Our Story
A Memoir of Love and Life in China
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
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.)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
