Yu Hua Cries in the Drizzle,
translated by Allan H. Barr.
Anchor Press, 320 pages, $13.95
Brought up during the Mao era in provincial Zhejiang, the writer Yu Hua experienced firsthand the harsh realities of China’s Cultural Revolution. Trained as a dentist, Yu began writing seriously in his twenties after realizing he would earn the same wages for working in the more pleasant environment of a cultural center. His early fiction consisted of short stories that were experimental in style and bleak in content, and he was critically acclaimed for his radical avant- gardism in Chinese literary circles during the 1980s. Commercial success came later, with the publication of his second and third novels. Comical and grim, these more realist, character-driven narratives are written in a clear and simple prose that illuminates the humanity of those portrayed as well as their courageous will to survive. His books constitute a brutally honest portrayal of human absurdity in Chinese provincial life under Maoist rule.
Yu Hua’s second novel, To Live, secured his celebrity status in China. The story of a peasant’s life journey as he successively loses wealth, home, and family, To Live spans the Civil War through the “Great Leap” and the Cultural Revolution. Set in the same time period, his third novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, simply and candidly recounts the heroic efforts of a father to keep his family alive during famine and societal upheaval, selling his blood to the point of nearly