized by this experience that she lost her wits. Although she did marry and have children, she was never happy.
 
My aunt had a relative who was investing in various ventures, and she borrowed 8,000 yuan to put in and became his partner. I do not know whether the ventures really lost money, but I do know that she was unable to pay the loan back. Then she mortgaged the house at Chenjia Bridge but was still unable to manage and asked my father to rent it from her. And that was why we spent eight years there.
 
After dinner every day, Third Brother and I (the two youngest children in the family) would go to my mother’s bed, where she told us stories. They were mostly traditional tales about morality: about Min Ziqian,1 who was obedient to his stepmother even though she treated him badly, and about Six-­Feet Alley, the story of how a wise minister resolved a boundary dispute in Imperial China.2 I still remember the emotion on her face as she got to the bit where Min Ziqian begs his father not to repudiate his cruel stepmother:
 
“If Mother stays at home, only I have to endure the cold. But if you divorce Mother, all three of us children will suffer the cold.”
 
And her laughter as she explained the last two lines of “Six-­Feet Alley.”
 
Our family was originally from Nancheng county, Fuzhou district, Jiangxi province. Nancheng dates back to ancient times, to the days when Liu Bang ruled as the first Han dynasty emperor, and Nancheng belonged to Yuzhang district.
 
The Xu River flowed north through old Nancheng; the town walls were built on the west bank of the river, and there were gates to the north, south, east, and west. Within the town, there was North Street, South Street, East Street, and West Street. The last was the longest. Our home was on North Street. The east bank was the outskirts of the town, so once you crossed Peace Bridge, there was less to see and fewer people around. The town and surrounding countryside were crisscrossed with waterways, like the veins of a leaf, and encircled by serried ranks of beautiful jade-­green peaks. Among the most famous were Magu Mountain and Conggu Mountain. There is a Song dynasty poem which goes

Flourishing fields of wheat and green, green mountains, a winding road.
The land of the South, stretching a thousand li, brings tears to the eyes in spring.
Mother Xu stands at the river crossing, calls to the ferryman, points far off to the third valley, Mayuan.

Seen through a poet’s eyes, the charm of my hometown had not changed much since the days of the Song dynasty: cocks crowed and dogs barked, the boatmen sang as they plied their oars, and the landscape of waterways and mountains had remained the same for generation after generation.
The “Mayuan” of the poem is the largest of the valleys of Magu Mountain, and legend has it that this is where Magu, the Hemp Goddess, practiced Daoism. Magu was a legendary Daoist immortal, apparently just a girl of eighteen or nineteen when she saw with her own eyes the bed of the East Sea rise up and turn into dry land and mulberry fields three times. No doubt I was influenced by the legend, because to my mind there was a cosmic feel about the Mayuan valley.
 
There was another reason why Mayuan was special to me: the land was very ­fertile—it was where the so-­called silver pearl or cold water white rice was cultivated—­and my mother bought a piece of land there and put the title deed in my name. I never saw it firsthand but my father told me it was about twenty mu (three acres). Mayuan valley was also where my father’s father was buried. After my mother died, she was buried beside my grandfather, to his left, in a slightly smaller grave. In 1958, the local government built a reservoir in the valley; the mulberry fields really did become an azure sea, and the two graves vanished beneath its waters.
 
For ordinary people in Nancheng, life was as lively as it always had been in such fertile regions. My grandfather wrote a poem about it:

The husband has gone to Ningzhou to buy green tea, the wife plants new squash behind the ferry landing.
The boy, with no work to do, rows to a mossy bank by night, lights pine resin,
plays at will-­o’-­the-­wisp.
 
There were four distinct seasons in Nancheng. In the words of the Song dynasty monk-­poet Hui Kai: “White flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, cool breezes in summer, snow in winter. If you have no cares, then all the seasons are good.” A child has no cares, and, during holidays, times really were good. Whether it was the Grave-­Sweeping Festival, the Start of Summer, the Dragon Boat Festival, the Double Seventh, the Midautumn Festival, or the Double Ninth, there would be much more food and drink than normal. And this was probably the chief reason why we children loved festivals.

In Nancheng county, there was a traditional way of celebrating the Start of Summer Festival, called “Push into Summer.” As the rhyme went: “Push hard into summer, push hard into summer, raise your...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pantheon
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1101871490
• ISBN 13: 9781101871492
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: PANTHEON; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar