Brothers by Yu Hua

With the Chinese New Year festival still ongoing, I would like to introduce one of the most talked about novels in China by one of the most respected and contemporary novelists in China.  Brothers contains a whopping 641 pages and has been shortlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize.


About the author:  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's since published four novels, six story and three essay collections, and his work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean.  In 2002, he became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award, and two of his novels - To Live and Chronicles of a Blood Merchant - were listed in the top ten most influential Chinese books of the last decade.  His other works are Cries in the Drizzle and The Past and the Punishments.  Yu Hua now lives in Beijing.

Brothers is translated from the Chinese by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas.

My thoughts:  What a novel!  The two brothers, or rather stepbrothers, are like chalk and cheese.  The eldest, Song Gang, is timid and introverted and the youngest, Baldy Li, is bold and an extrovert.  They have a strong relationship where, ironically, the extrovert brother usually rules over the introvert brother while the introvert brother would give the extrovert brother "his last piece of clothing and his last bowl of rice."  In any event, their tight-knit relationship eventually became undone by their love for the most beautiful girl in town.  Aside from that, the brothers are very much likeable even with their differing personalities.  Best of all, they are right down hilarious and they are probably the best examples to help you understand Chinese humour!

I have laughed and cried with the characters in this book or to put it mildly, Brothers has moved me to new heights of literary stimulation.  I do not think it is a book which appeals particularly to everyone but I may be wrong.  According to the translators (taken from the preface of the book), "...Brothers is flashy, blunt, and often deliberately repetitive, yet has moments of sublime beauty and gut-wrenching pathos.  It uses a combination of subversive humour and haunting sentimentality to chronicle contemporary China's transition from socialist austerity to capitalist hyperbole...

In addition to everything else, Brothers is "about parents and children, and the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children from a world gone mad..." and I cannot agree more wholeheartedly than their respected opinions.  Do read it for its own sake.  I think you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Below, I have assembled some videos and articles which I find interesting about the author and the book and I hope you will get something useful out of them:

1)  A video of Yu Hua discussing life before and during the China's economic boom produced by James Wang on The New York Times, 2009:

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/05/08/books/1194840083927/an-interview-with-yu-hua.html

2)  A Newsweek profile of the author:

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/03/20/talking-about-his-generation.html

3)  An article entitled "The Bonfire of China's Vanities" published 23 January 2009:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25hua-t.html?_r=1

4)  An NPR interview with the author:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104435507

Rating:  5/5