Yu Hua

His personal life was heavily influenced by the changes that China has gone through. He stated in an interview that he grew up in a time when China went through many different changes in a relatively short period of time. He said, “I grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Then came Reform and Opening and the economy’s explosive takeoff in the 90s, and then came the fantastic wildness of the new century and our worldview and our value system were both turned upside down.” He has also said that childhood experiences will impact the life of a writer.

In recent years, Yu Hua has dedicated many of his works about China itself, both aimed at China and East Asia, and then also the Western world. He also writes a monthly column for The New York Times in which he describes issues about China. Many of his writings have been known for their violence, but he is also known for some of his more intimate style. For example, the book, he stated in an interview that the book “To Live,” addresses “the cruelty and violence of the Cultural Revolution,” but that he also has “milder stories” like “The Boy in Twilight.” One of the key aspects of his writing is in dealing with the absurd. In an interview, he stated that “I am a realistic writer, and if my stories are often absurd, that’s simply because they are a projection of absurd realities.” As China has changed, he has started writing about the absurdities that come with it. In answering the criticisms that his writing is too violent, he responds that he is reflecting what he sees in reality, stating that “violence has long existed in my subconscious.”

Heavily inspired and affected by the Cultural Revolution, the theme of modern Chinese history is prevalent in Yu Hua's writing. His stories are often set in small towns during historical periods that he experienced including China under Chairman Mao's rule, the Civil War and Cultural Revolution, and post Mao capitalist China. Childhood is also a theme which appears often in his stories, but does not consequently lighten the subject matter. Yu Hua is known for his brutal descriptions of violence, cruelty and death as well as themes surrounding “the plight of China’s underclasses” as seen in Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. When he began focusing on more chaotic themes in Brothers, Yu Hua admitted his belief that despite his past modeling after Kafka's novels, "the essential nature of writing was to free yourself. If the great masters can unfetter themselves, why can’t we?” In this same work, he prides himself on his simultaneous expression of tragedy and comedy.

In the beginning of his career, he wasn't successful at gaining traction with the readers due to the complexity of his work. He aimed to demonstrate the dark side of human psychology and society in a non-traditional way. He changed his style after he started to gain traction in the writing world and adjusted his work away from over complexity due to readers’ finding his work difficult to understand. After his adjustments, he focused on injecting the right amount of modern ideologies into his work which is primarily constructed on the narration of “realistic societies”.

Originally published in literary journals, these stories were subsequently anthologized in different collections in both Taiwan and Mainland China. The most complete collection of his stories to date is I Don’t Have My Own Name (2017), including 21 stories. It features his most notable short stories such as “Leaving Home at Eighteen”, “Classical Love”, “World Like Mist”, “The Past and the Punishments”, “1986”, “Blood and Plum Blossoms”, “The Death of a Landlord”, “Boy in the Twilight” along with 13 other works. Other anthologies with these works include The April 3rd Incident (2018), translated by Allan H. Barr; The Past and the Punishments (1996), translated by Andrew F. Jones; Boy in the Twilight (2014), translated by Allan H. Barr; On the Road at Eighteen (1991); Summer Typhoon (1993); Shudder (1995); and the three volumes of Yu Hua's Collected Works (1994), among others.

Yu Hua received the Grinzane Cavour Prize as his first award in 1998 for his novel To Live. Four years later, Yu Hua became the first Chinese writer to receive the James Joyce Award (2002). Originally published in 1993, To Live was then published in English in 2003 and earned him the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 2004. That same year, Yu Hua was awarded the Barnes & Noble Discovery Great New Writers Award (2004) and in 2005, took home the Special Book Award of China. Since then, he has also won the Prix Courrier International (2008) for his novel Brothers which was also shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize

Three of Yu Hua's works have screen adaptations. “To Live” (1994) was directed by the highly esteemed Zhang Yimou, with Yu Hua himself participating in screenwriting. Though the screenplay was greatly altered it was still banned upon initial release. However, “To Live” swept awards at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. There are some notable changes within the narrative. One stark difference is Fugui's career being in shadow puppetry rather than farming. Another great contrast is the death of Youqing being from a car accident involving himself and the Magistrate Chunsheng. The same novel was adapted by Zhu Zheng as a television drama in 2003, named after the protagonist “Fu Gui”. The movie and novel emphasize two ways of “living” through exposing harsh realities underneath the facade of life and pondering the significance of existing. The television adaptation followed the tragedies in the original storyline more closely, avoiding the casting of big names in order to effectively portray the simplicity of civilian life in revolution era China. Each have their own virtues, but the public seems to prefer the movie. Most recently “Chronicles of a Blood Merchant” (2015) was adapted into a Korean language film, both directed by and starring actor Ha Jung-woo.

Yu Hua's novels in this period make a deep and detailed analysis of human evil and violence, instinct and desire, tradition and history. It mainly reveals the evil of human nature and a series of cruel, violent and bloody events caused by the evil of human nature. "1986", "One Kind of Reality", "The Inevitable" and other early works are his almost brutal indifference tone of the real and detailed fictional violence, blood and death, so as to show the human nature of violence, desire and the desire of the impulse. Yu Hua is to remove the modification of this kind of human nature, for the reader to open a pry human blood dripping window, let the reader understand this is not in the meaning of the vacancy.

A young Yu Hua's parents worked as doctors, so the family lived in a hospital compound across from the mortuary. His childhood proximity to death shaped his later works. He practiced dentistry for five years before turning to fiction writing in 1983 because he didn't like "looking into people’s mouths the whole day." For Yu Hua, the Cultural Revolution took place from the ages of seven to seventeen. It is for this reason that many of his works include the violence and chaos that were prevalent at the time. In his own words, “a calm, orderly society cannot produce such great works.” One of the distinctive characteristics of his work is his penchant for detailed descriptions of brutal violence.

Yu Hua is one of the most talented and individual writers of avant-garde novels. He has deepened the rational reflection of human beings on the situation of their lives in the form of novels, which has caused a lot of shock and attention in the literary world and among the readers. Therefore, he has become the representative of the avant-garde novels in China. In the late 1980s, Yu Hua was regarded as one of the most promising avant-garde or post-trendy writers, and many critics considered him perhaps the best example of Chinese yuan novels or post-modern writing. In the late 1990s, he plowed through a series of short stories, novellas and novels in which his style seemed to shift slightly toward the traditional "psychoanalytic" narrative.

Yu Hua (simplified Chinese: 余华 ; traditional Chinese: 余華 ; pinyin: Yú Huá ) is a Chinese author, born April 3, 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. Shortly after his debut as a fiction writer in 1983, Yu Hua was regarded as a promising avant-garde or post-New Wave writer. Many critics also regard him as a champion for Chinese meta-fictional or postmodernist writing. When his writing style changed towards a more “psychologized” narrative in the 1990s and experimented with more chaotic themes like in Brothers, Yu Hua received strong criticism from critics and readers.

Most of Yu Hua's novels are centred around the Cultural Revolution, either as the setting, a contextual reference, or as a literary device. Yu Hua was born in 1960, and his childhood memories are the Cultural Revolution. Yu Hua said, "My novel creation is closely related to childhood and juveniles." Yu Hua's description of the Cultural Revolution is indifferent, no matter whether it is describing violence or death. For example, the novel To Live uses an objective narrative style to describe the suffering of the Cultural Revolution. In Brothers, Yu Hua directly talks about what happened to a family during the Cultural Revolution. In these books, we can understand the harm of the Cultural Revolution to human nature and clearly understand the mistakes made during the Cultural Revolution.