Among contemporary literature pieces in China, Yu Hua's best-known work Huo zhe (To Live) is regarded as avant-garde.
He has produced infinite creativity in his unique, innovative and widely acclaimed novels.
Last Thursday, at the invitation of the Bertelsmann Book Club, Yu discussed his trend-setting works and his personal experiences with the public.
Appearing at the China Millennium Monument in Beijing, the writer was greeted by unexpected ardor and bombarded with questions from reporters and readers.
In a checked shirt and blue jeans, Yu looked no different from most ordinary middle-aged Chinese men, especially when talking about his daily life.
"I am very happy when my books sell well and make big money," he said.
But when Yu started talking about literature, he immediately bore a kind of sobriety that distinguished him from the others.
Dentist-turned Writer
Yu, who enjoys a similar amount of fame to Su Tong, whose novella Qiqie Chengqun (Wives and Concubines) was turned into the popular film Dahong denglong gaogaogua (Raise the Red Lantern), grew up away from China's literati.
Born in 1960 in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province, Yu's family later moved to a small county nearby, Haiyan.
After graduating from middle school, Yu followed his parents and became a dentist.
An interesting phenomenon is that many Chinese writers, such as Lu Xun and Bi Shumin, a contemporary female novelist, had medical backgrounds before turning to writing.
But Yu said it was nothing more than a coincidence.
Yu soon found himself disliking being a dentist and got tired of looking at patients' mouths day after day.
"The mouth is the least scenic place in the world," he recalled 10 years after giving up dentistry.
"I must have met over 10,000 mouths at that time."
Yu felt he would not be able to meet the precision of medical science and wanted to change his life.
One day, he noticed a man who worked at the local cultural center was wandering the streets.
Yu said the man told him: "I am a composer and I need not stay in my office all day long as long as I compose songs."
Envious of such an easy-going life, Yu longed to work at the cultural center and knowing that neither painting nor composing songs would suit, he opted for writing.
A hobby he developed for years helped him greatly in his first attempts at writing.
Yu had been reading widely since middle school works from the world's finest writers, and he learned much from the excellent wordsmiths.
In 1983, he began sending contributions to major literature journals but received no responses.
His life changed after a phone call from an editor at Beijing Literature, a Beijing-based monthly, who wanted Yu to come to the city to rewrite one of his original stories.
The whole of Haiyan stirred because, at the time, going to the capital was regarded as an honor.
As he had dreamed, Yu was soon employed by the cultural center and was able to bid farewell to what he calls "filthy mouths and decayed teeth" to became a man of words.
Creativity from Life
The writer takes pride in his grass roots origin and says he is motivated largely by his pursuit for better life.
"All my works -- in the past, at present and in the future -- are and will be closely related to my boyhood," Yu said.
His maiden work, Shibasui Chumen Yuanxing (Leaving Home at Eighteen), was first published in 1984.
Since then, he has published several novels such as Zai Xiyu Zhong Huhan (Crying in the Fine Rain), Huo Zhe (To Live) and Xu Sanguan Maixue Ji (Xu Sanguan Sells Blood).
He has also published several collections of short stories and essays.
Most of his works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian and Japanese.
Both To Live and Xu Sanguan Sells Blood were selected as the most influential books in China from 1990 to 2000.
But it was his experimental writing that drew attention from the country's literary circle.
The language in his work displays a peculiar set of characteristics and a reader can easily recognize if a sentence has been written by Yu or not -- the piercing power of his sentences can not be mistaken.
However, Yu is never a prolific author. Put together, all of his published novels and short stories contain no more than 800,000 Chinese characters.
The early works of Yu are particularly well-known for their detailed descriptions of physical violence.
Stories such as 1986 and Yizhong Xianshi (One Kind of Reality) tell readers of a cold and callous world.
To Live, Yu's most well-known novel, was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Award in Italy in 1998. It depicts the miserable life of an average man, Fu Gui, showing how he deals with his existence through endurance and optimism.
Although it looks at Fu, who loses his family's ancestral home and all possessions from gambling, the novel also covers several decades of social change in China from the 1940s.
A movie based on the work, from renowned director Zhang Yimou, won the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994.
The success of the movie has attracted more readers to Yu.
Yu said he does not care how directors adapt his works as movies and TV dramas based on his novels, as that would make them known by more people and sell better.
Coming New Works
In 1993, Yu resigned from the cultural center in Haiyan and settled in Beijing.
Currently, he is working on a new novel, which he said was about three generations of a family. It is again set in a small town.
"I could not handle it if the story happened in a big city such as Beijing because I did not grow up in such an environment," Yu said.
But the writing is not going smoothly. Yu's mind can "hardly settle down for writing now."
Besides winning him respect, Yu's metamorphosis from a dentist to prize-winning novelist has also brought a relatively better-off life.
He has spent a great deal of time traveling to places like Surriento, a small Italian town near Naples, which impressed him most.
"Before I went there, the renowned Italian song Return to Surriento had stirred a feeling of longing from me," Yu said.
"After I got there, I found the journey had been all worthwhile. It was so beautiful."
And the city he wants to visit most is Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.
Like many Chinese writers, Yu says he is frequently unsettled by a mundane life.
It took Yu two years to write To Live and Xu Sanguan Sells Blood.
Yet in the past seven years, he has not churned out a single novel.
Given the long break, Yu's new work, expected next year, is sure to be worth the wait.
(China Daily October 11, 2002)
