Yu Hua
The preface to "Alive" describes the inner activities of the writer Yu Hua when he wrote the book:
"The writer's mission is not to vent, not to complain or expose, but to show people nobility."
Readers speculate whether this means that Yu Hua, who has been practicing for 14 years, has decided to "change from evil to righteousness" and "develop compassionately" to produce a warm, harmonious and beautiful literary work.
It is no wonder that the reader is making a big fuss, but the writer's great achievements in writing 29 main characters in 8 short stories are too amazing to be cautious.
Unfortunately, the people who got the novel at that time did not know what they were going to face.
Is "Alive" noble?
"Alive" novel
As Yu Hua himself said, "I feel that I have written a noble work", the novel as a whole is definitely an outstanding realistic literary work.
The background of the story is perfect and broad, the character settings are real and diverse, and the narrative techniques are unique and avant-garde, especially at the end, the intention is abruptly elevated, which really corresponds to the praise of the outside world as "the pinnacle of contemporary Chinese literature".
However, in the eyes of most people, the tragedy derived from "Alive" is far greater than the "nobility" that the author wants to give to the reader.
Yu Hua in his youth
The protagonist Fugui in his early years gambled and defeated the family property and died his father;
In the middle of the family road, he bought medicine for niang, and on the way, he was arrested when Zhuang Ding's whereabouts were unknown and he died of his mother;
The son ran to donate blood to the county magistrate's wife in a hurry and was drawn to death in the hospital;
The daughter fell ill and became dumb, and finally died on the operating table during childbirth and hemorrhage;
The wife suffered from hypochondria after a lifetime of fatigue, and after sending away two children, she also died;
The son-in-law and his grandson were working and were caught between two stone slabs and died at the construction site;
Cooking beans for the sick grandson to eat results in the grandson being propped alive.
People can't believe that modern Chinese born in the sun and grown up in the spring breeze can write such a tragic and tragic novel.
"The author must have been an unambitious reader of the last century," everyone thought, "Maybe he is no longer there."
And just when people think that the author is a sloppy, paranoid, poor, and terrible middle-aged man, Yu Hua appeared in the latest interview, laughing and making comments on himself:
"In my heart, I still think that I am at the forefront of Chinese literature, but it doesn't matter whether others admit that I am there, anyway, some people already think that I am not there."
In 2022, as an interview became popular again on the Internet, Yu Hua once again appeared widely in the eyes of the general public.
Classic divine sentences emerge in an endless stream, daily interviews are full of baggage, this person with a shaky face and even some skin, is Yu Hua?
With the rapid spread of online media, people know.
Yu Hua is not only still there, but also an "excellent comedian" who truly "keeps happiness to himself and sends sadness to readers".
Yu Hua as a guest of "Readers"
Born in 1960 in Zhejiang Province, Yu Hua's parents were engaged in medical work, and yu Hua's family was already in a good position in the generally poor land of China.
Because of the job transfer, when Yu Hua was two years old, the family had to move to Haiyan County, a small city belonging to Jiaxing.
When he was a child, Yu Hua was very naughty, and his parents were busy at work and had no time to discipline him and his brother.
He often ran into trouble, and when he was afraid of being beaten, he secretly hid it, and when his father came to him, he would give a small signal to let people know where he was.
If his father was too busy to come to him, he would have to hide for a few hours without success, and then go home on his own.
And because of the particularity of his parents' work, he didn't even have the small right to "pretend to be sick".
Perhaps, Yu Hua is the first and only writer in Chinese history to lie about his stomach pain and was forcibly cut off by his parents in order to avoid punishment and housework.
For Yu Hua, this experience is a juvenile incident that can often be ridiculed.
After all, he was a child who had dealt with the most miserable place in the world at a young age.
In order to facilitate work, Yu Hua's whole family lives in the hospital, so this often happens:
A serious-faced and heavily armed doctor was carefully operating on the patient, but the unguarded operating room suddenly broke into two naughty boys who were not small and half big, and this look made the doctor on the operating table blush.
Operating room in the 1970s and 1980s
With a loud "roll" in the room, the two little boys escaped from the operating room.
It was "escape", but the smile on that little face symbolized the success of another prank.
From childhood to adulthood, Yu Hua has always grown up in such an environment, and for him, life in the hospital is not as terrible as many people think.
On the contrary, he liked the hospital environment, even the smell of formalin and disinfectant.
Some people say that the walls of the hospital bear the most tears and prayers in the world, and in this place that is busy every day and night, there is always a dark silence, that is, the darkness and shade that the sun cannot penetrate.
In this case, who could imagine that a little boy of no more than seven or eight years old could sleep sweetly on the small table in the morgue.
Hospitals of the last century
The southern summer is a good time for the sun to travel, the scorching of huge fireballs makes people's sweat evaporate before they can drip from their bodies, and the excessive shine of ultraviolet rays makes the display on the street look like a shaky picture from a distance.
Such weather is undoubtedly the most annoying to Yu Hua, because he often sees that after he is awakened by the heat during his nap, the simple grass mat has completely "buckled" his portrait.
Until one day, he slept on the cement platform where the bodies of the deceased were placed in the morgue, which he will continue to remember for decades to come.
"Death is a cool night."
Many years later, when Yu Hua finished reading Heine's poem, he suddenly found the most suitable verse for the comfort of that day.
That's right, comfortable.
At a time when countless people thought that the living environment he was living in at that time was extremely terrible, he used "no fear" to describe his days in the hospital.
"When I was very young, I was able to distinguish between all kinds of cries."
Such a sound often woke up Yu Hua, who was still asleep.
The overwhelming negative emotions in the hospital can sometimes be unbearable for a healthy adult, but Yu Hua, who is awakened at night, can analyze the different meanings of crying in the darkness that devours life.
This had a great influence on his early literary works.
In fact, there was not a single literary figure in the Yu Hua family, and even he himself was originally just a small doctor who extracted teeth in a dental clinic without a business license.
Yu Hua was reluctant to study, and even because of the background of the times at that time, the school environment was not very good.
He often wandered aimlessly around the playground, unable to tell the ringtones of the bells for class.
At that time, he was only sixteen or seventeen years old, and he was already in an important stage of the composition of the three views, but he lacked correct guidance.
It wasn't until he failed the college entrance examination and was assigned to the dental clinic after he didn't learn anything at school that Yu Hua vaguely felt that he didn't like the job.
"Is my whole life so stereotyped?"
Standing in the window of the dental office, he was envious of the idle people in the county cultural center, who could get a lot of money just by walking around the street every day.
He began to pick up a pen and write novels.
Yu Hua was interviewed along with his manuscript
Of course, the prefectural cultural center is a place that everyone dreams of going, but only Yu Hua has put it into action.
Every day in the "most scenic place in the world", with simple tools, pulling out the teeth that are rotten to the roots, Yu Hua's heart, from the initial resistance, gradually has no waves.
After five years of tooth extraction, his novel gradually took shape, and the ambition to start writing after reading two pages of the magazine was shattered by the blow of reality.
He understood that if he wanted to "grab a piece of the pie" from the writers who were contracted, the manuscripts he handed over were much better than theirs.
From the confidence of sending manuscripts to national newspapers and periodicals at the beginning, to the caution of demoting to the small newspapers and spreading the net, in the "banging" sound of postmen throwing rejections into the walls of their yards, he gradually began to settle down and patiently polish his works.
Finally, the phone call from Beijing Literature came.
Beijing Literature Magazine
In fact, "Beijing Literature" was not remarkable in the vast number of newspapers and magazines at that time, but it was valuable in discernment.
So far, one of the great achievements of Beijing Literature is to discover such an excellent young writer as Yu Hua.
At that time, the telephone still needed to be transferred layer by layer from various telephone stations to the hands of the parties, so the editor Zhou Yanru contacted Yu Hua from work in the morning until the end of the evening.
At this time, Yu Hua was very worried in his heart, he had actually vaguely guessed that this phone call from Beijing was related to whether his future literary path could really be opened, after all, there were no relatives in Beijing at his home.
Sure enough, Zhou Yanru's excited voice came from the other end of the phone, and she told Yu Hua that all three of the works he sent could be published, but one of them had to be revised, and he needed to go to Beijing to revise the manuscript.
Yu Hua, who dropped the phone, was extremely excited, but he did not make a big fuss, but silently asked for leave and took a train to Beijing.
The process of meeting with the editor was smooth, that is, Yu Hua's emotions were too excited.
Hearing the editor's comment that "the end of the novel is not very bright and needs to be minorly repaired", he vowed:
"You just have to publish it to me, and I can give you light from beginning to end!"
At that time, Yu Hua still remembers it vividly, and can imagine his joyful mood.
The editors of Beijing Literature felt that they did not choose the wrong person on the second day, and on weekdays, some authors needed a month or two, or even half a year, to revise the fragments, and Yu Hua only took one day to complete.
Editors who were pleased with their discernment said:
"Go play, the expenses are reimbursed to you!"
Beijing in the last century
Yu Hua, who had never been far away, began a journey of playing at the public expense of Guangming Zhengda, when his monthly salary was only 40 yuan, in addition to the problem of eating and living that had been solved, he could also get two yuan of subsidies every day.
That's two dollars a day in 1984.
Finally to the point where there was no way to play, Yu Hua carried eighty or ninety yuan in his pocket and returned to Haiyan triumphantly.
Returning to his hometown, Yu Hua was welcomed by the highest level of villagers and neighborhood leaders, and with the successful publication of the novel, he was also successfully transferred to the Haiyan County Cultural Center.
Now Haiyan County
On the first day of work, Yu Hua deliberately arrived two hours late, and when he arrived at the work place, he found that he was the first to arrive, which made him sigh with satisfaction:
"That's right."
At this time, Yu Hua was actually already in a state of "half lying flat", but as he said in an interview later:
"I write hard, and when my friends of the same age are still playing poker and playing, I write hard at my desk, isn't it just to live a life without an alarm clock?"
Unfortunately, this kind of life without an alarm clock often symbolizes the imminent arrival of a life that will be occupied by an alarm clock all day.
Yu Hua is a very lazy person, in order to enter the county cultural center, he can fill his life.
However, after his slight achievements in literature, he had to be "industrious".
Yu Hua attended the event
In particular, after the publication of "Alive", Yu Hua's prestige has developed unprecedentedly, and his position in the Chinese literary world has been firmly established, and it can be said that he can still live on "Alive".
However, at that time, the literary world was not harmonious, and unlike the once healthy competition, a series of talented young writers such as Yu Hua and Mo Yan were hit a lot, and there were not a few people who wanted to send them to Siberia to grow potatoes.
Fortunately, they were protected by a group of respected old writers, especially Mr. Ba Jin, who Yu Hua mentioned several times in the future and was full of gratitude.
After a series of writers grew up here, new problems arose.
The rise of online literature.
Yu Hua once said bluntly in his essay that he was a little worried about the growing popularity of online literature.
This fear is not a fear of literary flourishing, but whether the gradual disappearance of paper in the lives of writers with the flourishing of electronic information technology means that their group of established writers is at risk of losing their jobs.
Copyright, manuscript fees, publishing and other issues that were not discussed have become the focus, and in Yu Hua's view, some online literature is unqualified, even somewhat naïve.
However, those immature works can still trap a writer like Yasunari Kawabata who reads yasunari Kawabata's enlightenment, he said bluntly:
"If the fictional world of literature is only the sky, then the virtual world of the Internet has become a complete combination of the sky and the earth."
In a sense, the positive effect of such addiction on him is obvious.
Yu Hua interview tidbits
The 62-year-old gentleman was like a young man who had just entered the society in tencent's interview, laughing and complaining about their fees, talking about the world's sports stars, and explaining the hot words on the Internet.
This is also one of the reasons why among so many writers, Yu Hua has the highest degree of out of the circle.
In the 1980s and 1990s, a golden period for the vigorous development of Chinese literature, young writers such as Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Su Tong, Ge Fei, and Su Ganlu emerged, and their works were extremely unique in style, and they used their own means to bring modern literature to the peak.
They stand as adults at the crossroads of two centuries, experiencing far more than two eras.
Most of their literary works are set in post-1949 China, telling stories that are very different from today's for contemporary Chinese.
Yu Hua is one of the typical representatives of connecting the two eras.
In his eyes, "Alive" is noble, "Shouting in the Drizzle" is not bitter, and "Wencheng" is written at home after staying up for 20 years because of illness.
He can say without changing his face that "the biggest difference between French writers and Chinese writers is that French writers write in French, and Chinese writers write in Chinese." ”
He has also laughed uncontrollably at many writers' guest activities to tell the funny story of Stetson guarding the door in a wheelchair.
He even asked him to rate his "Alive", and when his 9.4 score made people scratch their heads, he asked everyone to ask Douban where the 0.6 score went.
Yu Hua was interviewed by Tencent Sports
Yu Hua's re-popularity with the "comedian" label proves that people are far less receptive to tragedy than comedy, and such true temperament is a feature of modern writers that is gradually disappearing.
But who knows.
After all, Mr. Yu Hua himself has said:
"80% of what writers say in interviews is not credible."