photo credit: Belle's pop, Joseph, 2008. Hat by maggiemae.com
Author Biography
Belle Yang, subject of the PBS documentary, “My Name is Belle,” is frequently asked whether she is primarily a writer or a painter. Answer: "When I'm writing, I'm a writer; when I'm painting, I'm a painter." She is also asked whether she is a children's author or of adult books.
The immigration journey, moving from Taiwan to Japan at age five and then to America during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, learning English as my third language.
Democracy Spring (1989) and the Tiananmen Massacre which silenced the voices of the Chinese people.
My father's Manchurian stubbornness and my mother's Hakka obstinacy.
The five years of stalking which drove me to writing and painting in solitude.
The benevolent spirit of my great grandfather who was swept out of his estate to wander a beggar under Communism.
Favorite Authors
Chekhov, Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, Frost, Van Gogh, Dickinson, David B., Sun-Tzu, Homer
What I'm Reading
I-Ching, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Illiad
I was always a bug, mud, tadpole, spider, turtle lover, plant identifier as a child, turning over rocks for crickets, putting tuna in a glass jar to catch beetles. Some how as I grew taller, I no
In the early 1950s, my father was teaching the Bunun aboriginal mountain people, whose land had been taken away over the centuries by Chinese onslaught from the mainland. The Bunun people farmed
My mother complained of sleeplessness and obsessing in the night, so the doctor recommended taking Paxil, an antidepressant. After two weeks on the med, she started to smile as beautifully as a b
Please don't merely read newspapers and magazines. They do NOT give us the full scope of what this economic crisis means. (And using facts selectively in short pieces become lies or distortions
I’ve finished two-thirds of "Forget Sorrow: A China Elegy" and mailed the Xeroxed pages to WW Norton. I’ve never worked on a graphic novel before and neither has Alane, my editor.
In 1960, the year I was born on the island of Taiwan, my father, the dean of a private school and my mother, a teacher of Chinese literature at the same, jointly made the equivalent of 60 US dollar
I've been sick this week, and I managed only three pages on the graphic novel. The third page below was done today. The Chinese speak of "chi" or life force.
From the manner in which the Chinese athletes win and lose, you can see the degree of freedom the people of the Middle Kingdom truly have. “The agony of defeat” is far more excruciating if
