MCLC: Yu Hua review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Yu Hua review
***********************************************************

Source: New York Review of Books
(10/11/12):http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/11/honest-writ
er-survives-china/

An Honest Writer Survives in China
By Ian Johnson

China in Ten Words
by Yu Hua, translated from the Chinese by Allan H. Barr
Pantheon, 225 pp., $25.95

To Live
by Yu Hua, translated from the Chinese and with an afterword by Michael
Berry 
Anchor, 250 pp., $14.00 (paper)
      
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
by Yu Hua, translated from the Chinese and with an afterword by Andrew F.
Jones 
Anchor, 263 pp., $13.95 (paper)
      
Brothers
by Yu Hua, translated from the Chinese and with a preface by Eileen
Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas
Anchor, 641 pp., $16.95 (paper)
      

The Past and the Punishments
by Yu Hua, translated from the Chinese and with a postscript by Andrew F.
Jones 
University of Hawaii Press, 277 pp., $14.95 (paper)
                   
Yu Hua @ 
by Yu Hua 
digital book in Chinese published by Tianyi Yuedu Jidi and Hongqi Chubanshe

A little over a year ago, I went with the Chinese writer Yu Hua to his
hometown of Hangzhou, some one hundred miles southwest of Shanghai, and
realized that his bawdy books might not be purely fictional; their
characters and situations seemed to follow him around in real life too.

We stayed in a villa in a secluded development built on part of a wetlands
park. The string of houses, bridges, and canals was surrounded by high
walls and walkie-talkie-wielding guards. Yu’s neighbors were film
producers, directors, artists, writers, and government officials—all
beneficiaries of a city-run company that owned the properties and lent
them out to anyone it figured might lend luster to Hangzhou, do something
artistic, or simply had the pull to live in a luxury development. Yu is
one of China’s most famous writers and even though his relationship to the
city is tenuous—he was born in Hangzhou but left as an infant for a small
town and now lives in Beijing—officials hoped he’d give their city some
cachet.

Over the next few days, the villa was the setting for a series of meals,
one raunchier than the next. The high point was a boozy lunch where the
head of the local writer’s association ogled the legs of the deputy head
of propaganda, while a paunchy singer for the People’s Liberation Army
showed off a “talented young lady” he had taken under his wing. Later, a
Party secretary arrived with a suitcase full of French wine and an
enormous celadon vase from the onetime imperial kilns of Jingdezhen—the
sort of trophy that governments in China fob off on famous visitors and
hotel lobbies. When everyone was suitably drunk, Yu quieted the room with
an announcement.

“We were just at West Lake,” he said, referring to the city’s most famous
tourist site. “I haven’t seen so many people in one place since June
4”—the 1989 massacre of antigovernment protesters in Beijing.

“Ha-ha, Yu Hua, only you,” the writer’s association chairman cackled as he
cocked his head in Yu’s direction. “I live next door to him. Always
joking.”

“What are you saying?” Yu said crossly. “Your only contribution to society
is to file fake meal receipts.”
The chairman widened his eyes and was about to counterattack but everyone
began laughing at him. He meekly bowed his head, whimpering: “We’re
neighbors, we’re neighbors. Ha-ha. He’s joking.”

And so it went for another hour as Yu treated the local notables to jokes,
innuendos about corruption, and the failings of the Communist Party. When
the wine bottles had been emptied, the prawns sucked dry, and a bottle of
grain alcohol lay on its side, the guests staggered out to their
government-issue Audi A6L limousines, windows tinted and doors held open
by drivers in dark aviator glasses. Yu saw them off with a wave and then
wondered aloud: “Who the fuck were these people? I can’t believe I
actually toasted them!”

The feeling might have been mutual. In a sense, the visitors had gotten
what they’d come for—a chance to meet the famous man and, in the privacy
of dinner, congratulate themselves on being so open-minded that they could
laugh along with Yu as he criticized the Communist Party. But like many
intellectuals in China, Yu is being forced into an increasingly
uncomfortable situation. He is unwilling to break with China and still
takes pride in living here, but the stagnant political climate—including
tighter controls over culture and the media—has pushed him into riskier
views at odds with his position as one of the country’s top establishment
writers.

Over the past two decades, the fifty-two-year-old Yu has emerged as one of
China’s most popular authors. His best-known work, the 1993 novel To Live,
recounts in parable-like form the story of a peasant who endures China’s
civil war and then the famines and political campaigns of early Communist
rule. His main quality is his sheer will to live, making the novel a bleak
commentary on recent Chinese history. The novel sold more than 200,000
copies in 2011 in China, according to his publisher, the Writers
Publishing House. His next novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, tells the
story of man who almost kills himself by selling blood to pay for his
family’s survival in the Mao period; it is another book that most educated
Chinese know and have read. In 2005 and 2006, he published his riskiest
novel, the best-selling Brothers, a picaresque story of two stepbrothers
whose lives span the latter half of the Maoist period and today’s reform
era. The underlying message is that today’s naked capitalism has its roots
in the brutality of early Communist rule. It can still be found on
bookstands selling pirated books—high praise in a country with a short
attention span.

Like any talented novelist in China, Yu has always walked a fine line: To
Live was made into an acclaimed movie by the Chinese director Zhang Yimou
but it was banned in China, even though Zhang toned down Yu’s most caustic
criticisms. (In the most notorious scene in the novel, the hero’s son has
his blood drained by a provincial doctor eager to save the life of a top
official; the movie makes his death an accident.) More recently, Brothers
caused critics in China to object that the evil brother was successful
while the good brother lost out—hardly the message that China’s cultural
bureaucrats want. Both, however, were published and widely read.

But Yu is now going further. He has started writing critical Op-Eds in
foreign publications and isn’t even bothering to try to publish his latest
book, China in Ten Words, in China. The book is a collection of ten
essays, each one based on a word that sets off musings on China, past and
present. They range from basic terms like “reading,” “writing,” and
“people” to more politically loaded words like “leader,” “revolution,” and
“Lu Xun”—the great early-twentieth-century Chinese author. He ends with
four words that sum up today’s China: “disparity,” “grassroots,”
“copycat,” and “bamboozle.”

The essays are strongest when they tell Yu’s own story of becoming a
writer. Born in 1960, he was six when the Cultural Revolution started, and
in one of the essays, “Reading,” he describes how he first came upon
novels. In the 1970s they were forbidden, but he and a friend managed to
borrow for twenty-four hours The Lady of the Camellias, a romantic novel
by Alexandre Dumas that another student had copied out by hand. The two
spent a feverish night making their own copy, splitting the work in half.
After they returned the original and sat down to read the other’s copy,
they realized that they had written so quickly that they couldn’t read
each other’s handwriting. By a streetlight, they read the novel to each
other, gasping in pleasure at the romance and tragedy of the courtesan who
dies of tuberculosis after being forced to abandon her true love.

In the essay “Writing,” Yu moves his personal story further along,
explaining how he became a writer. In the early 1980s, under China’s
prevailing form of socialism, he had ample free time to write while
working as a dentist in the small town of Haiyan where his family had
moved. He would send out manuscripts to scores of literary journals across
China. Most of the time they would be returned, the postman tossing them
over the wall to his family’s house. When his father heard the thud in the
yard he would yell out Yu’s name followed by “Reject!”

After a few years, his career was launched when a Beijing literary
magazine accepted three short stories for publication and brought him to
the capital for a meeting. He toured the city at the magazine’s expense
and was sent back home with a wad of per diem expense money. When he got
home, local officials were so flabbergasted that anyone from their town
was talented enough to be called to Beijing that they got him transferred
to the local “culture palace,” where he was allowed to work unsupervised.
That era, Yu says, “is my most beautiful memory of socialism.”

Often the stories are less nostalgic than brutal. In the essay
“Revolution,” he recounts how a friend’s father committed suicide after
months of torture at the hands of Red Guards. The night before the man
jumped into a well, Yu writes,

I had seen him in the street just a few hours before. Blood was trickling
down his forehead, and he was walking with a limp. In the failing light of
that late afternoon, his right hand rested on his son’s scrawny shoulders,
and as he talked to the boy, he wore a smile of seeming nonchalance.

This violence has marked Yu’s writing career. In the 1980s his short
stories (many of which are found in the collection The Past and the
Punishments) were so violent that almost every character seemed to die an
unnatural death. During this phase, he writes in China in Ten Words, he
was plagued almost every night by nightmares, until he dreamed of his own
death. That helped him recover a suppressed memory of having witnessed at
close range an execution during the Cultural Revolution—he recalls in
vivid detail how the victim’s head was blown open by the bullet, a
gruesome image but one that finally allows him to tame the past.

Topics like this aren’t always taboo in China. Chinese novelists often
explore the Cultural Revolution and problems in contemporary society. But
China in Ten Words is much more explicit than these works, or any of Yu’s
previous works. He writes about the Tiananmen Square massacre openly,
recalling the solidarity of people in Beijing as they tried to resist the
army’s approach into the city. Riding back one night from the square, he
was chilled by the night air until he felt from afar a wave of heat. As he
rode on, he realized the warmth came from a group of people standing to
protect the Hujialou intersection from approaching soldiers:

Although unarmed, they stood steadfast, confident that with their bodies
alone they could block soldiers and ward off tanks. Packed together, they
gave off a blast of heat, as though every one of them was a blazing torch.

This, he says, is the true meaning of the word “people,” a word the
Communist Party once used to describe the backbone of its support but that
today is rarely heard in public discourse. Instead, scholars and officials
whisper worriedly of rural unrest and other signs of a people who remain
discontent.

Yu also tackles sensitive issues such as the wealth gap in China, one of
the largest in the world. The essay “Disparity” starts in the past with
him relating the heartbreaking story of how he was a member of a Cultural
Revolution gang that beat up rural laborers coming to the city to buy and
sell rationing coupons—defined as a counterrevolutionary act in Maoist
China. One unlucky young man came to town to buy coupons so he could put
on his wedding feast. Yu and his friends pummeled the man until, bloodied,
he finally opened his fist to reveal the illegally obtained coupons. Yu
and his hoodlum friends turned the peasant in to the authorities and then,
when he was released, beat him all the way to the edge of town: “Clutching
his injured hand to his chest, with a dazed and hopeless look on his face,
he set out on the long road home that morning long ago.”

Yu then jumps to the present to talk about the notorious chengguan, a
government agency that ostensibly enforces city rules (parking, vendor
licenses, etc.) but has morphed into a brutish force with policing power
that preys on urban migrants. Equipped with the latest riot police gear,
they round up country folk at will, fine them, and send them home. For a
while the Chinese press was willing to criticize the chengguan, but the
subject has faded from public discussion.

In “Copycat,” Yu suggests that not only are cell phones and software
pirated in China; even ideas like environmentalism and political reform
are circulated in tamed and tepid versions. This calls into question many
major government projects to modernize the country, with Yu essentially
saying they are a sham. The reason, he says, is that Chinese haven’t fully
discussed or understood what their country is doing. Just as during the
Cultural Revolution people blindly followed Mao, today they reflexively
embrace market economics. “After participating in one mass movement during
the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another:
economic development.” This may be a bit simplistic, but his drawing of
parallels between the past and present is rare and unwelcome to the
regime. In official discourse, an entirely new historical period started
in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms.

Yu’s willingness to challenge these conventions puts him in the company of
more explicit dissidents like the conceptual artist Ai Weiwei and the
writer Liao Yiwu. Yu is not as provocative as either—unlike Ai, he doesn’t
literally give the Communist Party the finger, and unlike Liao he didn’t
write what amounts to a howl at the Tiananmen Square massacre. Both men
are on the government’s blacklist and Liao last year fled into exile in
Germany. Earlier this year, the essayist and Christian activist Yu Jie
chose a similar path, emigrating with this family after being jailed. But
in publishing China in Ten Words abroad, Yu has made a similar decision to
bypass domestic censorship and aim his work at a foreign audience. He
hasn’t gone quite as far as Ai, who relies on Western curators and buyers
for his shows and sales, or Liao, who hasn’t been able to publish a work
in China in fifteen years. But the new book is a clear break from his
string of domestic best sellers.

The gap between what can and can’t be published in China can be measured
by another book he published there last autumn, Yu Hua @. The book is a
collection of his blogs. He deals with a variety of topics, from
impressions of trips abroad to comments on society. He cites the South
African activist and retired bishop Desmond Tutu on the need for a country
to preserve its historical memory. In another post, he blasts the powerful
Ministry of Railways for covering up a horrific rail crash in July.

The Chinese book, however, lacks the systematic criticism found in the
English one, which is much more explicit in showing how the country is
still trapped by the past. Yu Hua @ touches on this issue once in a while
but doesn’t explore it nearly as fully. And needless to say it doesn’t
mention the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Yu’s career shows how these political and literary issues are linked.
While in Hangzhou, Yu and I had a chance to talk about literature and
politics, and what struck me most was a comment he made on criticism. What
China most lacked, he said, was publications that would help create great
literature: the journals, reviews, and magazines where young writers can
get a start and receive honest criticism. In China, literary journals are
either politicized or open to bidding, with favorable reviews bought by
authors or their publishers. This isn’t to say that all criticism in China
is corrupted, but much of it is, stifling the honest give-and-take that
might encourage the creation of genuinely superior work.

Most striking in Chinese literature is the lack of editing. Indeed,
publishing houses rarely revise or improve on drafts; many writers send in
first drafts—after all, no one who reads it will object. Some of Yu’s own
works exhibit these traits; Brothersfeels about one hundred pages too long
and, although poignant and hilarious, it is sometimes also maudlin and
full of clichés. These problems go beyond literature: Chinese artists and
academics are often astonishingly prolific because they tend to churn out
works. One talented Chinese artist I know regularly produces three
enormous shows a year; wiser and less greedy curators and gallery owners
would have advised him against this. Academics sometimes publish a book a
year, many of them regurgitations of earlier work or partially plagiarized
material. The concept of blind peer reviews is all but unknown.

The unwillingness to criticize a “master”—whether he is an acclaimed
writer, artist, or scholar—is ingrained in Chinese society. But these
problems are also political. The Communist Party’s politicizing of
journals and its ban on independent organizations inhibit the creation of
the institutions of civil society—independent journals, professional
groups, and open discussion—that are conducive to creative work.
At its annual plenum in 2011, the Communist Party declared culture to be a
national priority. It wants China to be more respected internationally and
realizes that, for all its problems, the United States is still the
culturally dominant country. The Party also knows that China must
encourage the creative impulse if it is to move up the economic
ladder—from being a country that produces for others and copies their
products to one that makes its own global brands.

That’s one reason why places like Hangzhou have been pushing creative
industries, hoping to lure people like Yu to contribute. But without real
reform, writers like Yu will be adornments who face the impossible
decision of whether to publish at home or abroad. These dichotomies make
Yu’s books more relevant than ever. His vision of a country ensnared by
its past may seem of interest only to history-obsessed foreigners. But as
he and many Chinese realize, it is the key to understanding the country’s
stunted modernization.