Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

The extent to which Yu Hua — perhaps the most notorious agent provocateur of the Chinese literary avant-garde that flourished in the years around the Tiananmen movement of 1989—has become part of the mainstream was brought home to me on a recent visit to Beijing. Flipping through the cable TV channels, I suddenly stumbled across an “Arts and Entertainment”—style documentary featuring Yu Hua’s life and work. Replete with impressionistic black-and-white televisual reenactments of episodes from his youth in Haiyan, a small provincial city on China’s prosperous southeastern seaboard, the show narrates Yu Hua’s meteoric rise from “barefoot” dentist to fame as one of the very best-selling and most critically acclaimed figures in the Chinese literary establishment through a series of vignettes. We are shown his birth in 1960, the travails of a childhood spent amid the all-encompassing political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, his formative and easy familiarity with the funereal world of the hospital morgue where both his parents worked as doctors, the five years he spent pulling teeth by day and obsessively reading the masterpieces of modern literature by night, and, finally, the triumphal moment when one of his first short stories, sent unsolicited to a literary magazine in the far-off capital city of Beijing, elicited the phone call from an influential editor that would eventually catapult him to the forefront of the literary scene, and make him a major figure in the post-Mao transformation of China’s literary and cultural terrain.

Yu Hua never mentioned the documentary to me when we had dinner a few nights later, and I didn’t bring it up. I suspect he didn’t care for the way in which the show neglected the very thing that remains most important to him: the power and precision with which he wields words as a means of engaging critically with the world around him. And I was at considerable pains to reconcile this slick televised portrait with the man I had first met one night in the early 1990s after having been drawn (and sometimes repulsed) by the clinical lyricism and musical violence of his angular and modernistic prose. Such was the sensitivity to the “rustle of language” and the almost Mitteleuropäer morbidity of sensibility evinced by his early work, that I was more amused than surprised when a skinny and slightly unkempt Yu Hua, almost immediately upon entering my hotel room in a converted traditional courtyard residence in Beijing for the first time, lit a cigarette, got down on all fours in search of an annoying buzzing sound of which I had been completely unaware, and unceremoniously unplugged the mini-refrigerator.

BEIJING, where Yu Hua now lives and works, is a noisier city than it once was. One traverses the city’s seemingly endless expanse of concrete housing blocks on newly constructed elevated expressways lit on both sides by glowing neon and the bill-boarded icons of transnational commerce: Toshiba, IKEA, Motorola. As we ate in a glitzy new Cantonese seafood restaurant, Yu Hua’s son played a portable video game and clamored for McDonald’s. Karaoke pop music and the blare of the television news seeped from another room, mixing with the loud conversation and shrill cell phone ring-tones of well-dressed entrepreneurs. Unplugging, in other words, is no longer an option. For writers of Yu Hua’s generation, often referred to as the “experimentalists,” the crucial questions have changed, irrevocably. The socialist orthodoxy and stale humanist verities against which they struggled mightily in the ’80s have long since been dethroned. The cultural insularity they so pointedly punctured by way of the importation and creative appropriation of modernist, magical realist, and postmodernist models has become less a problem than a virtual impossibility. Literary censorship is now largely market-driven, and formal experimentation simply doesn’t sell. The question that remains is this: How can a writer make his or her voice heard above the din? How do specifically literary signals penetrate the pervasive noise of commercial culture, media babble, and globalized culture that has inundated urban China in the new century? What position can Chinese writers occupy in an aggressively capitalist era in which the nouveau-riche entrepreneur is insistently exalted as the most alluring sort of culture hero? It is only in the context of these questions that we can understand Yu Hua’s transformation into a best-selling author, and the local significance of his Chronicle of a Blood Merchant as a work of literary imagination and social critique.

FOR YU HUA, growing up in the narrow, stone-cobbled and moss-edged lanes of his native Haiyan, writing was a way out. The lives of the salaried writers employed by the local party-sponsored “Cultural Palace” seemed positively bourgeois compared to the drudgery of pulling teeth. Perhaps even more important, the translations of global modernist fiction that were just beginning to trickle into local book markets in the mid-1980s as a result of the post-Mao program of “reform and opening,” seemed to offer a means of shirking the ideological and intellectual drudgery of everyday life, of imagining “one kind of reality” (as he titled an early novella) in which conventional ways of seeing the world no longer held sway. The Japanese Nobel Prize — winner Yasunari Kawabata’s lyrical attention to the world of things was an early and abiding influence. (Whenever he managed to find a rare Chinese translation of Kawabata’s works, Yu Hua once told me, he would buy two copies: one to read, and the other to keep pristinely intact on his bookshelf.) Yu Hua’s initial encounter with Franz Kafka’s tortuously Byzantine narratives of modern life, and especially his unflinching attention to spiritual and corporeal violence, was equally revelatory. The efforts of Jewish writers such as Bruno Schulz and Isaac Bashevis Singer to understand the horrors of inhumanity spoke to Yu Hua’s own concern with the question of how he might most effectively represent the cataclysms of recent Chinese history. The labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges exercised a profound fascination as well, for they pointed Yu Hua toward narrative convolution and philosophical uncertainty rather than the straight story lines and invariant verities of socialist dogma. And it was his intense dissatisfaction with the class-coded and stereotypical attributes of the stalwart heroes and reactionary villains he had grown up reading and watching in revolutionary novels and films that attracted him to the radical experiments of the French new novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose characters are deliberately emptied of any pretense of humanity or psychological depth— for the flatter the characters, Robbe-Grillet felt, the more quickly the illusionism and stale conventions of realism could be revealed as a cheap, if powerful, ideological ploy.

By the late 1980s, Yu Hua had begun to produce a series of shockingly audacious short stories and novellas in which he not only cut up his own characters in confrontationally graphic detail, but also relentlessly skewered and dissected the norms and conventions of almost every fictional genre, from premodern tales of “scholars and maidens” to martial arts fiction, from ghost stories and detective fiction to epics of the revolutionary struggle. Yu Hua’s narrator could linger for pages over a loving description of a madman sawing off his own nose (“1986”), or an unbearably visceral evocation of a young girl being hacked to pieces and sold to cannibals (“Classical Love”). His stories dispensed with the linear plot lines of realist fiction, preferring instead to loop back upon themselves, interlock into complex mosaics, or deliberately and seemingly inexplicably replay the same passage over and over again.

These heady experiments grew out of the cultural ferment and unrest of the years just before and after the Tiananmen movement of 1989. And Yu Hua was by no means alone in making these sorts of antiauthoritarian gestures in the literary journals of the day. He and a group of similarly avant-garde young authors such as Ge Fei and Su Tong (all of whom had still been children during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s) came to dominate China’s literary scene in the early 1990s. If post-Mao writers had struggled to rescue humanism from the ashes of a failed socialist past throughout the 1980s, enthused Chinese critics believed, the experimentalists of the 1990s would go even further, exposing the pitfalls of the humanist thinking and grand historical narratives their predecessors had relied upon as a means of cultural protest. If earlier artists had reclaimed European modernism after years of literary repression and isolation under socialism, other critics declared, Yu Hua and his contemporaries represented the arrival of a new global postmodernism on Chinese soil. The problem, these critics argued, was not so much the depredations of Maoism in particular, but the dangerous arrogance of any intellectual or political or literary system — even those as seemingly benign as humanism or nationalism or realism — that dared claim to tell the whole story, the only true story, in the name of the people. The nihilistic energy of Yu Hua’s fiction — and its refusal to behave like conventional fiction — thus came to be seen as a necessary refusal, a deconstructive gesture, and a sign of the times.

What this account missed, however, was Yu Hua’s deep affinity for the work of another Chinese master, Lu Xun, whose fiction and impassioned political advocacy had helped launch the epochal May 4th Movement for literary and cultural revolution in 1919. Widely acknowledged as the “father of modern Chinese literature” for his groundbreaking importation and appropriation of Western literary forms, Lu Xun’s unique brand of realist short fiction was inflected by the language and procedures he had learned as a failed medical student in Japan around the turn of the century. Medicine, he later wrote, could heal only bodies. It was the task of literature to minister to their sick minds. Eager to eviscerate what he saw as the deep-seated flaws of the Chinese national character (flaws that seemed by the 1920s to have resulted in China’s subjection to aggressive imperial powers such as England, Germany, France, the United States, and Japan), Lu Xun wielded his pen like a scalpel, cuttingly remarking on the cultural follies and moral failings of his fellow Chinese. What made Lu Xun a great writer, however, was not only his tremendous linguistic invention and uncompromising social conscience, but also the way he fretted about his inability as a member of the educated elite to truly reach or represent the masses. Relentlessly self-critical, he took pride in his willingness to turn his scalpel inward, to dissect his own failings even more unsentimentally than he did his “patients” and their pathologies.

The extent to which Yu Hua poked mordantly ironic fun at Lu Xun in his early fiction — one character in his “One Kind of Reality” is quite literally dissected by a wisecracking team of organ harvesting doctors after having been executed for murder— should not obscure their underlying affinities. At the most superficial level, they both grew up in and write almost exclusively about small-town life in Zhejiang province, near Shanghai. As a teenager in Haiyan, Yu Hua was so enamored with the ambiance of Lu Xun’s first masterpiece of short fiction, “Diary of a Madman” (in which traditional Confucian culture is ingeniously represented by a cannibalistic cabal plotting the demise of an enlightened, or perhaps merely paranoid, narrator), that he set it to music, with each Chinese character of the original text being assigned a random musical pitch. (Yu Hua still likes to say that it is quite possibly the longest and most impossible song ever written.) Like Lu Xun, Yu Hua returns obsessively to the violent spectacles of China’s tumultuous modern history. As in Lu Xun’s fiction, the incalculable sufferings of poverty, war, and revolution come to life for the reader in Yu Hua’s fiction as a sort of “theater of cruelty” visited upon the bodies of his characters. And as with Lu Xun, it is the operating theater and the hospital that more often than not serve as a symbolic site of cruelty, official ineptitude, and state malpractice. This is certainly true of To Live—the 1992 novel that catapulted Yu Hua to national fame, prompting a successful film adaptation by the internationally renowned director Zhang Yimou. The climax of that story— which relates the epic transformations of modern Chinese history through the eyes of a ne’er-do-well gambler called Fugui and his family — wrenchingly relates the entirely preventable death by bleeding of a pregnant woman in a hospital at the height of the Cultural Revolution.

While the sheer absurdity and cruelty of the vicissitudes Fugui and his family so resiliently suffer throughout the novel are reminiscent of Yu Hua’s early work, To Live represented a decisive turn away from avant-garde writing toward a more pointedly populist style. By 1992, the vogue for challenging, intellectually serious fiction had begun to cool, and China’s headlong push for wholesale marketization had begun to transform the way people thought about and, more importantly, bought and sold their culture. Ironically, the avant-garde of which Yu Hua had been such a prominent part, fell victim not so much to state repression as to the vagaries of the emergent capitalist marketplace. Literary journals and publishing houses, which had been subsidized by the authorities, were now forced to fend for themselves. Television dramas, Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop music, Hollywood blockbusters, and entertainment fiction rapidly came to dominate urban cultural markets. The intricately constructed narrative labyrinths and earnest cultural critique of the pre- and immediately post-Tiananmen years suddenly seemed hopelessly old-fashioned at best and willfully elitist at worst. The era of mass culture had arrived with a vengeance. Perhaps the best anecdotal emblem of this cultural sea change was the appearance in 1996 of a soapy six-part television miniseries of dubious artistic merit called China Models. Each episode, it turned out, had been ghostwritten by a critically acclaimed proponent of highbrow literary writing in China, including one segment penned by Yu Hua himself.

It would be too simplistic, however, to argue that a book like To Live was merely a capitulation to mass culture. For not unlike Lu Xun before him, Yu Hua has willingly become what we would now refer to as a public intellectual. He writes serious essays on literature, Western classical music, and the visual arts for the popular press. He has been active in producing musicals on Beijing’s vibrant drama scene. He frequently weighs in on issues of public concern on television and via the Internet. Since To Live, his fiction has gravitated toward gripping stories of ordinary men and women living through extraordinary travails. And in experimenting with and finally adopting a reconstructed realist style — one characterized by its stripped-down, almost cinematic brevity, earthy humor, and raw emotional appeal — he has also made a conscious decision to narrow the gulf between elite intellectuals and their audience, a gulf that Lu Xun self-consciously despaired of ever being able to overcome.

All of these tendencies come together in the Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Yu Hua’s most successful novel to date, first published as The Chronicle of Xu Sanguan’s Blood Selling (Xu Sanguan mai xue ji) in 1995. The novel’s deceptively simple scenario takes for its inspiration a subculture, born of rural poverty and a network of blood plasma collection stations in public hospitals, which has existed for more than thirty years in the Chinese countryside, engendering its own protocols, ritual codes of conduct, and belief systems. The disturbing revelations of official corruption and mismanagement within this system, as well as the widespread contamination of blood reserves with the HIV virus, came to light only several years after Yu Hua’s novel was published. Yu Hua’s novel, in this sense, seems eerily prescient. That many rural communities, especially in the drought-stricken central province of Henan, have come to subsist almost entirely on their “blood money” is chilling enough. And the appalling fact that these “blood villages” have also become “AIDS villages”—in which it is conservatively estimated that tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of peasants have contracted HIV through selling their own blood — cannot help but shadow our reading of Xu Sanguan’s distinctly unhygienic encounters with bumbling “blood chiefs” and venal medical officials.

But Yu Hua’s account of the prehistory of this public health holocaust is neither journalistic nor strictly ethnographic. And although Yu Hua faithfully chronicles Xu Sanguan’s life from the early days of socialism in the 1950s, to the disastrously ambitious economic collectivization of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and the three years of famine that resulted, followed by the factional violence of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and the relative prosperity of the post-Mao years, the novel isn’t necessarily, or exclusively, historical in its focus. There’s more than a whiff of the morality play here, for starters. Attentive as always to the musical aspects of his material, Yu Hua has staged his story as the sort of traditional Chinese opera that townsfolk like Xu Sanguan and his country cousins would heartily enjoy. Performances take place in an impromptu manner, in the street or at market or in the midst of a temple fair. Props are minimal, settings suggested in a few broad brushstrokes. Characters, playing more or less to type, appear onstage, explaining themselves directly to the audience and each other in soliloquy. Public life arranges itself into a series of dramatic gestures and emotionally charged tableaux; private life is virtually an impossibility, carried out against the backdrop of a disapproving crowd through furtive kindness or tender mercy, as when Xu Sanguan secretly brings his wife a morsel of meat as she stands in ritual humiliation on a busy street corner. The language of the original, finally, has the plain-speaking concision, bawdy humor, and sharp cadence of street opera, and Yu Hua’s themes — sustenance, suffering, blood money, blood ties, and bonds bought and paid in blood — are nothing if not elemental and operatic.

Few Chinese readers would miss the way in which the story— if only metaphorically — also engages with the wrenching social and economic dislocations of contemporary Chinese life. In a dizzyingly hyper-capitalistic climate in which the private sector has made a startling and often unregulated comeback, state workers such as Xu Sanguan have been rendered redundant, government officials have routinely exploited their political capital and connections to accumulate financial advantage for themselves and their families, and the infrastructure of socialism (medical care and public education) has been gutted by official corruption and privatization, Xu Sanguan’s career as a blood merchant poses a series of disturbing and politically pointed questions. Where does capital come from? What if the only capital you have is your own body? What does it mean to sell your lifeblood for a living? And what happens when there is no longer a market for your “labor”? It is in this specific sense that Xu Sanguan has become an emblematic figure for those who have inevitably been left behind by marketization, a scruffy reverse mirror image of the new entrepreneurial class so insistently touted as the masters of the future by the Chinese media in recent years.

Perhaps the most important question Yu Hua asks in this novel is this: Is there any difference between self-possession and being dispossessed? And the answer, if there is any for the taking, has perhaps to do with the way in which Yu Hua’s characters redeem themselves (and are repaid) not in blood money, but in an altogether more writerly sort of currency: words. Xu Sanguan’s wondrous verbal cookery during the famine is not just about conjuring a perversely empty pleasure from out of desperate privation. The words that he feeds his hungry children after fifty-seven days of eating gruel are a possession, a symbol of his own self-mastery, and a gift: of love, of imagination, of solidarity. What sustains Xu Sanguan and Xu Yulan through betrayal and tribulation is not so much the quasi-contractual blood bonds that brought them together but the stories they tell to each other, their neighbors, and their three children about the forgivably messy ways their lives have tangled and interwoven. And what ultimately counts most for Yile and his father is not so much blood but a simple term of address, a signal that cuts through the noise, an inaccurate yet redemptive fiction: “Dad.”