Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China

Rao Pingru was a twenty-six-year-old soldier when he saw Mao Meitang, a girl he´d known from childhood who had grown up to be a beautiful woman--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 Rao´s heart, the moment that sparked a union that would last almost sixty years. Our Story is that epic romance told through his paintings and accompanying text. We see Pingru and Meitang 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 they age, 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. It´s a tale at once tragic and inspiring, of enduring love and simple values, an old-fashioned story that unfolds in a nation rapidly becoming modern. Spanning 1923 to 2008, Our Story is a truly singular graphic memoir.