How Does Yu Hua Compare with Wang Shuo?

China Daily

It has been 10 years since Yu Hua, one of the most famous novelists in today's China, published his last fiction work.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Yu was a prominent figure in the avant-garde literary movement, which swept across the Chinese literary world at the time.

He was quite prolific. Between 1984 and 1995 he wrote a total of 12 books. Two of his most widely read novels, "To Live (huo zhe)" and "The Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (Xu Sanguan mai xie ji)" were listed among last decade's 10 most influential books in China.

His books also have received international acclaim, winning many awards in Europe and the United States and being translated into a dozen foreign languages.

"To Live" was later adapted into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Gong Li. It won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994...

tremendous or trash?

The China of Yu's imagination is a kind of comic-book version of the real thing. It is lawless, frenetic place, where corruption, gambling, prostitution and shady business deals are commonplace.

As for the heroes, Li Guangtou, the younger brother, becomes famous by creating a beauty pageant for virgins, while Song Gang, the elder, has one of his breasts surgically enlarged to help sell a line of breast enlargement gels in China's backward countryside.

Many critics here have lashed out at Yu, who has long been considered one of China's most respected novelists, for producing what one critic called a trashy, Hollywood-style portrayal of the country.

But other critics have praised the work as a compelling portrait of an increasingly materialistic, self-indulgent and even unhinged society...

"Brothers," is filled with graphic scenes, from masturbation to murder - not to mention descriptions of Li Guangtou and his father spying on women in the public toilets - and why it was not censored is anybody's guess. Perhaps Yu had become too famous; his previous books had continued to be widely read throughout the '90s. He also writes a popular blog and has lectured in the United States and Europe.

In any case, many within China's literary establishment were scandalized by the books.