China in ten words

Review by Choice Review

The first nonfiction publication in English from the celebrated fiction writer Yu Hua (b. 1960), this book is unique in conception, structure, and style. Ten simple words ("people," "leader," "copycat," to name just three) serve as titles for Yu's essays and provide thematic coherence. Through scenes of ordinary life from the present and his memories of the past, Yu shows China's amazing economic success and social change in recent decades, and also the rampant government corruption, materialistic indulgence, "moral bankruptcy," and the disturbing disparity between the rich and poor. Yu traces the causes of numerous social ills not just to the Mao era, but particularly to the crackdown on dissent in spring 1989, which halted political reform while giving economic development a free rein. In exposing many serious problems confronted by the impoverished and disenfranchised, the book is somewhat comparable to Liao Yiwu's interview-based Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up (2008). But Yu Hua's book is distinguished by his typical style in storytelling, his mixing of extremely moving and funny scenes, and his subtle irony--all of which, aided by Barr's fluent and succinct translation, make it an inspirational read. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. Y. Wu University of California, Riverside

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

IN 1978, 18-year-old Yu Hua was assigned the task of administering vaccinations in southern China. The only needles available were barbed from overuse, and with each shot he extracted a scrap of flesh. At night, haunted by the sobs of children whose arms he had bloodied, he would grind the needles sharp until his fingers blistered. In the introduction to his new essay collection, "China in Ten Words," he blames himself for making the children suffer, and says he should have tested a needle on his own arm - sacrificed his own chunk of flesh. It is a shrewd gambit for a Chinese writer seeking to speak his mind without bringing down the ire of the government: to begin by offering, in proper Maoist tradition, self-criticism. This does not, however, seem to have appeased the censors. "China in Ten Words" depicts a morally compromised nation, plagued by escalating unemployment, class polarization and endemic corruption and waste. At the extremes, peasants traverse the land selling their blood to the highest bidder while multimillionaires build mansions that are replicas of the White House. "By day a company executive sits at his desk in a copycat version of the Oval Office," Yu Hua writes. "By night he takes his pretty secretary by the hand and leads her into the copycat Lincoln Bedroom." The book has not been published in China, where Yu Hua still lives, yet its unflattering details are not far removed from the gold-plated toilets and artificial hymens of his previous book, the satirical novel "Brothers," which sold over a million copies in his native country. In an Op-Ed that appeared in The New York Times in June, he explained the difference in the books' reception: "'Brothers' does a May 35th" - the term Chinese bloggers use to circumvent the censors when referring to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown - "and 'China in Ten Words' is more like June 4th," the actual day of the massacre. Such lexical innovations, evasions and revisions give "China in Ten Words" its form. Each essay is devoted to a particular word - its origins, its devaluation or appreciation in meaning - starting with "people" (as in "serve the") and ending with "bamboozle," an arc that, for Yu Hua, seems to pretty much sum up the past half-century of Chinese history. At times his interpretations can seem dogmatic. To American readers, "grass roots" simply describes "the common people." He defines it more rigidly as "disadvantaged classes that operate at some remove from the mainstream and the orthodox." (The protesters at Zuccotti Park may agree.) He charges that the poor were "banned" from entering the Olympic Park in Beijing in 2008, when what he means is that they could not afford tickets for admission. Welcome to capitalism. As in "Brothers," the tone here is populist, with many comic digressions. This is a tale told by a raconteur, not an academic - an uneven mixture of memoir and polemic, farce and fury, short on statistics but long on passion. The most powerful and vivid sections reach back to Yu Hua's childhood during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao's quotations were plastered Everywhere, even on spittoons, and the slightest misstep - folding a picture of Mao so that a cross appeared on his face, for example - could have you labeled a counterrevolutionary. Embedded in this is the story of how Yu Hua became a writer. He hunted down illicit copies of Western novels, which had gone through so many furtive hands that often the final pages were missing. "How these stories without resolutions made me suffer!" he recalls. "I began to think up endings for myself." "China in Ten Words" is itself inconclusive. Yu Hua offers one last memory, of how as a child he faked a stomachache to get out of chores and wound up on the operating table. (His father was a doctor.) It is a cautionary tale about the risks of subterfuge, of trying to sneak something past one's father - or, perhaps, one's ever vigilant government. Yu Hua's real-life China closely resembles the country of his satirical fiction.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

It seems incongruous that the essence of a nation of more than one-billion people could be boiled down to just 10 words, and yet the challenge of doing just that is what Yu Hua embraces. An internationally celebrated novelist and the first Chinese to win the James Joyce Foundation Award, Yu Hua embarks on a cogent analysis of his country's tumultuous past three decades in essays that explore the 10 words and phrases that best sum up the Chinese experience. From the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, the philosophies of Chairman Mao and his successors to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, China is a nation of contradictions and anomalies, traditions and rituals that Yu Hua deciphers through candid observations and personal revelations. His love of Reading. for example, was ironically fostered by his library's limitation to the works of Chairman Mao, while his sense of Revolution was ignited by his older brother's schoolyard insolence. Introspective, provocative, persuasive, and inspiring, Yu Hua's insights into this mystifying land are refreshingly insightful.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In these moving and elegantly crafted essays organized around 10 common terms from the Chinese vernacular, internationally acclaimed novelist Yu (To Live) looks back on his childhood during the Cultural Revolution and examines how China has changed in the decades since. Yu's first work of nonfiction translated into English, the book offers rare insight into the cause and effect of China's "economic miracle," focusing close attention on the citizens of the world's most populous country. With an intimate tone and witty prose, Yu looks at the "effects that seem so glorious and search for their causes, whatever discomfort that may entail," training his incisive eye on the quotidian as well as the grand. Chapters such as "People," "Leader," "Disparity," "Grassroots" and "Revolution" weave memoir and commentary with a clear-eyed economic, sociological, and political appraisal, taking on poverty and oppression on the small and large scale. "Writing," "Lu Xun," "copy cat," and "bamboozle" examine Chinese cultural realities, past and present, extrapolating truths about growing up, family, friendship, sexuality, literature, and morality. Yu's book describes his particular experience, but hints at something much more expansive. As he writes in "Reading," "If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different... culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own." (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Yu is one of contemporary China's most celebrated but controversial writers. With much wit and elegance, he reminisces here in separate pieces (only one has been previously published) about his country's experiences over the past several decades, using personal stories as well as a piercing, critical examination of China's political, economic, and social transformation from what was essentially a Third World state into a superpower. Best known for his novels, e.g., Brothers, which satirize the country's moral depredation and its devolution into a hypercapitalist society, Yu chooses ten phrases-"people," "leader," "reading," "writing," "Lu Xun," "disparity," "revolution," "grassroots," "copycat," and "bamboozle"-that capture what he sees as China's most pressing issues over the last 60 years. His commentary is wide and varied, touching on everything from the country's severe economic and social disparity since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s to his own rise from uneducated, small-town "teeth puller" to one of the most highly regarded writers of his time. VERDICT A marvelous book for those interested in contemporary China, by one of China's foremost intellectuals.-Allan Cho, Univ. of British Columbia Lib., Vancouver (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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From the Introduction   In 1978 I got my first job--as a small-town dentist in south China. This mostly involved pulling teeth, but as the youngest staff member I was given another task as well. Every summer, with a straw hat on my head and a medical case on my back, I would shuttle back and forth between the town's factories and kindergartens, administering vaccinations to workers and children.   China during the Mao era was a poor country, but it had a strong public health network that provided free immunizations to its citizens. That was where I came in. In those days there were no disposable needles and syringes; we had to reuse ours again and again. Sterilization too was primitive: The needles and syringes would be washed, wrapped separately in gauze, and placed in aluminum lunch boxes laid in a large wok on top of a briquette stove. Water was added to the wok, and the needles and syringes were then steamed for two hours, as you would steam buns.   On my first day of giving injections I went to a factory. The workers rolled up their sleeves and waited in line, baring their arms to me one after another--and offering up a tiny piece of red flesh, too. Because the needles had been used multiple times, almost every one of them had a barbed tip. You could stick a needle into someone's arm easily enough, but when you extracted it, you would pull out a tiny piece of flesh along with it. For the workers the pain was bearable, although they would grit their teeth or perhaps let out a groan or two. I paid them no mind, for the workers had had to put up with barbed needles year after year and should be used to it by now, I thought. But the next day, when I went to a kindergarten to give shots to children from the ages of three through six, it was a different story. Every last one of them burst out weeping and wailing. Because their skin was so tender, the needles would snag bigger shreds of flesh than they had from the workers, and the children's wounds bled more profusely. I still remember how the children were all sobbing uncontrollably; the ones who had yet to be inoculated were crying even louder than those who had already had their shots. The pain that the children saw others suffering, it seemed to me, affected them even more intensely than the pain they themselves experienced, because it made their fear all the more acute.   This scene left me shocked and shaken. When I got back to the hospital, I did not clean the instruments right away. Instead, I got hold of a grindstone and ground all the needles until they were completely straight and the points were sharp. But these old needles were so prone to metal fatigue that after two or three more uses they would acquire barbs again, so grinding the needles became a regular part of my routine, and the more I sharpened, the shorter they got. That summer it was always dark by the time I left the hospital, with fingers blistered by my labors at the grindstone.   Later, whenever I recalled this episode, I was guilt-stricken that I'd had to see the children's reaction to realize how much the factory workers must have suffered. If, before I had given shots to others, I had pricked my own arm with a barbed needle and pulled out a blood-stained shred of my own flesh, then I would have known how painful it was long before I heard the children's wails.   This remorse left a profound mark, and it has stayed with me through all my years as an author. It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart. So when in this book I write of China's pain, I am registering my pain too, because China's pain is mine. Excerpted from China in Ten Words by Yu Hua All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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