BABA : A Return To China Upon My Father's Shoulders

San Diego, CA: Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace & Co, 1996. First Edition, First Pinting . Soft cover. NEW - COLLECTIBLE/None as Issued. Belle Yang (Author & Illustrator). Text/NEW & Bright. 1996 First Edition, Printing "A". Illustrated softcover/NF; w/faint creasing to lower front corner tip. Taiwan born, Californian Belle Yang (1960 -) is an artist, author, graphic novelist and children's book writer. After graduation from Univ.of CA, Santa Cruz, she spent 3 years in Beijing, China to be present during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. This, on her return home, her first book, was completed in 1994. In Chinese, "Baba" is simply "Papa" in English. This is biography of Belle Yang's father, Joseph Yang (1928- ), born in Manchuria, coming of age in northern China in the 1930s to 1940s, migrated to Taiwan before the U.S. Life of an heir to the prominent House of Yang of the northeastern extremity of the Great Wall, who knew of early Japanese invasion, Russian onslaught, fall of the Ch'ing Dynasty, ensuring flood of "White Russians" escaping the fall of Russian tsars at the hand of communist "Red Russians, and the ensuing rise of Chinese communism after World War II. A poetic portrait of Joseph Yang and that of 1930s, 1940s & 1950's China --- a song in words with watercolor renditions from a daughter. The 1937 Sino-Japanese invasion, marking the beginning of World War II (5 years before Pearl Harbor), set the last Ch'ing Dynasty heir Pu-yi in a puppet regime when China was already flooded with "White Russians" upon the fall of their Tsar. This is Baba's life --- a story of war, social upheavals & resiliency. Of the author's watercolor paintings, one depicts a tranquil rural setting against bombs falling far off --- it is told that then peasants, though knowing full well what bullets were, first thought bombs were but an odd phenomenon of bottles falling from the heavens!