Click here to read a report on Yu Hua's UCLA visit.

The plot of acclaimed Chinese author Yu Hua's Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, a novel newly translated into English, is simple enough: the good-hearted factory worker Xu Sanguan sells his blood every time his family is financially strapped. At 35 yuan for four hundred milliliters of blood, a farmer can earn more money than he would make working six months in the fields. Confident with the advice of friends that blood is like well water---"If you never go to the well, the source dries up, but if you use it every day, there'll always be just as much water as there was before"--Xu Sanguan figures he's tapped into a goldmine. After each transaction, he refuels at the Victory Restaurant, where he plops down two yuan, and orders two shots of warm yellow rice wine and a plate of fried pork livers, pounding his fist on the table for emphasis. When the Cultural Revolution and ensuing famine grips the country, Xu Sanguan's blood dealings become alarmingly frequent, and he soon sinks into a dangerous blood deficit that pork livers can't replenish. 

Despite the agonizing plot, Yu Hua's novel is compassionate and his characters simple, yet dignified. Some critics, however, have suggested that Yu Hua's treatment of his characters is simplistic and lacks internal complexity. For example, one MSN.com reporter writes that "if there is something that remains self-consciously difficult or experimental about his style, it's the flatness of the characters." But these criticisms overlook the broad scope of Yu Hua's story. True, his characters are not terrifically complex--they are uneducated, although endowed with rural wisdom, but at heart Chronicle is not really the story of an individual; it is the story of a family. This novel is less about complex internal states than it is about external relationships, familial bonds and community ties--the relationships that a pre-Communist Confucian society placed supreme importance on over individual desires.  The individual, in this story, melts away and is replaced by the various roles that individual plays. Yu Sanguan's sons, for example, rather than having highly individualistic names, are named Yile, Erle, and Sanle, meaning First Son, Second Son, and Third Son.  Never do they melt away into one generic son however, each character has his own distinct personality, yet it is clear that their purpose in is to act as sons to Yu Sanguan, and as brothers to one another. Chronicle explores the societal roles and relationships once strictly defined by Confucian hierarchy and structure, later unmoored by the Communist Revolution.

Xu Sanguan himself never once sells blood to make money for himself; each time he makes a transaction, it is to strengthen a bond with another person.  He sells to earn money to take his future wife out for a bowl of dumplings.  He sells to take his slowly starving family out to dinner. When Sanle is sent to a communal farm, Yu Sanguan sells blood to curry favor with Sanle's commune chief, hoping to make Sanle's life a little easier. Finally, with no one left to sell blood for, as his sons have all married, he breaks down completely for the first time.

Yu Hua's books have been successful in China for over a decade for a reason; they touch upon the dismay many Chinese felt at the unleashing and upheaval of societal roles, of relationships turned topsy-turvy by the Cultural Revolution. Xu Sanguan's sons, for whose sake he must have sold over a gallon of blood over the years, are ultimately imcomprehensible and disrespectful.  After Communist party officials publicly humiliate Yu Sanguan's long suffering wife for a decade-old transgression, her own sons turn on her, calling her a whore. Finally, when an aging Xu Sanguan tries to sell blood for a final time because he feels like having a plate of pork livers, the new blood chief, an arrogant young man, insults him, comparing his blood to that of a pig's.  This slap in the face is ultimately more upsetting than all of Xu Sanguan's blood transactions, heartbreaking as they are.

Yu Hua's gift for compassionate humor lightens the brutal story; he eases the agonizing situation without once ridiculing his characters, all of which are poor, uneducated, average citizens. In the end, it is this humor that brings the characters to life and give them dimension and dignity. After the upstart young blood chief humiliates Xu Sanguan, his wife complains about the new breed of obnoxious young people: "Who does he think he is?  Why, he's even younger than Sanle, and yet he dares to talk like that to you!  Back when we had Sanle, this Shen wasn't even a twinkling in his mother's eye, and now he thinks he's on top of the world."

Replies Xu Sanguan, "That's why people say pubic hair doesn't come out till after your eyebrows do, but gets even longer in the end."