Yu Hua in the NY Times Magazine

There is an interesting article on Yu Hua in this week's New York Times Magazine. I've been reading Yu's fiction since the early nineties and haven't appreciated all of it, but I have enjoyed very much his two novels To Live: A Novel and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, both in the original Chinese and in translation. Though I haven't met Yu, I did have dinner once with Su Tong, who is mentioned in the article as one of his peers whose work Yu reads. Some of you might have seen Zhang Yimou's movie To Live, which is based on Yu Hua's novel by the same name. The film, starring Ge You and Gong Li, aside from being a visually stunning film with a great plot, also provides an intimate look at Chinese history from the 1930s to the 1980s. Yu personally wrote the adaptation.

Incidentally, Yu Hua actually started out on a career as a dentist. The following paragraph is a quote from the Times article linked above.

He claims he became a writer because he hated his job: “the inside of a mouth is one of the ugliest spectacles in the world.” In the early ’80s he was living in a small town between Shanghai and Hangzhou. From his window he often observed workers of the local Cultural Bureau, the Chinese state’s salaried writers and artists, loafing in the streets. “We were all very poor in those days,” Yu recalled. “The difference was that you could work hard to be poor as a dentist, or you could do nothing and still be poor as a worker in the Cultural Bureau. I decided I wanted to be as idle as the workers in the Cultural Bureau and become a writer.”