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About the novelist Yu Hua
"Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China. He finished high
school during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist for five years
before beginning to write in 1983. He has published three novels, six
collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His work has been
translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and
Korean. In 2002 Yu Hua became the first Chinese
writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award. To Live
was awarded Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998 and
was named one of the last decade’s ten most influential books in China"
[biographical information provided by the author's agent, JoAnne
Wang Agency] ("To Live: Film Screening...").
"Yu was born in
1960 in the province of Zhejiang. After finishing high
school during the Cultural Revolution, he worked as a dentist for five years,
from the age of 18 to 23, “spending my most precious youth in examining
people’s opening mouths.” Yu gradually became bored with his job and began to
envy professional artists working for government-sponsored cultural centers
because they did not have to go to the office
early and could always idle away time on the street. In order to escape from
his job as a dentist, he began to write stories in 1983 and submitted them to literary journals around the country" (Xin Zhang).
Yu Hua on "the magic of
writing"
"As
Yu explained, he feels that the magic of writing is that it gives writers a
chance to express emotions and desires in a fictional world that are usually
not easily expressible through other means. Writing also makes it possible
for writers to experience another life. Yu felt after he became a
professional writer that his "true" life was becoming more and more
routine and boring while the fictional world he created in his writing became
increasingly exciting and rich. Yu talked about how his own understanding of
writing has changed over time. In his early years of writing, he felt that the
characters in his novels were just symbols whose personalities, emotions, and
desires were all under the full control of the writer. Gradually, he felt
that his characters began to gain a life of their own: once the writer
creates the characters, they begin to have their own voices which the writer
can no longer control. Along the same lines, Yu compared short stories and
novels: characters in novels are more independent of the writer. Furthermore,
novels are easier to escape from the writer's control, and compared to short
stories they make it easier for the writer to
experience a different, fictional life. For these reasons too, novels have a
much higher market value than short stories" (Xin Zhang).
Yu Hua on the movie To Live
"When
it came to comparing his novel To Live and the movie that
was adapted from it (released in 1994), Yu recalled the time in 1992 when he
and the director Zhang Yimou discussed the
adaptation. They actually started by working on another of Yu’s novels. However, after Zhang read the draft
of To Live, he immediately became captivated by
it. As Yu himself was also more confident about adapting this novel into
movie script rather than their original choice, the two soon agreed to work
on To Live. Personally, Yu said, he likes his novel
better than the movie. One reason, according to Yu, arises from the age
difference between Yu and Zhang. To Yu, who was only a child when the
Cultural Revolution broke out, the Cultural Revolution is just a childhood
memory and serves mainly as the background of his novel. On the other hand,
to the older Zhang, the Cultural Revolution was a highly involved personal
experience" (Xin Zhang; emphasis added).
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