Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Yu Hua published his first short story in 1983, when he was twenty-three. In the ebb and flow of his writing career since then, the early and mid-1990s stand out as an especially productive phase. Within the space of a few short years he completed a trio of novels—Cries in the Drizzle, To Live, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant—that firmly established him as a major figure in the Chinese literary scene. The reputation of these books, particularly To Live, which was soon adapted for the screen by Zhang Yimou, has tended to overshadow the short fiction that Yu Hua published during this same period. But the stories collected here, all written between 1993 and 1998, represent a distinctive body of work in their own way. Written in a spare, minimalist style, they sketch vignettes of everyday life in contemporary China, in keeping with the “popular realism” that characterizes To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. If there is a recurrent theme in Boy in the Twilight, it is the fractures and fluidities in human relationships during the reform era in China: marriages in crisis collapse or rebound, friendships are cemented or betrayed, in a precarious world where events may take an unexpected turn at any time. Yet Yu Hua does not entirely abandon the unorthodox stance of his earlier fiction, and comic absurdity rubs shoulders with tragedy as these stories unfold.