A Chinese Life (Collector’s Edition)
By Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtiér (France), SDX Joint Publishing Company, April 2016
Author Li Kunwu recounts life as an ordinary Chinese baby boomer in an ordinary town, with over 3,000 frames of comics and comic strips spanning half a century marked by meteoric social progress in China.
He created more than 100 characters based on his family members, classmates, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and soldiers, drawing real details of ordinary people and their feelings.
The graphic work consists of three volumes, respectively titled Hardships, Turning Points, and Prosperity, using ordinary people’s lives to trace the social progress in modern China. The first volume recounts the frustration of the author’s family in the 1950s. The second focuses on his army service that began in 1972. The third shows the new choices Li and everyone around him made during the economic tide after the country launched reform and opening-up in 1978.
Dargaud, a prestigious French publisher, released the complete graphic novel in 2009. It won two prizes at the Saint-Malo book fair in 2010 and was selected for the Angoulême International Comics Festival, often likened to “Comics Oscars.” Today, the book has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and English. This new version is a collector’s edition, with new material added to the original three volumes.
“A unique epic depicting ordinary people’s toils over half a century, it documents their daily life through historical changes, authentic, sincere, and touching,” commented journalist Cao Jingxing.
As a review in The Guardian puts it, the stories support the lead role of fate, reflecting how individuals were molded by modern China as well as the choices and struggles made by people around Li. With his ambitious graphic novel, the author shortened the distance between his readers and China, and showcased the losses and gains of the country as well as its greatness and various headlocks during its development.
Li Kunwu from China and Philippe Ôtiér from France worked together for five years to co-author the book. During compilation, according to Ôtiér, they always tried to find balance between “selves in the eyes of the Chinese” and “China in the eyes of foreigners.” They eventually reached consensus to present the original look of stories through the eyes of ordinary people and leave the space for readers to feel and judge.
Li Kunwu, a native of Kunming, Yunnan Province, was born in June 1955. He joined the army in 1972 and fought in the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. From 1980 to 2010, he worked at Yunnan Daily. Li serves as member of the council of Yunnan Artists Association and executive member of the council of China Newscartoon Society. Over the last few years, he has showcased Kunming with his comics, publishing more than 30 comic books, the most noticeable of which is Eighteen Weirds in Yunnan, a classic depicting civil culture in the city of Kunming.
Philippe Ôtiér was born in Périgueux, France, in 1964. He has been a playwright for 10 years and a comics fan for longer. During the early 1990s, he worked as a diplomat for France’s Ministry of Finance, and for 15 years that followed he worked and lived in China and East Asia. Today, he resides in Wuhan, the provincial seat of Hubei.
1. When I was child, I was afraid of rats.
2. On August 15, 1962, Lei Feng, a soldier of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who was known for selflessly helping others, died in the line of duty. On March 5, 1963, Mao Zedong, chairman of the People’s Republic of China, urged the whole country to “Learn from Lei Feng,” and Lei’s spirit has since served as an inspiration to the Chinese people.
3. During that era, young people who talked about reading while dating were considered to have lofty ideals.
5. China’s economic reform and opening-up have brought dramatic changes to the country. Now, villagers living deep in the mountains of Yunnan Province can check the mail online.