Yu Hua

I have read Yu Hua's columns in the New York Times for some years and enjoy and learn from his lens on modern China. For some reason I have not read his books before this one though this book and two of his novels, To Live, and Chrinicle of a Blood Merchant, have been in my TBR for years. I am so glad I finally got to this smart, painful, sometimes sweet (but not saccharine) eye-opening essay collection. China in Ten Words offers something hard to come by, cultural criticism anchored with memoir from China. While I admit that sometimes this reads a little moralistic -- this is especially true in the section on love and romance -- mostly it is just good storytelling with loads of personality that walks us through the seismic shifts in China from the Cultural Revolution (the time during which Yu grew up) to the current obsessive amoral money-obsessed economic powerhouse. It is strongest when Yu shares his childhood experiences to illustrate the ways in which human impulses to do good have been subverted.

In addition to cultural criticism, there is a linguistics angle to these essays, about how we turn words describing bad things into good or neutral words and thereby erode the moral fabric of a place and a people. So much of what he discusses in early 21st century China can be applied to 2015-present America. Yu's perspective is illuminating.

Published in 2010 this book uses 10 common Chinese words to illustrate the points mentioned above. Surprisingly, though the shift seems revolutionary it turns out that many things haven't changed as much as you might think. The stated goals are 100% different, but the people's behaviors and choices not so much. I was particularly taken by the "Copycat" and "Bamboozle" sections which takes us down the road to post-truth China (though China has been sort of post-truth for nearly a century.)

Unsurprisingly, this book is banned in China. I am surprised and pleased Yu Hua is allowed to write and live in China (and travel abroad in support of his books.) I will be moving on to other works.… (more)

This is a nice set of stories showing life in China for everyday people. Being fiction, it is hard to say whether it is an accurate depiction of China, but it's probably pretty close. In these stories, focus rests briefly on brutishness, petty cruelty, small-mindedness, and all the other everyday evils of daily life, with two particularly ugly scenes setting the tone in the first 2 stories as a 'halfwit' man is tricked into becoming complicit in the killing of his only friend, and a small boy is tortured by a vendor for stealing an apple. There are some nice scenes, too, but not so many, or so frequently that we can forget that under the nice veneer, any of these people may posses a much crueler side, as simply another aspect of their very normalness. The people in these stories struggle with finding the balance between conformity and individuality, good behavior and servility, and the wrong step at any point can prove disastrous in a society where everyone is watching and eagerly waiting for their chance to get ahead of you without being seen to be trying too hard.
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