Belle Yang
Belle Yang (born 1960) is a Taiwanese-American artist, author, graphic novelist, and children's book writer. She was born in Taiwan and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with her parents when she was seven. She earned a biology degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and later studied art. An ex-boyfriend’s harassment led her to live with family friends in Beijing for three years, where she traveled the country and studied history and classical Chinese art. She was in Beijing during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and returned to the United States later that year.
Back home, Yang began recording her parents’ stories from life in China, which became her first book, Baba, A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders (1994). Published by Harcourt Brace, it centers on her father, Joseph Yang, walking out of 1940s war-torn China. Foreword by Amy Tan calls Yang “an American writer who writes in English and thinks in Chinese.” Maxine Hong Kingston compared Yang’s art and writing to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Marc Chagall. Kirkus Reviews described her work as “a lovely painted scroll … full of wild spirits, creatures, and feelings of tragedy and hope.”
In 1996 she published Odyssey of a Manchurian about her father’s exodus from China, completing a trilogy with Forget Sorrow, An Ancestral Tale (2010), published by W. W. Norton & Company. Yang has also written children’s books, including Chili-Chili-Chin-Chin, Foo the Flying Frog of Washtub Pond, Always Come Home to Me, and My Name Is Hannah, a retelling of her family waiting for a green card.
Her art has been shown in museums with a national tour titled Crossing Cultures: Belle Yang, A Story of Immigration. A documentary about her, My Name Is Belle, was made by Mac and Ava Motion Pictures and has been shown on public television.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:18 (CET).