On banned readings, and more, in China

CHINA IN TEN WORDS, by Yu Hua, translated by Allan H. Barr. Pantheon, 240 pp., $25.95.

If Yu Hua never wrote anything else, he would rate entry into the pantheon of greats for "Reading," an essay in his new collection "China in Ten Words." Nothing I've ever read captures both the power and subversive nature of youthful reading as well.

Growing up in China in the '70s, in the wake of the so-called Cultural Revolution, Yu was all but literally starved for things to read, with only 20-some novels of "socialist revolutionary literature" on the fiction shelf in his town's recently reopened library. When he pored over the four-volume "Selected Works of Mao Zedong," neighbors "sighed in wonder" at his zeal. Actually, Yu writes, "what I liked to read in 'Selected Works' was simply the footnotes, explanatory summaries of historical events and biographical details about historical figures, which proved to be much more interesting than the novels in our local library."

Later, Yu and his friends passed around "poisonous weeds": banned novels that had survived Red Guard bonfires, in handed-on disrepair with a dozen or more pages missing from their beginnings and endings. To not know how a story ended "was a painful deprivation," so at night as he went to sleep he would imagine his own endings.

Yu, whose novels include "Brothers" and "To Live," has picked 10 words to serve as launchpads for his explorations of the "social complexities and staggering contrasts of contemporary China." Those essays include plenty of circling back to the brutal inanities of the Cultural Revolution.

In "Copycat," Yu explains how widespread pirating in China "represents a challenge of the grass roots to the elite, of the popular to the official, of the weak to the strong." After Tiananmen, he writes, political reform ground to a halt, while "the economy began breakneck development," leading to a contradictory reality where people sometimes toe the line, and other times throw away the rule book. He also describes a remarkable gathering of Mao Zedong look-alikes, including a woman who invested many hours and many yuan to craft her impersonation of Mao.

In "Lu Xun," Yu grapples with an earlier Chinese writer whose work, for him and many others, "is freighted with a meaning that goes well beyond the scope of literature and biography." Mao's high regard for Lu Xun (who died in 1936) made the author's name a catchphrase that "represented eternal correctness and permanent revolution." The mocking young Yu began attributing his own opinions to Lu Xun as a way to win playground arguments. Much later, a film director asked Yu to look through some Lu Xun stories for possible adaptations. Yu discovered, to his surprise, a writer of lucid and supple narratives for mature readers. "For a reader to truly encounter an author sometimes depends on finding the right moment," Yu concludes.

For American readers curious about the upheavals of China, this may be the right moment to discover Yu Hua.