Contemporary Authors

• Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2018

https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024862 Rao, Pingru, 1922- author, illustrator. Pingru Meitang. English Our story : a memoir of love and life in China / Rao Pingru ; translated by Nicky Harman. First American edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2018. pages cm CT1828.P56 A313 2018 ISBN: 9781101871492 (hard cover : alk. paper)

QUOTED: "gripping graphic narrative."
"Thanks to the persuasive power of its humane and humorous author, Our Story is as hard to resist as the great, rich, rambling serial narratives of the oral storytellers who travelled from one Chinese village to another in the past, drawing entire populations out of their houses to sit on the hillside and listen."

Surviving Mao's China: Hilary Spurling is enchanted by depictions of simple family pleasures throughout
years of famine and persecution
Hilary Spurling
Spectator.
337.9897 (May 5, 2018): p28+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China by Rao Pingru, translated by Nicky Harman Square Peg, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 357
Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive upheavals that marked China's transition in the 20th century from an immemorial, apparently immutable imperial past to its current uneasy truce with the technology, morals and politics of the Western world.
He was born in Nancheng, a city virtually unchanged in seven centuries since the end of the great Song dynasty. The first painting in this book shows Pingru himself as a small boy kneeling to knock his head on the floor in a traditional kowtow, performed at the foot of the man who had come to teach him to write. In ancient China, calligraphy embodied continuity, discipline, the accumulated wisdom of civilisation itself.
Pingru tells his story from the bottom up, so to speak, documenting a life lived against a background of constant chaotic destruction in small lively paintings that are hard to resist. He looks back to his grandfather, whom he never met, painting him in the voluminous yellow silk
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robes of a mandarin at the imperial court: a squat, almost square emblem of absolute power.
From the start Pingru pictures himself as a wide-eyed, owlish, bespectacled observer of the shifting contemporary scene. His father was a provincial lawyer, and he himself grew up in a society still regulated by the rhythm of seasonal street festivals, celebrated with feasting, fireworks and highly competitive homemade paper lanterns in the shape of dragons or lions.
He paints the house he lived in with its courtyards, Buddhist shrine and walled garden in a world where transport meant push-carts or carrying poles. He paints his parents' rice bowls, which he had to fill at every meal. He paints the family at table, and the food he loved as a child: meatballs, mooncakes, glutinous rice dumplings and steamed rolls filled with sweet potato noodles. He even includes a diagram showing the correct ritual his mother taught him for washing his face.
But time was already up for the old traditional world he briefly glimpsed as a boy. He was five when the farmer's son Mao Zedong recruited what he called his Red Army. And he was 12 when Mao embarked on the Long March that became the great founding myth of communist China. Open conflict between the advancing communists and the Nationalist Republican army of Chiang Kai-shek was postponed only when they joined forces in China's war with Japan.
Pingru volunteered to fight for his country, presenting himself at 18 for military training. An uncharacteristically heroic image shows him mounted on a rearing war horse when he finally rode out to join the artillery in 1946. His regiment marched north into territory laid waste at intervals for 1,000 years by bandits, warlords and civil conflict. He describes the devastation he found there in a line from the 12thcentury poet Jiang Kui: 'Abandoned ponds and lofty trees still detest talk of soldiers.'
The civil war had started again, ending in 1949 with triumph for Mao, who declared the People's Republic of China. Pingru's problem was that he had enlisted three years earlier in what was then the victorious Nationalist army. It turned out to be a disastrous choice. He and his family were
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ostracised, stigmatised and punished for it to the end of their lives. Nothing they could do altered the fact that an initial mistake had marked them for ever in communist China as class enemies.
A new society remodelled for a new world meant the start of a new life. Pingru had fallen in love at first sight with a 19-year-old girl called Mao Meitang, who married him in 1948. Together they opened a shop selling noodles that closed almost at once. A second attempt to start a business trading in chillis also ended in dismal failure. Eventually Pingru got a job in Shanghai, working as an accountant to support his wife and their growing family in Nancheng.
In 1958 Mao's second Five Year Plan plunged China into starvation. Around 40 million people died in the great famine. Pingru spent 22 years in a forced labour camp. He says relatively little about the 'Re-education through labour' that swallowed the two central decades of his adult life, leaving Meitang responsible for their children's survival, upbringing and education. The wife of an enemy of the people ranked bottom of the social heap, so the only work she could find was carrying bags of cement (each weighing more than four stone, or 25 kilos) as a labourer on construction sites. Her eldest son, who was nine, shifted scrap iron.
Pingru would be nearly 60 before he was free to go home after Mao's death. He expresses his satisfaction with a paint ing of the whole family sitting round a bare wooden table eating their fill of steamed dumplings. But grief, hardship and physical exertion had worn his wife out. She died slowly and painfully of kidney failure less than ten years after his release.
This book is his tribute to her in words and pictures, both entirely free from resentment or anger. Pingru survived almost unimaginable privation thanks primarily to an insatiable interest in other people, an absolute lack of self-pity and a curiosity that nothing could extinguish. He retains in his nineties something of the bright, energetic, observant small boy who learned to write, draw and make lanterns in the traditional way. One of the last paintings in his book is a self-portrait that shows him as a white-haired grandfather, squatting on a low wooden stool in T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops playing the mouth organ to his cat.
This book emerges from communist China with no word of explanation, no blurb, preface or dustjacket, and no proper cover to the spine. Although it was translated with Arts Council funding and put out by an offshoot of Penguin, it shows little sign of even perfunctory editing. But thanks to the persuasive power of its humane and humorous author, Our Story is as hard to resist as the great, rich, rambling serial narratives of the oral storytellers who travelled from one Chinese village to another in the past, drawing entire populations out of their houses to sit on the hillside and listen.
Caption: In the Sishao open-air tea garden. Far left: Rao Pingru and his siblings make a lion lantern with their mother
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Spurling, Hilary. "Surviving Mao's China: Hilary Spurling is enchanted by depictions of simple
family pleasures throughout years of famine and persecution." Spectator, 5 May 2018, p. 28+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540211943 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=30cee5ba. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540211943

QUOTED: "a graceful, gently told narrative of contentment and resilience."

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Pingru, Rao: OUR STORY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pingru, Rao OUR STORY Pantheon (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 5, 8 ISBN: 978-1-101-87149-2 A graphic memoir recounts a quiet life amid cultural upheaval.
Pingru, 95, makes his literary debut with a charming memoir illustrated with his own evocative watercolors, chronicling his life in China from 1923 to 2008, the year his beloved wife died. The son of a lawyer, the author grew up in a close-knit family that valued tradition. Throughout the year, his parents, siblings, and assorted relatives gathered to celebrate the seasons and various festivals, pay respects to ancestors and gods, and share special foods. When he was 18, he was accepted into a military academy, eager to join the fight against the Japanese. By the time World War II ended, he had risen to first lieutenant. The most significant event in his life was his marriage to Mao Meitang in 1948. Although the union was arranged by their families, the two had known each other as children and were delighted with the match. Now responsible for a wife, Pingru decided to return to civilian life, though he was unsure about his new path. He learned bookkeeping, tried--and failed--to set up a noodle shop, and settled in Shanghai, where he found two jobs, as a hospital accountant and editor. Everything changed for the worse in 1958, when, caught in the Cultural Revolution, the author was sent to do "Reeducation Through Labor" in a province far from Shanghai. Meitang and their five children were left to eke out a living without him. "The whole family was stigmatized," he writes. The author does not dwell on the hardship of those 20 years but instead focuses on how he coped: by memorizing sentences in English to occupy his mind during "unskilled and primitive" labor; by learning to play the violin on Sunday, "a rest day"; and by trips home once a year at the Chinese New Year. "For ordinary people like us," he writes, "life is made up of numbers of small details" that become "treasured memories."
A graceful, gently told narrative of contentment and resilience.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pingru, Rao: OUR STORY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959740/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d081f4eb. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959740

QUOTED: "Pingru's exquisite, visually dazzling memoir reveals an ordinary life lived in extraordinary times."

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Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China
Publishers Weekly.
265.9 (Feb. 26, 2018): p78. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China
Rao Pingru, trans, from the Chinese by Nancy Harman. Pantheon, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-1101-87149-2
Using spare prose and stunning, full-color illustrations, Pingru reveal his struggles, joys, and enduring love for his wife over the course of their lives in a dramatically changing China. Pingru, a 95-year-old living in Shanghai, recalls the fun-filled games of dominoes of his childhood and the singular beauty of an evening at the foot of the Peace Bridge in Nancheng when he was 16. Pingru artfully sketches his service as an artillery platoon leader in the nationalist army in the 1940s; his attempts to run his own business after the war; and his painful separation from his family during his "reeducation through labor" in 1958. Though Pingru met Meitang twice when they were children, it wasn't until the spring of 1946, when Pingru was 25 years old, that his father accompanied Pingru to Meitang's family's house to arrange their marriage. He chronicles the pain of growing old and relives the utter devastation he feels when his wife Meitang's diabetes leads slowly to her death in 2004. Pingru's exquisite, visually dazzling memoir reveals an ordinary life lived in extraordinary times. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China." Publishers Weekly, 26 Feb. 2018, p. 78. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530637472/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=af474838. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530637472

QUOTED: "The 350-page memoir, half in prose and half in color drawings, is a vivid, at times intimate, portrait of a changing China."

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'Our Story' offers a graphic glimpse
of a China that no longer exists
Jingnan Peng
The Christian Science Monitor.
(May 17, 2018): Arts and Entertainment: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Science Publishing Society http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Jingnan Peng
China, 1946. Barely emerging from the Second Sino-Japanese war, the country was now torn by a civil war between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (KMT). A young KMT soldier took leave from the army to meet with the woman his family had arranged for him to marry. Her name was Mao Meitang, "beautiful crabapple flower" in Chinese. She was smart, beautiful, fun-loving. His name was Rao Pingru, "peace and contentment." He was generous, caring, unwilling to fight his fellow Chinese.
The couple dreamed of leading a pastoral life, like those depicted in ancient Chinese poems - "making do with simple clothes and food and living out our days, with no need for distant travels." But they had no idea that "the China of old folk songs would soon be gone forever."
Within a few years, the Communist Party drove the KMT to Taiwan and founded the People's Republic of China. Mao's propaganda demonized the KMT, repressing its role as the main Chinese forces that fought Japanese invaders. KMT associates who remained in the mainland, like Pingru, were labeled "counter-revolutionaries" and sentenced to forced labor. Pingru had fought the Japanese, not the Communists, but Mao's politics made no such distinctions. In 1958, the 35-year-old Pingru left Meitang for a labor camp. When he came back, he was 58.
By then it was 1980. After decades of political turmoil, China had begun its "Reform and Opening-Up" movement. In Shanghai, Pingru and Meitang enjoyed "good, tranquil time" with their children and grandchildren. Then came illnesses. When Meitang died in 2008, after years of decline, Pingru, then 85, took up his pen and paintbrush to commemorate their marriage and recall his own life. His words and drawings filled 18 volumes, from which a Chinese publisher compiled Our Story.
The 350-page memoir, half in prose and half in color drawings, is a vivid, at times intimate, portrait of a changing China. The story begins with Pingru's childhood in the 1930s, a time when "the charms of my hometown had not changed much since the days of the Song dynasty [10 to 13th century AD]," and ends in the 2000s, where dialysis equipment for Meitang can be installed in the couple's bathroom. In between, we see Pingru in close combat with Japanese troops,
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traveling with Meitang after the war, and enduring hardship at the labor camp. The perspective of a KMT soldier - something China's censors still limit today - will be an eye-opener for many readers, especially young people of Chinese descent around the world.
Pingru's drawings recall illustrations in classic Chinese novels. These are "wide-angle shots" that situate characters and action in a larger environment: an initiation ceremony for students, where eight-year-old Pingru kneeled in front of a tablet honoring Confucius; a Western-style ballroom frequented by teenage Meitang; a mountainous landscape where Pingru pursued the Japanese. Though the characters' features are often indistinct, the reader gets a powerful sense of place.
"Close-ups" are rarer but striking. The first facial close-up of Meitang shows her not long after Pingru left for the labor camp, troubled by her colleagues' advice that she divorce him, because he had fought with the KMT. A thought bubble contains the Chinese term "draw a clear boundary," a common phrase in Mao's time referring to people cutting ties with "counter- revolutionaries" around them. While many renounced family members at that time, not without a sense of pride, Meitang remained loyal.
"You hadn't betrayed your country, you hadn't been a thief, you hadn't done anything wrong, why should I divorce you?" she said to him many years later.
Images from Pingru's life in the camp, though few in number, vividly evoke how detainees survived with few resources. Pingru would sew together holes on the soles of his socks instead of buying new ones. A group of drawings show how his long socks grew shorter and shorter, becoming mid-length socks, then short socks.
Meitang, left alone and stigmatized because of Pingru, sank into poverty. In one image, she puts her last golden bracelet on her sleeping daughter's wrist, giving her the one and only chance to wear it before pawning it off the next morning. During Chinese New Year, Pingru was allowed to visit his family. Early one morning, as he got ready to leave for the camp, he found his luggage tied with a rope to the ankle of his sleeping youngest daughter, whom he had forbidden to see him off. Several bells were also fastened on the rope. He untied the rope quietly, without waking her.
Despite these powerful snapshots, much of Pingru's life from the 1960s and 70s - a censored topic in China - is left unexplored. Mao's name is never mentioned, nor the abuse of prisoners in labor camps, nor the decade-long Cultural Revolution, in which at least hundreds of thousands perished. While the first 35 years of Pingru's life fills 250 pages, his two decades in the camp are covered in only 30 pages.
Many questions are left unanswered: How did camp officials and fellow prisoners treat Pingru? With his future in limbo, what were his moments of fear and despair? And what about Meitang? She was the wife of a "counter-revolutionary." Anyone - even neighbors and colleagues - could raid her home, drag her onto the streets, humiliate and beat her in public. Such incidents were common then. Did Meitang live through any of that?
It is still the case that, to get a book published in China, certain things cannot be talked about in depth.
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Aside from its political elements, "Our Story" also has a cultural, sociological value. The author has documented customs, objects, and places from a past that few now remember, but that still lives in the "cultural genes" of Chinese people today. One memorable drawing in the book shows young Meitang at her school's playground, walking down a special track with "footprints marked in contrasting color, showing how to walk gracefully." She spreads out her arms slightly, as if trying not to fall. "Meitang used to practice on it every day after class," Pinru writes, "so that when she grew up she could be a graceful young lady." Such tracks probably do longer exist today, but the anecdote immediately sheds light on the deeply ingrained gender norms in today's China.
Another surprising yet revealing anecdote involves Pingru's mother teaching him how to wring his towel. "For a boy, it was right hand on top, left hand below, and wring clockwise. For a girl, it was the opposite. If you were a boy and did it the girl's way, everyone laughed at you."
The English translation by Nicky Harman reads smoothly. I noticed a few minor mistakes, which do not significantly alter the gist of the passage. To fully engage English-speaking readers, the book would also have benefited from an introduction and notes that explain historical and social context more fully.
Near the end of "Our Story," Pingru quoted an ancient Chinese poet while reflecting on Meitang's life: "Other lives we cannot divine, this life is finished." "Our Story" is an elegy of lives and ways of life laid waste in the flow of time, buried beneath China's rapid development. But still, Pingru, Meitang and their children were lucky in some ways. Countless people broke with their spouses during the 60s and 70s, and countless children "drew a clear boundary" between themselves and their parents. Countless "counter-revolutionaries" were beaten to death or killed themselves. As we read "Our Story," we should keep in mind that it offers only a glimpse of some of the past century's worst atrocities.
Jingnan Peng is the Monitor's multimedia producer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Peng, Jingnan. "'Our Story' offers a graphic glimpse of a China that no longer exists." Christian
Science Monitor, 17 May 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A539192796/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e9ef545c. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539192796
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Spurling, Hilary. "Surviving Mao's China: Hilary Spurling is enchanted by depictions of simple family pleasures throughout years of famine and persecution." Spectator, 5 May 2018, p. 28+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540211943/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=30cee5ba. Accessed 24 June 2018. "Pingru, Rao: OUR STORY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959740/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d081f4eb. Accessed 24 June 2018. "Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China." Publishers Weekly, 26 Feb. 2018, p. 78. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530637472/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=af474838. Accessed 24 June 2018. Peng, Jingnan. "'Our Story' offers a graphic glimpse of a China that no longer exists." Christian Science Monitor, 17 May 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539192796/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e9ef545c. Accessed 24 June 2018.

• The Bookseller
  https://www.thebookseller.com/news/love-story-and-illustrated-chinese-history-square-peg-318712
  Word count: 398

  Exquisite' Chinese love story to Square Peg
  Published December 16, 2015 by Natasha Onwuemezi

  Square Peg, an imprint of Vintage, is to publish Our Story, which combines a tale of a 60-year-old love with an "amazing illustrated history of China".

  Publishing director Rosemary Davidson and Pantheon/Knopf editor Tim O’Connell jointly bought world English rights to the title by Rao Pingru from Cullen Stanley at Janklow & Nesbit Associates on behalf of Bardon Chinese Media and Guangxi University Press (NA).

  Since Frankfurt Book Fair in October, Janklow has sold rights to Seuil in France, Bompiani in Italy, Salamandra in Spain, MillBooks in Korea and Hollands Diep (Robbert Ammerlaan) in the Netherlands.

  Our Story was first published in China by Guangxi Normal University Press and has sold more than 250,000 copies, according to the publisher.

  The book is a graphic memoir of the love story between Pingru and his wife of 60 years, Meitang. When Meitang died in 2008, Pingru was overcome by grief and to memorialise the love, he began at the age of 88 to illustrate their life together.

  Pingru was an artillery soldier in the Imperial Army and had fought at the battle of Xiangxi in 1945 against the Japanese. Rao and Meitang met for the first time in 1946 when he was on leave from the army. Pingru draws from memory and includes scenes of his childhood, stories Meitang told him and their wedding day.

  He also illustrates the 22-years they spent apart when he was sent to a labour camp to be reformed. For the next 22-years he would see Meitang and his children only once a year, for Chinese New Year.

  "But his love for Meitang never diminished," the publisher said. "Like millions of other ordinary Chinese people, Meitang and Rao survived war, famine, incarceration, separation, re-education and illness. And, like so many couples, they disagreed, quarrelled and made up, raised children, and grew old together. This is a love story, but it is also an amazing illustrated history of China."

  Davidson said: “This is an exquisite graphic memoir. Rao Pingru and his wife Meitang’s love story encompasses the charmingly domestic and big and small events in China over 90 years. It is quite simply unique."

  Square Peg will publish Our Story simultaneously with the US in spring 2017.

• Forbidden Planet
  http://forbiddenplanet.blog/2018/reviews-love-life-china-story/
  Word count: 955

  QUOTED: "Our Story shows the traits of humanity and family run deeply through us all in any decade, in any nation, there is so much family life here that anyone, anywhere, will recognise, empathise with, smile at. Pingru’s paintings add a lovely touch. ... It’s physically elegant ... but as with any book it is the inner life between those handsome covers that truly counts. And in Our Story it’s a beautifully warm, personal, human story of life, love and family."

  Reviews: Love and Life in China – Our Story
  Published On April 11, 2018 | By Joe Gordon | Books, Comics, Reviews, Reviews

  Our Story: a Memoir of Love and Life in China,

  Rao Pingru,

  Square Peg/Vintage Books

  “All we children knew about them was that books were among the good things of this world.”

  This was an unusual one for me, an autobiography started by a Chinese gentleman in his late 80s; I think the last Chinese biography I read was back in the 90s, the globally conquering Wild Swans. Rao Pingru recalls his long life spanning most of the twentieth century: childhood, adulthood, meeting the woman who would be his wife for nearly six decades, it takes in the huge events they lived through (and many did not), from the end of an ancient way of life to war then civil war and revolution, and Our Story takes us through these events, but at a personal, family level, with an elegant and warm charm; by the end of this I felt as if I could sit down with Pingru for a chat and tea.

  After losing Meitang, his wife of nearly sixty years, Pingru didn’t want the stories they had shared to vanish, and writing was a good way not only to share those memories, but was no doubt quite therapeutic after his loss. This isn’t really a graphic novel, it is more prose with illustrations, rather lovely ones at that, painted by Pingru. In fact there are scenes much later in the book, in his retirement years, where he takes up painting, which Meitang teases him for not being terribly good at, that he should have started learning this skill as a child so by now he might be good! And while there is an amateur quality to those paintings, they are done with love and affection and work far better than a professional illustrator’s work would have done, because this is clearly so personal and from the heart.

  Pingru’s long life spans a huge series of changes in the ancient civilisation of China, events that have shaped the present day we live in and the future to come, not just in China but globally. But Pingru keeps those vast historical moments to the personal level: childhood in the last days of an old way of life, about to vanish forever, the long war with Japan (starting long before Singapore and Pearl Harbour brought that fight to the West), the subsequent civil war (just as they think they can at last go home to their lives and families), the Maoist revolution, the “re-education” camps, the emergence of modern China. All of these are seen through the personal level, how it affected him, his family, his friends, and as such it reminds us that those big historical moments are one thing, but it is the people swept up in them who really matter, because they are us.

  A recurring theme in Our Story is food, and more importantly, the sharing of food. From the little treats beloved in childhood – especially the dishes served up only at specific festivals, like the Dragon Boat festival or Chinese New Year (we all have similar memories, I’m sure), the warmth of family around you (grandparents, aunt and uncles sneaking you extra treats or little pocket money gifts), through sharing food as a married couple then as their own family grew in turn, or the special occasions when several generations of the family get together. These events stand out against the harder, leaner years – the war, the early Mao era which saw Pingru sent to a re-education camp, apart from his family for so much of the time, making those moments together even warmer, more precious.

  There are glimpses into another culture’s way of life – the lovely little rituals observed, such as one to mark the first day of proper schooling, including paying homage to the venerable Confucis, the writing of elegant short poems to mark special occasions in life, the seasonal festivals. Mostly, however, Our Story shows the traits of humanity and family run deeply through us all in any decade, in any nation, there is so much family life here that anyone, anywhere, will recognise, empathise with, smile at. Pingru’s paintings add a lovely touch (in some ways taking the role of family photos), and even the designers of the book have gone the extra mile, crafting a gorgeously bound volume; it’s physically elegant (everyone I showed this to thought it very beautiful), but as with any book it is the inner life between those handsome covers that truly counts. And in Our Story it’s a beautifully warm, personal, human story of life, love and family.

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  About The Author
  Joe Gordon
  Joe Gordon

  Joe Gordon is ForbiddenPlanet.co.uk’s chief blogger, which he set up in 2005. Previously, he was professional bookseller for over 12 years as well as a lifelong reader and reviewer, especially of comics and science fiction works.
  Related Post

• Spectator
  https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/05/enduring-life-under-chairman-mao/
  Word count: 1145

  Enduring life under Chairman Mao
  In a series of lively paintings, Rao Pingru recalled happy family occasions, making decades of privation easier to bear
  Hilary Spurling
  Rao Pingru and his siblings make a lion lantern with their mother
  Rao Pingru and his siblings make a lion lantern with their mother

  Hilary Spurling

  5 May 2018

  9:00 AM
  Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China Rao Pingru, translated by Nicky Harman

  Square Peg, pp.357, £25

  Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive upheavals that marked China’s transition in the 20th century from an immemorial, apparently immutable imperial past to its current uneasy truce with the technology, morals and politics of the Western world.

  He was born in Nancheng, a city virtually unchanged in seven centuries since the end of the great Song dynasty. The first painting in this book shows Pingru himself as a small boy kneeling to knock his head on the floor in a traditional kowtow, performed at the foot of the man who had come to teach him to write. In ancient China, calligraphy embodied continuity, discipline, the accumulated wisdom of civilisation itself.

  Pingru tells his story from the bottom up, so to speak, documenting a life lived against a background of constant chaotic destruction in small lively paintings that are hard to resist. He looks back to his grandfather, whom he never met, painting him in the voluminous yellow silk robes of a mandarin at the imperial court: a squat, almost square emblem of absolute power.

  From the start Pingru pictures himself as a wide-eyed, owlish, bespectacled observer of the shifting contemporary scene. His father was a provincial lawyer, and he himself grew up in a society still regulated by the rhythm of seasonal street festivals, celebrated with feasting, fireworks and highly competitive homemade paper lanterns in the shape of dragons or lions.

  He paints the house he lived in with its courtyards, Buddhist shrine and walled garden in a world where transport meant push-carts or carrying poles. He paints his parents’ rice bowls, which he had to fill at every meal. He paints the family at table, and the food he loved as a child: meatballs, mooncakes, glutinous rice dumplings and steamed rolls filled with sweet potato noodles. He even includes a diagram showing the correct ritual his mother taught him for washing his face.

  But time was already up for the old traditional world he briefly glimpsed as a boy. He was five when the farmer’s son Mao Zedong recruited what he called his Red Army. And he was 12 when Mao embarked on the Long March that became the great founding myth of communist China. Open conflict between the advancing communists and the Nationalist Republican army of Chiang Kai-shek was postponed only when they joined forces in China’s war with Japan.

  Pingru volunteered to fight for his country, presenting himself at 18 for military training. An uncharacteristically heroic image shows him mounted on a rearing war horse when he finally rode out to join the artillery in 1946. His regiment marched north into territory laid waste at intervals for 1,000 years by bandits, warlords and civil conflict. He describes the devastation he found there in a line from the 12th-century poet Jiang Kui: ‘Abandoned ponds and lofty trees still detest talk of soldiers.’

  The civil war had started again, ending in 1949 with triumph for Mao, who declared the People’s Republic of China. Pingru’s problem was that he had enlisted three years earlier in what was then the victorious Nationalist army. It turned out to be a disastrous choice. He and his family were ostracised, stigmatised and punished for it to the end of their lives. Nothing they could do altered the fact that an initial mistake had marked them for ever in communist China as class enemies.

  A new society remodelled for a new world meant the start of a new life. Pingru had fallen in love at first sight with a 19-year-old girl called Mao Meitang, who married him in 1948. Together they opened a shop selling noodles that closed almost at once. A second attempt to start a business trading in chillis also ended in dismal failure. Eventually Pingru got a job in Shanghai, working as an accountant to support his wife and their growing family in Nancheng.

  In 1958 Mao’s second Five Year Plan plunged China into starvation. Around 40 million people died in the great famine. Pingru spent 22 years in a forced labour camp. He says relatively little about the ‘Re-education through labour’ that swallowed the two central decades of his adult life, leaving Meitang responsible for their children’s survival, upbringing and education. The wife of an enemy of the people ranked bottom of the social heap, so the only work she could find was carrying bags of cement (each weighing more than four stone, or 25 kilos) as a labourer on construction sites. Her eldest son, who was nine, shifted scrap iron.

  Pingru would be nearly 60 before he was free to go home after Mao’s death. He expresses his satisfaction with a painting of the whole family sitting round a bare wooden table eating their fill of steamed dumplings. But grief, hardship and physical exertion had worn his wife out. She died slowly and painfully of kidney failure less than ten years after his release.

  This book is his tribute to her in words and pictures, both entirely free from resentment or anger. Pingru survived almost unimaginable privation thanks primarily to an insatiable interest in other people, an absolute lack of self-pity and a curiosity that nothing could extinguish. He retains in his nineties something of the bright, energetic, observant small boy who learned to write, draw and make lanterns in the traditional way. One of the last paintings in his book is a self-portrait that shows him as a white-haired grandfather, squatting on a low wooden stool in T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops playing the mouth organ to his cat.

  This book emerges from communist China with no word of explanation, no blurb, preface or dustjacket, and no proper cover to the spine. Although it was translated with Arts Council funding and put out by an offshoot of Penguin, it shows little sign of even perfunctory editing. But thanks to the persuasive power of its humane and humorous author, Our Story is as hard to resist as the great, rich, rambling serial narratives of the oral storytellers who travelled from one Chinese village to another in the past, drawing entire populations out of their houses to sit on the hillside and listen.

• The Culture Trip
  https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/rao-pingrus-our-story-a-visual-retelling-of-a-chinese-romance/
  Word count: 1143

  QUOTED: "Rao Pingru’s nostalgic memoir creates a deeply personal portrait of his life and marriage as well as a gripping account of China in the twentieth century. Our Story is a masterpiece of memory."
  "In a rare show of nakedness, Rao expresses the intensity of his grief, the load of his longing. He has journeyed back, and through his art, made peace with his earthly story. Now, he is ready for a heavenly one."

  Rao Pingru's 'Our Story', a Visual Retelling of a Chinese Romance
  Picture of Matthew Janney
  Matthew Janney
  UK Books Editor
  Updated: 18 May 2018

  Rao Pingru’s nostalgic memoir creates a deeply personal portrait of his life and marriage as well as a gripping account of China in the 20th century.

  Our Story is a masterpiece of memory. At the age of eighty-eight, following the death of his partner Meitang, Rao Pingru began to paint. With only their love letters, a few heirlooms and his memories as a muse, the former Chinese military man from Nanchang City produced a life’s worth of charming paintings, accompanied by detailed written recollections (translated by Nicky Harman): it is a comprehensive, visual autobiography. Set during the political upheavals of the 20th century in China, Pingru – who has no previous books to his name – tells a story that is both entirely his own and indeed representative of a whole generation.

  Pingru’s childhood was like any other: ‘Wash behind your ears, and the nape of your neck,’ his mother would tell him; the universal soundtrack that accompanies almost all childhoods. But his life was anything but ordinary, with a plot that feels inherently novelistic, shaped by the smallest of margins, the closest of calls. The challenge for Pingru was not to turn his life into a novel, but to turn his novelistic story into a life, a life that feels convincing, relatable, lived.
  From Rao Pingru’s ‘Our Story’
  From Rao Pingru’s ‘Our Story’ | © Rao Pingru / Penguin Random House

  Pingru’s writing is dispassionate and neutral in contrast to the emotional intensity of his water-colour sketches. If his words describe, his paintings animate, and provide a rich visual backdrop to the narrative. Stylistically, his paintings are naive and cartoon-like, while a palette of diluted yellows and purples are frequently used to colour physical spaces and backgrounds. The prevalence of these colours – yellow and purple denoting remembrance and fortune in Chinese culture respectively – suggest Pingru’s art is fuelled by sharp nostalgia more than aesthetic ambition. As we learn in his epigraph: ‘Every word I have written is true. Every story is true. All these pictures of the past came from my head.’

  Like many of that era, Pingru transitioned to adulthood while at war. During World War II, Pingru fought for the 100th Army – a group in the Chinese artillery – against the Japanese. Even when confronted by death, Pingru’s tone remains undisturbed. Recalling a platoon cook who was killed by a Japanese sniper, he remarks: ‘He died instantly. I remember only that his surname was Ren.’

  Pingru leaves the philosophising to others, with fragments of poetry interspersed throughout. He quotes Mao Zedong’s version of a Saigō Takamori poem: ‘A hero has no need to be buried in his native place. / He lies surrounded by green mountains.’ Not only is this a way for Pingru to articulate what he cannot express, but using a Chinese version of a Japanese poem is a quiet comment on the futility of war, and the common experience on both sides. After all, ‘Human nature and human feelings are very much the same everywhere’, he reflects.
  From Rao Pingru’s ‘Our Story’
  From Rao Pingru’s ‘Our Story’ | © Rao Pingru / Penguin Random House

  On leave from his military duties, Rao gets engaged to Meitang, a distant childhood friend who he goes on to share his life with, and whose presence permeates the book. Pingru writes: ‘Before I met Meitang, I had no fear of dying, or of long journeys, and was blithely unconcerned about the passage of the years. But now, I began to consider the future very carefully indeed.’ If Meitang began to influence Rao’s future then, she is the driving force of his past, now.

  Whilst their marriage was plagued by hardship – poverty, ill-health, the years Rao spent in a rehabilitation labour camp – the most moving, and convincing, moments in Rao’s narrative are the ordinary quirks of married life. Rao recalls how he became nearsighted after watching too many movies in the front row with Meitang, in order to compensate for her nearsightedness. It is a perfect symbol of how they willingly accommodated each other’s imperfections, how they expressed their love. Less convincing might be the assertion that they only had one quarrel during their entire lifetime. Could this be a crack in Rao’s nostalgic project? Maybe. But ultimately, this is their story, and the overall narrative is anything but a rose-tinted eulogy.

  ‘Journeying side by side’ is the title of one chapter, the chapter documenting their various travels together before settling down to family life in Shanghai. On the book’s inside cover, two portraits of Rao and Meitang stand side-by-side, as if looking out onto the world together. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of Le Petit Prince, once said: ‘Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.’ It is this shared vision, this commitment to facing the world side-by-side, that Rao captures so tenderly.
  From Rao Pingru’s ‘Our Story’
  From Rao Pingru’s ‘Our Story’ | © Rao Pingru / Penguin Random House

  The book ends with the painful deterioration of Meitang’s health and her eventual death – the reason Rao began writing in the first place – providing a neat circularity to the work. Departing from his characteristically guarded tone, Pingru writes these lines in memory of her, accompanied by a beautiful painting of their silhouettes waving at a technicoloured sky:

  ‘We endured the most difficult of times, and gradually our lives became better. But heaven granted us so few years together and today I grieve bitterly, because now you are gone. Who can anticipate the vicissitudes of life? I have been through good times and bad, and am disillusioned with this earthly world. I long only to be reunited with you in the next life.’

  In a rare show of nakedness, Rao expresses the intensity of his grief, the load of his longing. He has journeyed back, and through his art, made peace with his earthly story. Now, he is ready for a heavenly one.
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• CRI English
  http://english.cri.cn/8706/2013/08/06/2661s780271.htm
  Word count: 2424

  QUOTED: "I spent sixty years with her. I couldn't forget it. So I thought I could draw our stories and pass them to our grandchildren or grand grandchildren letting them know about their grandparents who have been through war, poverty, sickness and most importantly, love. It's also a record of our time. At the same time, drawing these out can also help ease my pain of missing her."

  "Our Story"by Rao Pingru
  2013-08-06 15:42:58 CRIENGLISH.com Web Editor: Zhang Ru

  "Our Story" by Rao Pingru [photo:baidu.com]

  Mao Meitang (left) and Rao Pingru (right) [photo:baidu.com]

  Anchor:
  Hello and welcome to this edition of "In the Spotlight", a show featuring arts, culture and showbiz from right here in China. I'm your host Li Ningjing.

  First up on today's show, a cultural exchange program recently held in Beijing provided opportunities for exchange between underprivileged students from China and the United States.

  Then, we will take you to Chinese painter Wang Xingwei's first retrospective exhibition at the renowned Ullen's Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

  Last but not least, we will introduce you a romantic and touching picture book sketched by a 91-year-old man to commemorate his deceased wife.

  So, plenty of entertaining and informative stories up ahead on 'In the Spotlight', stay tuned.

  The "Rainbow Bridge" Chinese-American Students Cultural Exchange Program in Beijing

  Anchor:

  In this age of globalization, international student exchange is nothing new. However, when we think about the astronomical cost of these exchange programs, they seem out of reach for most common folk.

  The "Rainbow Bridge" Chinese-American Students Cultural Exchange Program is especially designed to provide opportunities for exchange between underprivileged students from different countries.

  Liu Kun has more on this benevolent program.

  Reporter:

  The training hall of the Tian Yi Fencing Club in eastern Beijing has recently been filled with laughter and applause. 25 Chinese college students and 25 American high school students, all selected by the "Rainbow Bridge" Chinese-American Students Cultural Exchange Program", enjoyed fencing performances, cucurbit flute music, face-changing performances and singing in the club.

  Initiated by the China Next Generation Education Foundation and fully financed by the Bank of China, the "Rainbow Bridge" program selects students from underprivileged backgrounds from both countries and sends them to explore each other's countries. In a schedule lasting about a month, students visit different cities and universities, learn about the local history and culture, and even meet and speak with politicians.

  Launched last year, this is the second time the program has been held.

  Chen Hao, an associate director at China Next Generation Education Foundation, explains this year's new initiatives.

  "This year we have added new things to the program; for example, we will hold a dialogue between the students and American politicians. We have invited the deputy mayor of Washington D.C. to give a lecture on the American political system. Also, a former American ambassador to China will speak to the students about China-U.S. bilateral relations. And we will also visit the Chinese Embassy."

  Wu Suyun, a sophomore at China's Wuhan University and one of this year's selected students, is looking forward to her journey with the program.

  "First of all, I want to know more about Beijing's history and culture. This will be my first visit here, so I want to know more about our country's history and culture by visiting the city's museums. Second, I expect to learn more about the history and culture in America. Their cultural values are quite different from ours. Also, I want to improve my oral English."

  Although still at the beginning stage of becoming involved in the program, Wu is ambitious when speaking about what she hopes to get from it.

  "As for myself, I really want to further my study in America if I get the opportunity. Our teacher Ms Hou told us last year that the students in this program learned a lot from their experience in America. This is a very precious opportunity. I want to follow in their steps and improve myself. If I have the chance, I want to go to America to learn more about this world."

  On the part of the American students, Cesar Garcia, who is expecting to enter the University of Washington Seattle this coming fall expresses similar wishes.

  "When I go to college, I want to study abroad once again in China, in maybe different cities, to see what it's like. I am already in the northern part, so I would like to see the southern part and see the difference in the culture or go to the countryside and see how their culture is."

  The program will last for about ten years. Inspired by the success of the 1st and 2nd year programs, Chen Hao says they are considering expanding the program.

  "America is just one country that we currently engage on. Next year we are considering opening the program in the European continent. Maybe we will consider Africa and Latin America in the future, too."

  The 25 Chinese students will fly on July 26th from Beijing to New York while the 25 American students will continue their adventure in China.

  Interview curator Philip Tinari on Chinese contemporary painter Wang Xingwei

  Anchor:
  Chinese painter Wang Xingwei is holding his first retrospective exhibition at the renowned Ullen's Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

  Wang was born in northeast China's Liaoning province and trained in painting at Shenyang Normal University.

  While the rest of the '85 new wave generation was embracing foreign conceptual influences, Wang questioned the western classics he had been taught to paint, and found his own style.

  Wang moved to Beijing in the mid-1990s and met other artists connected to the experimental China Art Archives and Warehouse.

  In his latest show, on until the 18th of August, one can see his skilled adaptations of many different painting styles featuring his characteristic quirks.

  Primrose Riordan caught up with exhibition curator and centre director Philip Tinari.

  "Our Story" by Rao Pingru

  Anchor:
  A 91-year-old man has filled 18 albums of drawings completed during the past four years to commemorate his deceased wife. From the first time they met each other, to their wedding day, and then their 22 years apart, up until her final days lying in bed - all the images of their nearly 60-year marriage have been recorded in his book "Our Story."

  Although his beloved wife left him when she passed away, his longing for her never stopped. In this week's bookshelf, let's follow Siqi to find out more about this old man, Rao Pingru, and his eternal love.

  Reporter:

  The man blowing the harmonica is Rao Pingru, a 91-year-old man who drew over 300 pictures after his wife passed away in 2008. He compiled the 18 albums of drawings in a book and named it "Our Story" to commemorate his deceased wife and their marriage of nearly sixty years.

  "Drawing our memories out is a kind of comfort for me when I am missing her."

  From the first time he saw her putting on makeup in a mirror, to their wedding at which they promised "to love and cherish each other", to their 22 years apart, to her lying in bed during her final days - all these images provided food for his art. Under each picture, Rao Pingru wrote down a caption or lines of poems for it.

  When Rao met his wife Mao Meitang, Rao was a 26-year-old soldier fighting Japanese invaders.

  He nearly lost his life several times in the battles. At the time, he said he was never afraid of death until he met Meitang. He wrote beside the picture of a beautiful lady putting on lipstick at the window:

  "I walked into her house, and saw a pretty twenty-year-old girl sitting in front of a mirror putting on lipstick. Such was my first impression of Meitang."

  Rao met Meitang as a blind date and the first time they saw each other both knew they were the one.

  During their early dates, Rao was too shy to say "the three words" in Chinese. Instead, one day on a park bench in his hometown, Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, he sang an English song of the time, "Rosemarie, I Love You" to express his feelings.

  "Back in our time, people were not as open as today's young people. So I thought that maybe singing a love song could help. The lyrics of "Rosemarie" go like this: 'Rosemarie I love you. You are always in my dreams. I just can't forget you."

  After two years' touch through correspondence, they held a big wedding in Nanchang in 1948.

  Unfortunately, the photos of the wedding ceremony were lost in the turbulence following the war. In the book, Rao painted several pictures about his wedding ceremony based on his memories.

  2008, the year his wife Meitang left him was also the year of their 60th wedding anniversary. But Meitang failed to make it to the day. After Meitang passed away, Rao refused to comply with his children's arrangements for him travel abroad, although he went to their wedding venue in Nanchang alone and took a photo where they took one before.

  As Rao recalled, the first several years of their marriage was the sweetest time of his life in spite of the turbulence following the war.

  Unlike others, they teased each other about how poor they were, running an eatery, and found it fun and poetic living in a rooftop house that would shake on stormy days.

  "At the time, all the happiness was from the bottom of your heart. We never thought of the hardships as something bad. We were able to find fun in them. The mood matters."

  However, the happy days didn't last long. In 1958, during a political movement, Rao was sent to be reeducated through labor.And the couple were seperated for over two decades.

  After Rao left, Meitang had to support the family alone. To increase the family's income and raise their five children, Meitang, a lady who had excelled at singing and dancing in old Shanghai, took on a job carrying cement, at 10 kilograms a bag, for the construction of the Shanghai Natural History Museum. Rao feels bad whenever he speaks about this period.

  "Every time I walk past the museum, I pause for a while. I don't know which step was made from the cement she carried, but I know she carried it for the kids, for the family, and maybe because of this, she suffered from a lifetime of waist pain."

  During the 22 years apart, the couple kept in touch mostly through correspondence, except for Rao's annual leave once a year. They wrote about 1,000 letters over that time, most of which are pasted in the albums. Rao even recorded the lines of the broken letters.

  In 1979, Rao returned to Shanghai and became a publishing editor. Rao thought they could have enjoyed their twilight years. But in 1992, Meitang was diagnosed with kidney disease and Alzheimer's disease. Rao stopped working and walked Meitang through the final, and perhaps most painful stage of her life.

  He got up 5am everyday, combed her hair, washed her face, cooked, kept close records of her illness and coaxed her like a child, trying to satisfy her every want.

  "All of them were very curious as to how I could be so energetic regardless of tiredness. I got up 5am, cooked, prepared medicines according to the prescription. But I was in high spirits, because I always held hope. I hoped she could get better. That was my strongest motivation."

  At 4:23pm on March 19, 2008, five months before their 60th wedding anniversary, Rao lost Meitang. Rao remembers the time clearly. He said that fortunately he made it to Meitang's bed as she passed away,

  "I walked in and stayed beside her, just a few steps away. I think she saw me. Even though she was so weak, she still knew I was there. She left a teardrop before she went. Then I cut a lock of her hair and kept it at home tied with a red string. That's the only thing she left."

  After Meitang left him, Rao said he couldn't let the pain go for almost half a year. Then he decided to draw their stories out and file them in a book. The last picture shows Meitang lying in bed with one teardrop.

  "I spent 60 years with her. I couldn't forget it. So I thought I could draw our stories and pass them to our grandchildren or grand grandchildren letting them know about their grandparents who have been through war, poverty, sickness and most importantly, love. It's also a record of our time. At the same time, drawing these out can also help ease my pain of missing her."

  Rao's beloved wife left him, but his longing for her never stopped.

  Back anchor:
  Thank you Siqi for bringing us this tear-jerker. Love that never gets bored is the most beautiful in the world.

  With that we've come to the end of this edition of "In the Spotlight".

  Hope you've enjoyed the programme. If you have any comments or suggestions, you can email us at Spotlight@cri.com.cn. I'm Li Ningjing. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
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