21/9/24. Baba ("daddy" in Chinese) is Joseph Yang, born in Manchuria in 1928. His daughter, Belle, a writer and artist who was born in Taiwan but whose "spiritual address in much in the West", set out in 1986 to paint and to write - and thereby preserve for posterity - Baba's memories of his coming-of-age in China in the 1930s and 1940s. The result is this book, an illustrated odyssey of the fourth of seven children in the House of Yang, a prominent Manchurian family, who experienced the Japanese occupation of northern China. Through his life Baba is informed and influenced by characters both human and spiritual: the benevolent goddess Guanyin, the mystical Scholar Wang and the vague and ominously prophetic Ma Po Po.