Yu Hua (simplified Chinese: 余华; traditional Chinese: 余華; pinyin: Yú Huá) is a Chinese author, born on April 3, 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. He studied dentistry but soon decided to write fiction in 1983 because it allowed him to be more creative and flexible. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution so many of his stories and novels are marked by this experience. Some[who?] have called his early work brutal.
Yu Hua has so far written four novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His most important novels are Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and To Live. The latter novel was adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. Because the film was banned in China, it instantly made the novel a bestseller and Yu Hua a worldwide celebrity. His novels have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean and Malayalam.
[edit] Works
Short Stories
- Leaving Home at Eighteen (十八岁出门远行, Shíbā Suì Chūmén Yuǎnxíng)
- The Past and the Punishments: Eight Stories ISBN 0-8248-1817-2
- World Like Mist: Eight Stories (Shi shi ru yan) ISBN 986-7691-37-7
Novels
- To Live (1992) (活着, Huózhe) ISBN 1-4000-3186-9
- Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (许三观卖血记, Xǔ Sānguān Mài Xuè Jì) (1995) ISBN 1-4000-3185-0
- Cries in the Drizzle (在细雨中呼喊, Zaixiyuzhong Huhan) (2003) ISBN 978-0-307-27999-6
- Brothers (兄弟, Xiōng Dì) (2005) shortlisted at the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize
[edit] External links
The Bonfire of China’s Vanities
One cold afternoon last fall I met Yu Hua at the state-run Friendship Hotel in Beijing. Cheerfully, he described to me the incipient international fame of his most recent novel, “Brothers,” one of China’s biggest-selling literary works. He had just returned from Hong Kong, where the novel was short-listed for the Man Asian Prize; he was leaving soon for Paris to receive an award for the book, which had just been translated into French. With the breezy insouciance that unbroken success creates, Yu then began to recount a somewhat irreverent memory of Mao Zedong’s death.
Though nearly 50, Yu, who wears his hair short and spiky, looks relatively young. He speaks in emphatic bursts, his face often flushing red, and he is quick to laugh. It was, in fact, his boisterous laugh that almost got him into trouble on the morning of the solemn announcement of Mao’s death. Responding to orders that blared out from loudspeakers, he assembled with hundreds of other students in the main hall of his small-town high school. “Funereal music was played, and then we had to hear the long list of titles that preceded Mao’s name, ‘Chairman,’ ‘Beloved Leader,’ ‘Great helmsman . . . ,’ ” Yu recalled. “Everyone loved Chairman Mao, of course, so when his name was finally announced, everyone burst into tears. I started crying, too, but one person crying is a sad sight; more than a thousand people crying together, the sound echoing, turns into a funny spectacle, so I began to laugh. My body shook with my effort to control my laughter while I bent over the chair in front of me. The class leader later told me, admiringly, ‘Yu Hua, you were crying so fervently!’ ”
He paused, and then jumped 13 years to a memory of another momentous — and more traumatic — event in China’s modern history. In the spring of 1989, when tens of thousands of protesters filled Tiananmen Square, Yu was living in Beijing, partaking of the cultural excitement and political hopefulness of post-Mao China. Already a major figure in the city’s artistic avant garde, Yu biked every day to Tiananmen Square to express solidarity with the student protesters.
As Yu described the widespread civilian support for the students, a note of passion entered his voice, and the menu he had elegantly snagged off a passing waiter lay open and unread in his lap. “The word ‘people’ was much used in the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “It is a very loaded term in China, it is used a lot, but until the mass protests in 1989 I did not realize what the word meant.”
His voice grew louder as he recalled the bloody suppression and aftermath of the protests. I became nervous. Yu, a short, thickset man with bulging eyes, could easily pass unnoticed in a crowd of Chinese peasants and workers, but he does not exactly strive for self-effacement. We were sitting in the corner of the hotel lobby, partly concealed by a large pillar and surrounded by a thick fog of cigarette smoke. Yu, a restless chain smoker, insists on ignoring China’s new ban on smoking in public places.
The hotel was full that day of young executives from nearby I.T. offices, any one of whom might have recognized Yu, who is frequently mentioned as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though official repression of the memory of Tiananmen has ensured that few young Chinese know much about the struggles for democracy waged in the 1980s, cybersavvy youth of the kind we were surrounded by are still likely to take a sternly nationalistic line with a Chinese writer or intellectual criticizing the events of June 1989 to a foreigner. Indeed, as Yu spoke, a trendily dressed young woman looked up from the glowing screen of her laptop to squint at him.
Yu seemed totally oblivious to potential eavesdroppers. His face was red as he came to end of his memory of 1989. Turning to me, he said: “Sorry to take off like that. But this was a big turning point for all of us. After June 1989 people in China lost interest in politics. In 1992 Deng Xiaoping made his famous ‘Southern Tour,’ calling for faster market reforms, and the economy started to take off. The ideals of nation and socialism began to look empty. People became focused on making money.
“I, too, began to enjoy the fruits of capitalism,” he added, and laughed.
YYu was only partly joking. For someone who started out in China’s brief moment of counterculture in the 1980s as a writer of bleak, experimental and defiantly unsalable stories, Yu has gone on to receive an ample share of the fruits of capitalism. Published in two parts in 2005 and 2006, “Brothers,” which traces the fortunes of two stepbrothers from the Cultural Revolution to China’s no-less-frenzied Consumer Revolution, has sold more than a million copies in China, not counting the probably higher sales of innumerable pirated editions.
The novel, which will be published in an English translation later this month, may also prove to be China’s first successful export of literary fiction. Certainly, foreign readers will find in its sprawling, rambunctious narrative some of China’s most frenetic transformations and garish contradictions. “Brothers” strikes its characteristic tone with the very first scene, as Li Guang, a business tycoon, sits on his gold-plated toilet, dreaming of space travel even as he mourns the loss of all earthly relations. Li made his money from various entrepreneurial ventures, including hosting a beauty pageant for virgins and selling scrap metal and knockoff designer suits. A quick flashback to his small-town childhood shows him ogling the bottoms of women defecating in a public toilet. Similarly grotesque images proliferate over the next 600 pages as Yu describes, first, the extended trauma of the Cultural Revolution, during which Li and his stepbrother Song Gang witness Red Guards torturing Song Gang’s father to death, and then the moral wasteland of capitalist China, in which Song Gang is forced to surgically enlarge one of his breasts in order to sell breast-enlargement gels.
余華（1960年4月3日－），中國作家，浙江杭州人，後隨父母遷至海鹽縣。中學畢業後，曾從事牙醫五年後棄醫從文，現定居北京從事職業寫作。余華從1984年開始發表小說，是中國大陸先鋒派小說的代表人物，並與葉兆言和蘇童等人齊名。《十八歲出門遠行》是他的處女作，代表作品有《許三觀賣血記》、《活着》、《在細雨中呼喊》等。其中《活着》和《許三觀賣血記》同時入選百位批評家和文學編輯評選的「九十年代最有影響的十部作品」。其一些作品已被翻譯成英文、法文、德文、俄文、意大利文、荷蘭文、挪威文、韓文和日文等，在外國出版。
目錄[隱藏] |
[編輯] 近況
- 2005年8月出版最新作品《兄弟》（上）；
- 2006年4月出版《兄弟》（下）；
[編輯] 作品
- 長篇小說：《活着》、《許三觀賣血記》、《在細雨中呼喊》、《兄弟》；
- 中篇小說集：《鮮血梅花》、《現實一種》、《我膽小如鼠》、《戰慄》；
- 隨筆集：《溫暖和百感交集的旅程》、《音樂影響了我的寫作》、《沒有一條道路是重複的》、《靈魂飯》。
[編輯] 獎項
- 1998年，意大利格林扎納－卡佛文學獎
- 2002年，澳大利亞懸念句子文學獎
- 2004年，美國巴恩斯－諾貝爾新發現圖書獎
- 2004年，法國藝術及文學勳章（騎士級）
[編輯] 外部連結
- （简体中文）《兄弟》（選載）
- 可凡傾聽 - 採訪余華 《探詢暢銷作家余華的神秘魅力》
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