The beautiful thing about Boxers & Saints (besides Yang’s clear, expressive lines, attention to historical details, and wonderful imagination) is its presentation of Boxers and Christians as equally complicated and diverse groups. From her point of view, the Boxer Rebellion is the attempt of a cruel culture to reassert its control over her. Though she doesn’t fully understand Christianity, she sees it as a liberating alternative to the oppression she was feeling from her own family. In Saints though, the reader meets a young girl who was already alienated by her culture before she met her first Christian. From that perspective, the uprising of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists (called “Boxers” by Westerners because of the way they moved in training and combat) is a just reaction to intolerable imperialism. Reading Boxers, it’s easy to cast the Christian missionaries and their converts as the bad guys, especially after an early scene in which they bully villagers and destroy a beloved god. The protagonists in one are the antagonists in the other.”

Did I sympathize more with the Boxers or their Chinese Christian victims? That’s why the project ended up as two volumes. Yang, a practicing Roman Catholic of Chinese heritage, recently told Good Comics for Kids’ Caleb Mozzocco, “The more I read about the Boxer Rebellion, the more conflicted I felt. That’s what Boxers & Saints, as the books are called collectively, is all about. Each side in a violent conflict has its own perception of what caused the crisis, and even members of the same side can disagree about objectives and the best way to reach them.

War is seldom as simple as identifying heroes and villains. Boxers and its companion volume, Saints, tell individual stories about two young people during China’s Boxer Rebellion, but they also inform each other and combine to form a more complete picture of the conflict and what caused it. American Born Chinese creator Gene Luen Yang’s two new graphic novels can be read separately from each other, but that doesn’t mean that they should be.

Boxer rebellion graphic novel