by Yu Hua
While the sheer absurdity and cruelty of the vicissitudes Fugui and his family so resiliently suffer throughout the novel are reminiscent of Yu Hua’s early work, To Live represented a decisive turn away from avant-garde writing toward a more pointedly populist style. By 1992, the vogue for challenging, intellectually serious fiction had begun to cool, and China’s headlong push for wholesale marketization had begun to transform the way people thought about and, more importantly, bought and sold their culture. Ironically, the avant-garde of which Yu Hua had been such a prominent part, fell victim not so much to state repression as to the vagaries of the emergent capitalist marketplace. Literary journals and publishing houses, which had been subsidized by the authorities, were now forced to fend for themselves. Television dramas, Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop music, Hollywood blockbusters, and entertainment fiction rapidly came to dominate urban cultural markets. The intricately constructed narrative labyrinths and earnest cultural critique of the pre- and immediately post-Tiananmen years suddenly seemed hopelessly old-fashioned at best and willfully elitist at worst. The era of mass culture had arrived with a vengeance. Perhaps the best anecdotal emblem of this cultural sea change was the appearance in 1996 of a soapy six-part television miniseries of dubious artistic merit called China Models. Each episode, it turned out, had been ghostwritten by a critically acclaimed proponent of highbrow literary writing in China, including one segment penned by Yu Hua himself.
It would be too simplistic, however, to argue that a book like To Live was merely a capitulation to mass culture. For not unlike Lu Xun before him, Yu Hua has willingly become what we would now refer to as a public intellectual. He writes serious essays on literature, Western classical music, and the visual arts for the popular press. He has been active in producing musicals on Beijing’s vibrant drama scene. He frequently weighs in on issues of public concern on television and via the Internet. Since To Live, his fiction has gravitated toward gripping stories of ordinary men and women living through extraordinary travails. And in experimenting with and finally adopting a reconstructed realist style—one characterized by its stripped-down, almost cinematic brevity, earthy humor, and raw emotional appeal—he has also made a conscious decision to narrow the gulf between elite intellectuals and their audience, a gulf that Lu Xun self-consciously despaired of ever being able to overcome.
All of these tendencies come together in the Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Yu Hua’s most successful novel to date, first published as The Chronicle of Xu Sanguan’s Blood Selling (Xu Sanguan mai xue ji) in 1995. The novel’s deceptively simple scenario takes for its inspiration a subculture, born of rural poverty and a network of blood plasma collection stations in public hospitals, which has existed for more than thirty years in the Chinese countryside, engendering its own protocols, ritual codes of conduct, and belief systems. The disturbing revelations of official corruption and mismanagement within this system, as well as the widespread contamination of blood reserves with the HIV virus, came to light only several years after Yu Hua’s novel was published. Yu Hua’s novel, in this sense, seems eerily prescient. That many rural communities, especially in the drought-stricken central province of Henan, have come to subsist almost entirely on their “blood money” is chilling enough. And the appalling fact that these “blood villages” have also become “AIDS villages”—in which it is conservatively estimated that tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of peasants have contracted HIV through selling their own blood—cannot help but shadow our reading of Xu Sanguan’s distinctly unhygienic encounters with bumbling “blood chiefs” and venal medical officials.
But Yu Hua’s account of the prehistory of this public health holocaust is neither journalistic nor strictly ethnographic. And although Yu Hua faithfully chronicles Xu Sanguan’s life from the early days of socialism in the 1950s, to the disastrously ambitious economic collectivization of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and the three years of famine that resulted, followed by the factional violence of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and the relative prosperity of the post-Mao years, the novel isn’t necessarily, or exclusively, historical in its focus. There’s more than a whiff of the morality play here, for starters. Attentive as always to the musical aspects of his material, Yu Hua has staged his story as the sort of traditional Chinese opera that townsfolk like Xu Sanguan and his country cousins would heartily enjoy. Performances take place in an impromptu manner, in the street or at market or in the midst of a temple fair. Props are minimal, settings suggested in a few broad brushstrokes. Characters, playing more or less to type, appear onstage, explaining themselves directly to the audience and each other in soliloquy. Public life arranges itself into a series of dramatic gestures and emotionally charged tableaux; private life is virtually an impossibility, carried out against the backdrop of a disapproving crowd through furtive kindness or tender mercy, as when Xu Sanguan secretly brings his wife a morsel of meat as she stands in ritual humiliation on a busy street corner. The language of the original, finally, has the plain-speaking concision, bawdy humor, and sharp cadence of street opera, and Yu Hua’s themes—sustenance, suffering, blood money, blood ties, and bonds bought and paid in blood—are nothing if not elemental and operatic.
Few Chinese readers would miss the way in which the story— if only metaphorically—also engages with the wrenching social and economic dislocations of contemporary Chinese life. In a dizzyingly hyper-capitalistic climate in which the private sector has made a startling and often unregulated comeback, state workers such as Xu Sanguan have been rendered redundant, government officials have routinely exploited their political capital and connections to accumulate financial advantage for themselves and their families, and the infrastructure of socialism (medical care and public education) has been gutted by official corruption and privatization, Xu Sanguan’s career as a blood merchant poses a series of disturbing and politically pointed questions. Where does capital come from? What if the only capital you have is your own body? What does it mean to sell your lifeblood for a living? And what happens when there is no longer a market for your “labor”? It is in this specific sense that Xu Sanguan has become an emblematic figure for those who have inevitably been left behind by marketization, a scruffy reverse mirror image of the new entrepreneurial class so insistently touted as the masters of the future by the Chinese media in recent years.
Perhaps the most important question Yu Hua asks in this novel is this: Is there any difference between self-possession and being dispossessed? And the answer, if there is any for the taking, has perhaps to do with the way in which Yu Hua’s characters redeem themselves (and are repaid) not in blood money, but in an altogether more writerly sort of currency: words. Xu Sanguan’s wondrous verbal cookery during the famine is not just about conjuring a perversely empty pleasure from out of desperate privation. The words that he feeds his hungry children after fifty-seven days of eating gruel are a possession, a symbol of his own self-mastery, and a gift: of love, of imagination, of solidarity. What sustains Xu Sanguan and Xu Yulan through betrayal and tribulation is not so much the quasi-contractual blood bonds that brought them together but the stories they tell to each other, their neighbors, and their three children about the forgivably messy ways their lives have tangled and interwoven. And what ultimately counts most for Yile and his father is not so much blood but a simple term of address, a signal that cuts through the noise, an inaccurate yet redemptive fiction: “Dad.”
Yu Hua
CHRONICLE OF A BLOOD MERCHANT
Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China. He finished high school during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist for five years before beginning to write in 1983. He has published three novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. In 2002 Yu Hua became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award. His novel To Live was awarded Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998, and To Live and
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant were named two of the last decade’s ten most influential books in China. Yu Hua lives in Beijing.
Andrew F. Jones is the translator of Yu Hua’s first collection of short fiction in English, The Past and the Punishments, as well as a collection of literary essays by Eileen Chang. He is associate professor of modern Chinese literary and cultural studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age.
ALSO BY YU HUA
To Live The Past and the Punishments
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2004
Translation and afterword copyright © 2003 by Andrew F. Jones
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Yu, Hua, [date]
[Xu Sanguan mai xue ji. English]
Chronicle of a blood merchant / Yu Hua; translated from the Chinese by Andrew F. Jones.
p. cm.
1. Yu, Hua, 1960—Translations into English. I. Jones, Andrew F. II. Title.
PL2928.H78X813 2003
895.1’352—dc21
2003048808
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42526-3
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