Carlos Prado-Fonts, Regina Wei, and Honghong Ma for APA
UCLA Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures

Click here to read Shirley Hsu's review of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant.

From staring at teeth to his first officially-sponsored visit to Beijing to seeing the adaptation of one of his novels into an internationally acclaimed film, contemporary Chinese novelist Yu Hua has come a long way as a writer. On his visit to UCLA on November 24, 2003 he impressed a crowded room full of students, faculty and other community members with his eloquence and quick wit and allowed his audience a glimpse of what it means to be a writer in contemporary China today.

While admitting that writing provides him a vital emotional release, Yu Hua says that he can't really write for himself. Looking at the relation between the writer, his readership and the market, he believes that a writer is always a product of a society. His own writing cannot be said to be written for himself or for the people. A fervent admirer of Lu Xun's work and his commitment to the “writer's responsibility,” Yu Hua asserts that writing not only provides him health and completes his own life, but also makes him able to discover the fiction of the world.

During his talk at UCLA's Asia Institute, Yu Hua discussed this and many other aspects of his career and his views on writing. The writer, is currently participating in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, has recently seen two of his major novels published in English. To Live (Knopf, 2003), translated by Michael Berry, tells the story of Fu Gui, a son of a wealthy family who, after having lost his fortune, becomes an honest farmer and suffers the hardships of fate and the truculences of history. To Live—which has been used in the teaching of post-1949 Chinese History—became extremely popular in China and reached international audiences when acclaimed director Zhang Yimou turned it into a successful movie in 1993. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (Pantheon, 2003), translated by Andrew Jones, describes how Xu Sanguan, an ordinary factory worker, has to sell his own blood at several points of his life in order to support his family during the bleak years of the Cultural Revolution. Written in a lyrical but sober style and not exempt from humor and satire, the novel masterfully reflects on the collapse of many concepts and values in modern Chinese society.

Looking at these two novels, Yu Hua sees an evolution in his treatment of the fiction characters throughout his career. His short stories written during the avant-garde period of the late-1980s portray groups of flat characters with symbolic nature. People appear as symbols or signs, in the same line as French nouveau roman author Alain Robbe-Grillet. Some of these pieces of short fiction were also translated by Andrew Jones and published under the title of The Past and the Punishments (University of Hawaii Press, 1996). Throughout his later writing experiences, Yu Hua claims to have discovered his characters' own voices. The later novels depict more mature characters, such as Fu Gui and Xu Sanguan. In this sense, he confesses having learned the craft of writing from Shen Congwen, another of the most important Chinese writers in the 20th century, who emphasized the tiezhe renwu xie, literally, “writing by sticking closely to the characters.” This—along with a very able adaptability to the situation of the literary market both in China and abroad—can help explaining his transition from the short story form towards the long novel. In the novel the characters are less confined by the literary limits, says Yu Hua, who is currently working on two long works of fiction.

Born in 1960 in Hangzhou, Yu Hua worked as a dentist for five years when he graduated from high school right after the Cultural Revolution. The publication of his short story “On the Road at Eighteen” in 1984 draw the attention of Chinese critics and catapulted him to a prominent position within the literary avant-garde of Post-Mao China, along with authors like Su Tong, Ge Fei or Wang Shuo. In the 1990s his work reached a wider readership without losing some of the features that had established his reputation in the previous decade. Today, after having published several novels, collections of short stories and critical essays, Yu Hua is more than ever at the forefront of China's literary scene and is widely acclaimed as one of the most talented and creative voices of contemporary Chinese literature.