Yu Hua

Yu Hua at the 2005 Singapore Writers Festival [[1]]

Childhood

Yu Hua was born on April 3, 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province of China.

Original File [[2]]

Yu Hua has very little written of his childhood other then what you can piece together from his novels. Yu, went to school like the rest of his generation. 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 something he was not had to end. 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."

The change gave Yu the freedom to spend his day being social and seeing china from the streets and not through his dental office. Yu began to express himself though his writing, 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, and .

"In 1993, when I believed I could support myself with my writing, I gave up the job, the one that offered the most freedom in the world. I settled in Beijing and began a life filled with even more freedom."

News week Extremes

Happiness

Money

To educate his generation

Writing Styles

The novel “Family” is a story of a broken home. The family relationship is the complete opposite of what a family should be like. It makes perfectly clear the injustices of the time, and the senile traditions of the Kao family.

There are 3 main protagonists in the story. They are three brothers, Cheuh Hsin, Cheuh Hui, and Cheuh Min. They each have their own ambitions and love interests, however each is muddled up and ruined by the elders of the family, particularly the grandfather, who is the head of the house, and has the final say on everything.

The oldest brother, Cheuh Hsin, (whom I think perfectly represents Ba Jin) is very good academically, and has plans to study abroad. He also has his heart set on marrying Mei Mei. His hopes are shattered, however, when his father arranges for him to marry a complete stranger, and also his dreams of continuing his education when his father sends him to work at a local, family-owned business, to support his new family.

Cheuh Hui loves Ming Feng, a servant in their house. He feels strongly about going forward with their relationship but he can’t bring himself to tell his relatives about it. Without his knowledge, the grandfather arranges for her to become a concubine to one of the grandpa’s friends. She is so dejected and frightened by the prospect, that she drowns herself. This sends Cheuh Hui into severe depression.

Chueh Min is perhaps the only character that may achieve his own ambition. He loves Chin, a cousin who has similar goals for her education. But they are equally afraid let anyone find out about any of this.

The final blow on the characters is struck when the grandfather dies. There is a tradition in this part of china, that when a corpse is in a house, and a woman is giving birth, it causes the corpse to be desecrated and spurt blood or something like that. So, Cheuh Hsin’s wife is giving birth, and in order to keep with tradition, she is forced to go somewhere else to have her baby, in the dead of winter, all to protect the dead grandpa and she dies in childbirth.

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

He was happily married to Xiao Shan from 1944 until she died in 1973 They had two children, A daughter and a son, both of whom had the freedom filled upbringing he wanted himself to have. They each choose their own careers and their own spouses. His daughter is now a leading member of the editorial department of a big Chinese literary magazine while his son is a rising novelist. [9]

His wife, Xiao Shan died of cancer in 1973, which affected him deeply. He said, "When I lose my ability to work, I hope there will be several copies of fictions translated by Xiao Shan on my sickbed. After I close my eyes, please let my ashes be mixed with hers." [10] In 1983 he contracted Parkinson’s disease, which in his final years left him mute and unable to walk. He spent most of that time in a hospital in Shanghai, where he died in 2005 at the age of 100.

He left behind a vast amount of writing and shared the wealth of experience from the century of his life. That legacy was the legacy of learning from your mistakes, and choosing to be a nonconformist. He saw both sides of the spectrum, conformity and rebellion, and he chose at last to stay a rebel forever.

• Yu Hua's novels have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Persian, Spanish, Swedish, Serbian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Malayalam.

References

• A conversation with Yu Hua at UCLA

• A profile of Yu Hua in the New York Times Magazine

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&>.