Difference between revisions of "Yu Hua"
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Yu Hua loves to laugh and during his time as a dentist he found it hard being himself. The lifestyle of a dentist was slowly killing him inside. He hated the long hours and poor government allotted pay. The pressure to be someone he wasn't had to stop. After writing some worthwhile articles he was able to make the transition. Finding a job working at the local cultural center. He said this of the new position, "I was still a poor bastard, but a poor bastard in the cultural center who had every minute to himself. I slept until noon nearly every day. Then I would spend my time wandering about in the streets. If there were absolutely no people left to play with me, I’d go home and write." | Yu Hua loves to laugh and during his time as a dentist he found it hard being himself. The lifestyle of a dentist was slowly killing him inside. He hated the long hours and poor government allotted pay. The pressure to be someone he wasn't had to stop. After writing some worthwhile articles he was able to make the transition. Finding a job working at the local cultural center. He said this of the new position, "I was still a poor bastard, but a poor bastard in the cultural center who had every minute to himself. I slept until noon nearly every day. Then I would spend my time wandering about in the streets. If there were absolutely no people left to play with me, I’d go home and write." | ||
| − | Yu was asked once what fueled his desires to write? what | + | Yu was asked once what fueled his desires to write? what fueled his desires? His response was that he began writing because he wanted to be free to do whatever he wanted to do. He then mentioned that he would always have to write to express himself. |
| − | The change gave Yu the freedom to spend his day being social and seeing china from a view other then his dental office. Yu began to express himself though his writing | + | The change gave Yu the freedom to spend his day being social and seeing china from a view other then his dental office. Yu began to express himself though his writing. |
| − | + | Another of Yu's motivations was money. Growing up with two parents as doctors you would assume that he was wealthy, but that was not the case. The typical american doctor makes now around 200,000 where a Chinese doctor on fixed wages by the government makes roughly 42,000. These numbers are current averages but you can imagine the pay then for Yu's parents wasn't that spectacular. | |
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To educate his generation | To educate his generation | ||
Revision as of 12:12, 5 December 2012
![[1]](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yu_hua.jpg){kind=link}
Childhood
Yu Hua was born on April 3, 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province of China.
![[2]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zhejiang_in_China_(%2Ball_claims_hatched).svg){kind=link}
Yu Hua has very little written of his childhood other then what you can piece together from his novels. Yu, went to school and was raised during the cultural revolution. Yu grew up in and around a hospital where his parents were both doctors. Under the direction of his parents and the government he studied to be a dentist.
Yu said this of dentistry in a interview with Michael Standaert, "I had been working as a dentist for five years, but I didn’t like the job because I was looking into people’s mouths the whole day. The mouth offers the worst scenic view in the world. I was still young and I wanted to see other more interesting things." (Michael Standaert).
The only other event that Yu Hua mentions of his childhood was the comical school experience relating to the death of Mao Zedong. Yu at the age of sixteen had been lead out of the school with thousands of other students for an announcement. Mao Zedong had died that morning, "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!’” (Pankaj Mishra).
Motivations
Yu Hua loves to laugh and during his time as a dentist he found it hard being himself. The lifestyle of a dentist was slowly killing him inside. He hated the long hours and poor government allotted pay. The pressure to be someone he wasn't had to stop. After writing some worthwhile articles he was able to make the transition. Finding a job working at the local cultural center. He said this of the new position, "I was still a poor bastard, but a poor bastard in the cultural center who had every minute to himself. I slept until noon nearly every day. Then I would spend my time wandering about in the streets. If there were absolutely no people left to play with me, I’d go home and write."
Yu was asked once what fueled his desires to write? what fueled his desires? His response was that he began writing because he wanted to be free to do whatever he wanted to do. He then mentioned that he would always have to write to express himself.
The change gave Yu the freedom to spend his day being social and seeing china from a view other then his dental office. Yu began to express himself though his writing.
Another of Yu's motivations was money. Growing up with two parents as doctors you would assume that he was wealthy, but that was not the case. The typical american doctor makes now around 200,000 where a Chinese doctor on fixed wages by the government makes roughly 42,000. These numbers are current averages but you can imagine the pay then for Yu's parents wasn't that spectacular.
To educate his generation
Writing Styles
He even started a movement in china the french named "Avant-garde". Avant-garde stretches the boundaries of the Chinese government and the social norms of china's current cultural realm. Yu Hua did this through writing about Extremes in the Cultural Revolution, the mass protests in 1989. The tools he used best were his vivid first-hand observations, especially the Violent moments. Yu Hua has also been complemented in his writing for how he conveys simply a rich and complex view of China.
Controversy
When the communist party assumed power in 1949, Ba Jin was hopeful for a better future. He believed communism could be the answer to the problems China was facing, However he soon began to see that life did not improve under the communist regime. In the 1950’s he still continued to write, but was compelled to write under the communist theme, which he conformed to. He stopped writing fiction, and strictly wrote nonfiction.
He was also forced to “edit” his past and deny all connection to the Anarchist Movement. In 1961 he said 'I am not satisfied either by the quantity or quality of my works.‘ The attention given to him, proved to be a curse, not a blessing, when he was appointed him to be vice-chairman of the official China Writers' Association.[7]
He regretted his submissive actions and when allowed to, he began expressing his true opinions and criticized the government. He even wrote a letter of support to the students of the 1989 Tiananmen protests on May 18. (before the massacre had started.)
During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Terror was unleashed on all non-supporters of Mao Zedong. The Red Guards attacked many writers, including Ba Jin. They made a big fuss about his anarchist past. They saw his independent thinking was dangerous, and claimed he was being a traitor to his country.
For a while he was imprisoned, and was also forced to work in a Labor camp. Finally, on June 20, 1968, Ba Jin was dragged to the People's Stadium of Shanghai. It was a televised humiliating spectacle with him kneeling on broken glass, with the shouts from the crowd, accusing him of being a traitor and enemy of Mao Zedong. At the end of the demonstration Ba Jin shouted, “You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me.”[8]
Legacy
"Brothers," published in two parts in China, in 2005 and 2006, sold millions of copies and helped cement Yu's place as one of the country's few homegrown literary stars.
- Yu Hua's novels have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Persian, Spanish, Swedish, Serbian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Malayalam.
References
Sources
Michael Standaert. "Michael Standaert, Interview with Yu Hua" MCLC Resource Center, August 30, 2003. <http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/yuhua.htm>.
Mishra Pankaj. "Mishra Pankaj, The Bonfire of China’s Vanities" The New York Times. The New York Times, 25 Jan. 2009. Web. 23 Jan. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25hua-t.html?_r=2&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all&>.