by Yu Hua
Someone went and told Xu Yulan, “Xu Yulan, what are you doing? Still cooking? Drop everything! Come right away. Your old man Xu Sanguan’s crying in the streets. We tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t even look at us, and we asked him what was the matter, but he wouldn’t tell us anything. We don’t know what’s going on. Come quick!”
Yile, Erle, and Sanle ran out into the street and stood in their father’s way just as he was about to cross Five Star Bridge.
“Dad, what are you crying for? Who’s been upsetting you? Tell us what’s going on.”
Xu Sanguan leaned back against the railing of the bridge and sobbed, “I’m old. No one wants my blood anymore. The only one who might be able to use it is the lacquer man.”
His sons said, “Dad, what are you talking about?”
Xu Sanguan continued along his earlier train of thought. “What will happen if we run into trouble again? How will we manage?”
“What are you trying to say?”
Xu Yulan arrived just at this moment, grabbed hold of Xu Sanguan’s sleeves, and said, “What’s the matter with you? You were just fine when you went out, and now you’re crying like a baby.”
When Xu Sanguan saw that Xu Yulan had arrived, he lifted his head and wiped away his tears. “Xu Yulan, I’m an old man now. I’ll never be able to sell blood again. No one wants my blood anymore. What’ll happen to us if something goes wrong?”
Xu Yulan said, “Xu Sanguan, you don’t have to sell your blood anymore. We have enough money, and that’s not going to change. What do you need to sell your blood for? And why did you go to sell blood today anyway?”
Xu Sanguan said, “I wanted to eat a plate of fried pork livers. I wanted to drink two shots of yellow rice wine. I thought I could eat pork livers and drink wine if I sold some blood.”
Yile said, “Dad, don’t cry out here in the street. If you want to eat some fried pork livers and drink yellow rice wine, I’ll give you the money. Just don’t cry out here. If you cry in public, people will think we don’t treat you right.”
Erle said, “Dad, are you telling me that you’ve been making a scene all afternoon over some stupid pork livers and wine? And for that you’ve made us lose any face we might once have had?”
Sanle said, “Dad, don’t cry. If you really have to cry, why don’t you cry at home? Don’t cry out here. It just doesn’t look right.”
Xu Yulan wheeled around toward her three sons, and with her finger jabbing the air for emphasis, she shouted:
“What is with you three? Have your consciences been eaten by dogs? How can you talk that way about your dad? It was all for you. Each and every time he sold his blood was for you. Every fen he made selling blood he spent on you. You were raised on his blood. During the famine, when all we could get to eat was corn flour gruel and you three were nothing but skin and bones, he sold blood just so that you could eat some noodles. You three seem to have forgotten all about that. Then there was the time Erle was sent to work in the countryside. Your dad sold blood not once but twice. And all of that just so he could get on Erle’s brigade chief’s good side. Your dad treated him to lavish meals, bought him all kinds of gifts, just so you could get sent back home a little earlier. But you don’t remember any of that, do you, Erle? And Yile, what you just said hurts the most of all. How could you, of all people, talk to your dad that way? You’ve always been his favorite son. And he’s not even your real dad. Even so, he’s always been so good to you. When you had to go to the hospital in Shanghai, he sold blood everywhere he could along the way, because we didn’t have any money for the hospital bill. You’re supposed to wait at least three months each time you sell blood, but to save your life, your dad put his own life in danger. He sold blood after three days, then sold it again five days later. And he almost died in Pine Grove because of it. But you seem to have forgotten about that. What is with you three? I really think your consciences must have been eaten by dogs.”
As Xu Yulan’s voice faded to a whisper, tears slid down her face as well. She took hold of Xu Sanguan’s hand.
“Xu Sanguan, let’s go. Let’s go eat fried pork livers and drink yellow rice wine. We’ve got plenty of money now.” She fumbled in her pocket and extracted a wad of bills. “Look, these two are five- yuan bills, and here’s a two-yuan note, and here’s another one. And there’s more where that came from. You can eat whatever you want.”
Xu Sanguan said, “All I want is fried pork livers and yellow rice wine.”
Xu Yulan brought him to the Victory Restaurant, sat him down at a table, and ordered a plate of fried pork livers and two shots of yellow rice wine. When she was finished ordering, she picked up the menu and showed it to Xu Sanguan.
“There are a lot of other dishes here too. All of them are really good. Which ones do you want to try? Just tell me.”
“All I want is pork livers and rice wine.”
Xu Yulan ordered a second plate of fried pork livers for him, and then a third, accompanied by a whole bottle of yellow rice wine. When everything had been delivered to their table, she asked him once again what else he would like to eat. This time he shook his head.
“That’s enough. Any more dishes and I really wouldn’t be able to finish the meal.”
The table in front of Xu Sanguan was laden with three plates of fried pork livers, a bottle of yellow rice wine, as well as four extra shots of rice wine. He laughed as he ate the pork livers and drank the wine and said to Xu Yulan, “This is the best meal of my whole life.”
He laughed as he remembered what the young blood chief had said to him in the hospital. As he ate, he related to Xu Yulan exactly what he had said.
When Xu Yulan had heard his story, she began to curse. “ His blood is the pig’s blood, not yours! Not even the lacquer man would want his blood. Only a ditch or a drainage pipe could use his blood. Who does he think he is? I know who he is! He’s that idiot Shen’s kid. His dad’s an idiot. The man’s so stupid, he can’t even tell the difference between one yuan and five. And I know who his mom is too. She’s a real slut. Who knows whose bastard that Shen really is! Why, he’s even younger than Sanle, and yet he dares to talk like that to you! Back when we had Sanle, this Shen wasn’t even a twinkling in his mother’s eye, and now he thinks he’s on top of the world.”
Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “That’s why people say pubic hair doesn’t come out till after your eyebrows do, but gets even longer in the end.”
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
The extent to which Yu Hua—perhaps the most notorious agent provocateur of the Chinese literary avant-garde that flourished in the years around the Tiananmen movement of 1989—has become part of the mainstream was brought home to me on a recent visit to Beijing. Flipping through the cable TV channels, I suddenly stumbled across an “Arts and Entertainment”–style documentary featuring Yu Hua’s life and work. Replete with impressionistic black-and-white televisual reenactments of episodes from his youth in Haiyan, a small provincial city on China’s prosperous southeastern seaboard, the show narrates Yu Hua’s meteoric rise from “barefoot” dentist to fame as one of the very best-selling and most critically acclaimed figures in the Chinese literary establishment through a series of vignettes. We are shown his birth in 1960, the travails of a childhood spent amid the all-encompassing political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, his formative and easy familiarity with the funereal world of the hospital morgue where both his parents worked as doctors, the five years he spent pulling teeth by day and obsessively reading the masterpieces of modern literature by night, and, finally, the triumphal moment when one of his first short stories, sent unsolicited to a literary magazine in the far-off capital city of Beijing, elicited the phone call from an influential editor that would eventually catapult him to the forefront of the literary scene, and make him a major figure in the post-Mao transformation of China’s literary and cultural terrain.
Yu Hua never mentioned the documentary to me when we had dinner a few nights later, and I didn’t bring
it up. I suspect he didn’t care for the way in which the show neglected the very thing that remains most important to him: the power and precision with which he wields words as a means of engaging critically with the world around him. And I was at considerable pains to reconcile this slick televised portrait with the man I had first met one night in the early 1990s after having been drawn (and sometimes repulsed) by the clinical lyricism and musical violence of his angular and modernistic prose. Such was the sensitivity to the “rustle of language” and the almost Mitteleuropäer morbidity of sensibility evinced by his early work, that I was more amused than surprised when a skinny and slightly unkempt Yu Hua, almost immediately upon entering my hotel room in a converted traditional courtyard residence in Beijing for the first time, lit a cigarette, got down on all fours in search of an annoying buzzing sound of which I had been completely unaware, and unceremoniously unplugged the mini-refrigerator.
BEIJING, where Yu Hua now lives and works, is a noisier city than it once was. One traverses the city’s seemingly endless expanse of concrete housing blocks on newly constructed elevated expressways lit on both sides by glowing neon and the bill-boarded icons of transnational commerce: Toshiba, IKEA, Motorola. As we ate in a glitzy new Cantonese seafood restaurant, Yu Hua’s son played a portable video game and clamored for McDonald’s. Karaoke pop music and the blare of the television news seeped from another room, mixing with the loud conversation and shrill cell phone ring-tones of well-dressed entrepreneurs. Unplugging, in other words, is no longer an option. For writers of Yu Hua’s generation, often referred to as the “experimentalists,” the crucial questions have changed, irrevocably. The socialist orthodoxy and stale humanist verities against which they struggled mightily in the ’80s have long since been dethroned. The cultural insularity they so pointedly punctured by way of the importation and creative appropriation of modernist, magical realist, and postmodernist models has become less a problem than a virtual impossibility. Literary censorship is now largely market-driven, and formal experimentation simply doesn’t sell. The question that remains is this: How can a writer make his or her voice heard above the din? How do specifically literary signals penetrate the pervasive noise of commercial culture, media babble, and globalized culture that has inundated urban China in the new century? What position can Chinese writers occupy in an aggressively capitalist era in which the nouveau-riche entrepreneur is insistently exalted as the most alluring sort of culture hero? It is only in the context of these questions that we can understand Yu Hua’s transformation into a best-selling author, and the local significance of his Chronicle of a Blood Merchant as a work of literary imagination and social critique.
FOR YU HUA, growing up in the narrow, stone-cobbled and moss-edged lanes of his native Haiyan, writing was a way out. The lives of the salaried writers employed by the local party-sponsored “Cultural Palace” seemed positively bourgeois compared to the drudgery of pulling teeth. Perhaps even more important, the translations of global modernist fiction that were just beginning to trickle into local book markets in the mid-1980s as a result of the post-Mao program of “reform and opening,” seemed to offer a means of shirking the ideological and intellectual drudgery of everyday life, of imagining “one kind of reality” (as he titled an early novella) in which conventional ways of seeing the world no longer held sway. The Japanese Nobel Prize–winner Yasunari Kawabata’s lyrical attention to the world of things was an early and abiding influence. (Whenever he managed to find a rare Chinese translation of Kawabata’s works, Yu Hua once told me, he would buy two copies: one to read, and the other to keep pristinely intact on his bookshelf.) Yu Hua’s initial encounter with Franz Kafka’s tortuously Byzantine narratives of modern life, and especially his unflinching attention to spiritual and corporeal violence, was equally revelatory. The efforts of Jewish writers such as Bruno Schulz and Isaac Bashevis Singer to understand the horrors of inhumanity spoke to Yu Hua’s own concern with the question of how he might most effectively represent the cataclysms of recent Chinese history. The labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges exercised a profound fascination as well, for they pointed Yu Hua toward narrative convolution and philosophical uncertainty rather than the straight story lines and invariant verities of socialist dogma. And it was his intense dissatisfaction with the class-coded and stereotypical attributes of the stalwart heroes and reactionary villains he had grown up reading and watching in revolutionary novels and films that attracted him to the radical experiments of the French new novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose characters are deliberately emptied of any pretense of humanity or psychological depth— for the flatter the characters, Robbe-Grillet felt, the more quickly the illusionism and stale conventions of realism could be revealed as a cheap, if powerful, ideological ploy.
By the late 1980s, Yu Hua had begun to produce a series of shockingly audacious short stories and novellas in which he not only cut up his own characters in confrontationally graphic detail, but also relentlessly skewered and dissected the norms and conventions of almost every fictional genre, from premodern tales of “scholars and maidens” to martial arts fiction, from ghost stories and detective fiction to epics of the revolutionary struggle. Yu Hua’s narrator could linger for pages over a loving description of a madman sawing off his own nose (“1986”), or an unbearably visceral evocation of a young girl being hacked to pieces and sold to cannibals (“Classical Love”). His stories dispensed with the linear plot lines of realist fiction, preferring instead to loop back upon themselves, interlock into complex mosaics, or deliberately and seemingly inexplicably replay the same passage over and over again.
These heady experiments grew out of the cultural ferment and unrest of the years just before and after the Tiananmen movement of 1989. And Yu Hua was by no means alone in making these sorts of antiauthoritarian gestures in the literary journals of the day. He and a group of similarly avant-garde young authors such as Ge Fei and Su Tong (all of whom had still been children during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s) came to dominate China’s literary scene in the early 1990s. If post-Mao writers had struggled to rescue humanism from the ashes of a failed socialist past throughout the 1980s, enthused Chinese critics believed, the experimentalists of the 1990s would go even further, exposing the pitfalls of the humanist thinking and grand historical narratives their predecessors had relied upon as a means of cultural protest. If earlier artists had reclaimed European modernism after years of literary repression and isolation under socialism, other critics declared, Yu Hua and his contemporaries represented the arrival of a new global postmodernism on Chinese soil. The problem, these critics argued, was not so much the depredations of Maoism in particular, but the dangerous arrogance of any intellectual or political or literary system—even those as seemingly benign as humanism or nationalism or realism—that dared claim to tell the whole story, the only true story, in the name of the people. The nihilistic energy of Yu Hua’s fiction—and its refusal to behave like conventional fiction—thus came to be seen as a necessary refusal, a deconstructive gesture, and a sign of the times.
What this account missed, however, was Yu Hua’s deep affinity for the work of another Chinese master, Lu Xun, whose fiction and impassioned political advocacy had helped launch the epochal May 4th Movement for literary and cultural revolution in 1919. Widely acknowledged as the “father of modern Chinese literature” for his groundbreaking importation and appropriation of Western literary forms, Lu Xun’s unique brand of realist short fiction was inflected by the language and procedures he had learned as a failed medical student in Japan around the turn of the century. Medicine, he later wrote, could heal only bodies. It was the task of literature to minister to their sick minds. Eager to eviscerate what he saw as the deep-seated flaws of the Chinese national character (flaws that seemed by the 1920s to have resulted in China’s subjection to aggressive imperial powers such as England, Germany, France, the United States, and Japan), Lu Xun wielded his pen like a scalpel, cuttingly remarking on the cultura
l follies and moral failings of his fellow Chinese. What made Lu Xun a great writer, however, was not only his tremendous linguistic invention and uncompromising social conscience, but also the way he fretted about his inability as a member of the educated elite to truly reach or represent the masses. Relentlessly self-critical, he took pride in his willingness to turn his scalpel inward, to dissect his own failings even more unsentimentally than he did his “patients” and their pathologies.
The extent to which Yu Hua poked mordantly ironic fun at Lu Xun in his early fiction—one character in his “One Kind of Reality” is quite literally dissected by a wisecracking team of organ harvesting doctors after having been executed for murder— should not obscure their underlying affinities. At the most superficial level, they both grew up in and write almost exclusively about small-town life in Zhejiang province, near Shanghai. As a teenager in Haiyan, Yu Hua was so enamored with the ambiance of Lu Xun’s first masterpiece of short fiction, “Diary of a Madman” (in which traditional Confucian culture is ingeniously represented by a cannibalistic cabal plotting the demise of an enlightened, or perhaps merely paranoid, narrator), that he set it to music, with each Chinese character of the original text being assigned a random musical pitch. (Yu Hua still likes to say that it is quite possibly the longest and most impossible song ever written.) Like Lu Xun, Yu Hua returns obsessively to the violent spectacles of China’s tumultuous modern history. As in Lu Xun’s fiction, the incalculable sufferings of poverty, war, and revolution come to life for the reader in Yu Hua’s fiction as a sort of “theater of cruelty” visited upon the bodies of his characters. And as with Lu Xun, it is the operating theater and the hospital that more often than not serve as a symbolic site of cruelty, official ineptitude, and state malpractice. This is certainly true of To Live—the 1992 novel that catapulted Yu Hua to national fame, prompting a successful film adaptation by the internationally renowned director Zhang Yimou. The climax of that story— which relates the epic transformations of modern Chinese history through the eyes of a ne’er-do-well gambler called Fugui and his family—wrenchingly relates the entirely preventable death by bleeding of a pregnant woman in a hospital at the height of the Cultural Revolution.