Review time! with ‘We Served the People’

“I understand blood and I understand pain, there can be no life without it”

Several years ago, back when I was but a neophyte blogger, I wrote a review of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. I did not particularly love Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, and I titled the post I wrote about it “Persepolis 2: The asparagus of comics books!” I called it “asparagus” because I do not like asparagus, but asparagus is good for you.* Persepolis 2 is, in my humble opinion, not a particularly good comic, but it’s something you should read – it’s good for you, in other words. In the years since, I’ve read several “asparagus comics” – comics that I didn’t love all that much, but which I’m glad for having read them. They’re usually about cultures we mouth-breathing ‘Muricans know nothing about, they’re usually created by an underrepresented group, and they’re usually about repressive regimes, because those make for good drama. No one wants to read about little Erkki growing up happy and fulfilled in Finland, after all! Stupid Finns and their excellent education system and low crime rate! I’m glad I read these “asparagus comics,” but I have no interest in reading them again. At Thanksgiving, nobody says, “Hey, I finished my asparagus, let me have some more.” Well, crazy people do. Normal folk say, “Thank god I finished my asparagus – now let me get some more cheese-and-bacon-filled mashed potatoes and turkey drowning in gravy!”

* If you’re one of those crazy people who likes asparagus, feel free to substitute a food you don’t like. Kohlrabi, for instance.**

** If you don’t know what kohlrabi is, you probably won’t like it.

You can see where this is going, as the latest book I am reviewing is We Served the People: My Mother’s Stories by Emei Burell, which is published by Archaia and edited by Gwen Waller and Sierra Hahn. We Served the People is better than Persepolis 2, I think, because Burell is a better writer and artist than Satrapi, but it still suffers a bit from being “asparagus.” It’s the story of how Burell’s mother survived the Cultural Revolution, and that’s definitely something we should all know more about.

Burell gives us the background we need early in the book, explaining what the Cultural Revolution was and when it occurred, why Mao Zedong needed it after the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and what it meant. Basically, Mao ordered students to leave the cities and head for the country to learn how to be “real” (hmmm, an elitist claiming the heterogeneous cities were degenerate and lauding the homogeneous rural areas – where said elite would never live – were the “true” people … are we sure the Republican Party didn’t steal Mao’s playbook?), and Burell’s mother, who was just getting out of middle school in 1966, was sent from Beijing to Yunnan, way in the south of China, and she didn’t get to return to her home for almost a decade (Yunnan is wedged into the southwestern corner of the country, bordering on Burma, Laos, and Vietnam and is about 1600 miles from Beijing). In the present, she tells Burell about her experiences, and Burell writes them down and illustrates them. That’s it. It’s a biography, in other words, of a person who lived through extraordinary times (aren’t they all, though?).

Part of what makes the book work so well is also a weakness, as weird that might sound. Burell’s mother – Yuan – leaves her home, lives on a farm for ten years, drives a truck, learns to drive a tractor, decides to go to a university whose classes are broadcast on television, and goes to Sweden on a work visa, from which she apparently never returns to China (the book ends with her leaving for Sweden, but Burell points out that when her mother told her the stories years later, she was still there). So we get an intensely personal story, really a collection of anecdotes about her mother’s life even after she returned to Beijing. What this does is ground the weirdness of the Cultural Revolution and make it resonate more with us because we are following one woman’s trials within the system, so that we feel her frustration at being taken from her home and made to work somewhere for a vague utopian vision with no immediate rewards, but also her determination to make herself better and excel when others are willing to slack off (the parts of the book where Burell’s mother talks about how she was the only one working hard feel like a bit of a self-aggradizing embellishment, but the basic idea – that some people will work hard and others don’t, and the ones who work hard should be rewarded – is a sound one). Her mother’s difficulty in dealing with a male-centric power structure in a supposedly gender-blind society is done well, too – Burell doesn’t push it too much, but it’s clear that the old prejudices and stereotypes that the Communists were supposed to have swept away were still there. Yuan also has to deal with a recalcitrant, entrenched bureaucracy that sees her as a threat because she won’t simply go along to get along, despite exhortations from the Party to improve oneself. Because this is such a personal story, we as readers are much more invested in what Burell’s mother goes through, and it helps highlight the oddness of the Chinese Communist regime.

On the other hand, the weakness comes from the fact that, while the Communism of Mao seems a bit strange in the book, it doesn’t seem particularly malevolent. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution led to millions of deaths in China through famine and government repression. While Yuan was taken from her family and sent thousands of miles to the south, there’s not a sense of dread that must have hung over Chinese society at that time. She’s over-worked in the fields, but is never unhealthy despite not getting enough to eat. No one around her disappears in the night or is dragged away for questioning the government. The petty bureaucrats who oppress her are frightened of people higher up the Party ladder, but that’s true about every government in history, and it doesn’t seem to affect Yuan personally. Even when her mother steps back to talk about the situation in the country at certain points, it feels detached and antiseptic, which feels weird. Her mother doesn’t seem to have any deep affection for Chinese Communism, so it seems strange that she wouldn’t note the damage Mao did to the country during the final 15 years or so of his life. Despite the fact that this is simply the stories of one person, it seems odd that Burell herself or her mother wouldn’t attempt to put in a larger context. The 1960s were terrible years for China, and Burell’s mother makes it sound like an inconvenient outing in the country that would be fine if you just worked hard. The dissonance is bizarre.

Burell’s art is interesting, too, because it shows clear growth, and it makes me wonder how long it took her to draw this. Like a lot of artists early in their development, she uses harsher hatching lines early in the book, and her figures are much more cartoonish. Her figure work is a bit more simplistic, although her landscapes are quite beautifully detailed. Also like a lot of younger artists, she struggles a bit with depth, as much of the panels are “flat.” (Of course they’re always flat, but using depth in two dimensions is a nice talent to have, and Burell doesn’t always nail it early on in the book.) After the initial story, she hatches much less, forms faces into different and interesting shapes, and has a more delicate line, while her landscapes remain beautiful. As the book moves on, the hatching returns, but it’s softer now, as her coloring is much more nuanced (either she switched to digital or got better at it), with more shades and shadows than earlier in the book. She reaches a happy medium between the fine, detailed faces she was drawing and the more cartoonish faces that began the book, and it’s an interesting balance. I don’t know if she drew the book in sequence, but it’s fascinating to examine the differences in the art, no matter when the chapters were drawn. She uses a lot of earth tones and muted blues and greens to make living in the country seem drab, implying the leveling of society that Mao and the Communists preached, and when she does show the landscape, it’s interesting to see how it dwarfs the people – Mao might want the people to tame the land, but the land seems unconcerned that they will be able to accomplish it. Burell does a nice job finding the humanity of the characters – especially Yuan – in a place where humanity might be crushed out of people. One of the things Burell is going for in the book is that the people matter more than the government, and her art gets that across nicely.

I want to like We Served the People a lot, because as I noted, it is an important book. There’s a bit too much missing, however, which is, for me, often the case with memoirs or biographies by people close to the subject. There’s an urge – probably not even conscious – to make sure the subject doesn’t come off poorly, because it’s someone you love. I completely get that impulse, but it makes the book feel a bit circumspect, as if Burell was being overprotective. It’s a nice read and it gives us a peek into a society we don’t know much about, but it feels a bit incomplete.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆