To Live

Born in 1960, Yu Hua grew up amid the Cultural Revolution in Zhejiang, a coastal province of China. His parents worked in the medical profession, and Yu himself practiced dentistry for several years as a young man. However, he disliked the work and soon turned his eye to writing, which was a state-sponsored profession. Yu initially struggled to find his voice, as the political environment in which he was raised had hampered his education:

I distinctly remember that writing my first story was extremely painful. I was twenty-one or twenty-two but barely knew how to break a paragraph, where to put a quotation mark. In school, most of our writing practice had been copying denunciations out of the newspaper—the only exercise that was guaranteed to be safe, because if you wrote something yourself and said the wrong thing, then what? You might’ve been labeled a counterrevolutionary (Yu Hua. “Yu Hua, The Art of Fiction, No. 261.” Interview by Michael Berry. The Paris Review, no. 246, Winter 2023).

By the mid-1980s, Yu had made a name for himself writing experimental, avant-garde short fiction influenced by the work of writers such as Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges (“