01 Apr / Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders by Belle Yang + Author Profile [in aMagazine: Inside Asian America]
Belle Lettres
For Belle Yang, creating Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders, a lyrical new book filled with impressive pictures and musical prose, was somewhat akin to a rescue mission.
“The stories my father told me – I felt I had to rescue them,” she says of her chronicles of her father’s childhood in Japanese-occupied Manchuria during the 1930 and ’40s. “It was not so much that these stories were about my father, but more about those people who had influenced his life, who had been a strong part of my father‘s life.” Yang speaks especially fondly of two of the book’s recurring characters: “Uncle Yu,” a hired hand who worked in gardens of the vast Yang family estate, and “Uncle Zhao,” a clumsy ex-bandit who was rescued by Yang’s great-grandfather, the family patriarch. “Uncle Yu and Uncle Zhao had all but disappeared without leaving a trace of their lives, until my father told me their stories and I was able to rescue them.”
For Yang, the preservation of the colorful stories that fill Baba is part of the greater continuum of the Asian American literary experience. “Writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and many before them set the stage for a book like Baba,” she says. “through their writing, they showed a true understanding of Asian Americans. From that point, I’m able to take readers back to China, to show them where we Asian Americans came from.”
The creation and completion of such a book as Baba has been a personal odyssey for Yang as well. Born in Taiwan in 1960, Yang spent the first five years of her life in the mountains where both her parents were high school teachers. “I have vivid memories of our life there, of its beauty, of fireflies, of the sleeping dragon mountains in the distance.” she says. “‘I’m afraid to go back there now; I’m afraid to disturb my memories.”
Leaving Taiwan, the Yang family spent two years in Japan, where her father was a graduate student in international relations, fefore arriving in the U.S. in 1967. “My father applied to two schools, one in Texas and one in California,” Yang recalls. “We only had the money to get to San Francisco, so that was decided.” Before the elder Yang finished his PhD, the family moved again. “My father was in his 40s at the time and he decided he needed to make a living, so he opened a restaurant in Mountain View.” …[click here for more]
Author profile: “Belle Lettres,” aMagazine: Inside Asian America, April/May 1995
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 1994