Belle Yang's Blog
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Aug.03.2012
"I got the cliched shivers when I saw my paintings and my father's work, leaning against the wall where John Steinbeck's huge black and white image looked down upon them."--Belle Yang
I'm humming "Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night . . . "-- okay not really. My big opening at the...
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Jun.02.2012
I post this the photojournal by X every anniversary. This year, 2012, My father hungers all the more for the voices of dissent via New Tang Dynasty Televison online, and his nightmares returns to the time of his escape in 1947, just a half-a-step ahead of the encroaching Communists....
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May.14.2012
When my last adult nonfiction came out to great reviews, try as WW Norton my publisher might, we could not land a review in the coveted NYTimes. So when my humble bilingual book came out to little fanfare, I thought nothing of it. This morning, roaming around the pages of Amazon, I...
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May.03.2012
I've mistakenly posted this in a blog. So be it. It was a curiously painstaking process of working on a Mandarin reader for English speakers. My editor, who is an English speaker, was wonderful in her guidance, even when we were having trouble communicating her English similes...
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Nov.05.2011
History is linear for Westerners. For me, especially my personal history, it’s a spiraling up. When I began writing after my 3-year sojourn to China in the late 80s, I wrote every day with a heart aching from the ecstacy of thinking through my fingers, even if at an untold distance...
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Oct.16.2011
There are no statues or plaques to commemorate them, just a few illusive names like China Cove, China Camp remain of their tenure in California. Few of my friends who live in the Monterey Bay Region know that Salinas would not be the agricultural hub (nor Castroville, Watsonville, Pajaro and...
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Jul.21.2011
FORGET SORROW exhibit ends August 13, 201
I passed out in the middle of the night half a month before the opening of this show. I had internal bleeding that left me with merely one-third of my blood volume. My doctor friend who works at the Stanford VA told me he'd never seen anyone's...
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May.02.2011
I saved my life by joining Dave Whipple's hiking brotherhood soon after the beginning of summer 2010, right in the middle of my book tour for my graphic novel "Forget Sorrow." Climbing high above sea level meant I could leave my greedy carcass and attain see level in the mountains where...
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Jan.13.2011
On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Amy Chua's book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" and it set off a storm of debate about cultural differences and parenting. In her essay, Chua wrote that "A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such...
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Dec.05.2010
It took 14 years to write, sell and paint my graphic memoir, FORGET SORROW. This week I received the news on its listing as recommended graphic memoir of 2010 in the SF Chronicle and today, the LA Times. (Just heard as I write that FS made Barnes & Nobles Year's Best Reading. Part of my job...
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Nov.30.2010
When my father left Taiwan in 1964, then an authoritarian state under Chiang Kai-shek, for Tokyo to study, the first thing he did was to write home to Manchuria. His hometown Xinmin-"New People"-in Liaoning Province, was where his grandfather had been a prominent businessman in the grain...
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Nov.10.2010
Native American tribes celebrated harvest festivals with ritual dances and other observances of thanks long before the arrival of Europeans. And people throughout the world give thanks for the abundance of harvest. In China we have our Mid-Autumn Festival.
When I was a child in Taiwan, the...
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Aug.15.2010
Drawing, and specifically calligraphy, also offer the Taiwanese-born American author Belle Yang a spiritual escape, in her case from ‘Rotten Egg', an abusive boyfriend-turned-stalker. Yang is used to being a free-spirited, independent Westernised woman, but she is forced to take refuge in the...
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Jul.15.2010
Belle Yang Interviews Belle Yang
Before we begin today's Q and A, please click here to watch this 4 minute film in which I am drawing a graphic novel page.
Q: Ms. Belle, are graphic novels all fiction?
A: Well, Belle, this area of art/literature is still being defined as it...
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Jul.06.2010
*** I will be at Kepler's in Menlo Park this Thursday the 8th at 7:30 P.M.
I’ve had many an interview on this book tour for my graphic memoir, “Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale,” published by WW Norton and Company. I’ve had fun replying to the questions, but sometimes, I leave the sessions...
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About Belle
Belle Yang, subject of the PBS documentary, “My Name is Belle,” is often asked whether she is primarily a writer or a painter. Answer: "When I'm writing, I'm a writer; when I'm painting, I'm a painter." Is she a children's author or writers of adult...
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