Boxers and Saints are two companion graphic novel volumes written and illustrated by Gene Luen Yang, and colored by Lark Pien.
[3] Saints follows the story of "Four-Girl", a girl from the same village who becomes a Catholic, adopts the name "Vibiana", and hopes to attain the glory of Joan of Arc.
[5] Yang said that he wanted to do two volumes because he was not sure which side in the conflict were "good" or "bad" and he noticed connections between contemporary terrorists and the Boxers.
Yang stated that he encountered more difficulty writing Saints, in which the Christians stay in the same place and defend themselves, compared to Boxers, in which the characters go on an adventure.
[6] Yang decided that a reader needed to be able to enjoy each individual book as a story of its own and not only together, so he gave the beginning-middle-end narrative structure to each.
An oil salesman, Red Lantern Chu, comes and performs wondrous things, such as curing an old woman's lazy eye with a single jab to the neck.
However, he gets kicked off and told to never come back after believing that his new trainer, Master Big Belly, had grown fat on food, and tries to steal from his bean garden.
Bao runs to the mountain, where Master Big Belly reveals his stomach is full of ancient wisdom, and his bean garden represents the many Chinese gods.
He quickly rises in the ranks, and aided by the spirits of Qin Shi Huangdi, Sun Wu Kong, Guan Yu, and many others, his swelling army launches a bloody crusade against “foreign devils,” i.e. Europeans and Christian missionaries.
With Prince Tuan’s support and the Kansu braves’ men, the Boxer rebellion takes off, with the death of Baron von Ketteler and many others occurring.
When the siege of the foreigners' compound fails to get results, Bao controversially attempts to break through by burning down the Hanlin Academy library, which contains ancient priceless texts that preserved a thousand years of Chinese cultural heritage.
Because of the earlier deaths of her would-be siblings and her father, she is not given a proper name by her grandfather, who favors an older cousin, Chung.
In attempting to win his love, “Four-girl” accidentally destroys the family’s house idol while trying to prove her wood chopping skill, causing her grandfather to call her a “devil.” She then starts wearing a "devil face" in public, encouraging her family members to be put on edge by her mere presence.
She sees a syncretic vision of Christ, who tells her not to renounce her faith, and recites the Parable of the Good Samaritan with the healing and pierced hands of Guan Yin, saying "So please, Vibiana, be as mindful of others as I am of you."
While the Boxer Rebellion was a real historical event, the specific stories of Little Bao and Vibiana are fictional creations by Gene Luen Yang.
His primary goal was to dive into the psychological and emotional complexities of the characters and the broader social and cultural context of the time, rather than just providing a historically accurate account.
In an interview Yang comments on one of the main social dilemmas that motivated him to write this novel, stating “In China just over a hundred years ago, being a Chinese Christian was seen as a contradiction.
Yang’s work offers a unique perspective of this historical period with its complex battle of contradicting ideologies, as he states that he “wanted to show that the same event could be interpreted in radically different ways, depending on a person’s life history”.
"[13] Dan Solomon of The Austin Chronicle wrote that the books are "very personal and character-driven, which isn't necessarily what you might anticipate when you have 500 pages in front of you about the Boxer Rebellion.