A copycat gets copied

Yu Hua has been called “the Hemingway of China”, but one of his books is banned there. Why the authorities let him continue living in Beijing is a bit of a mystery. Maybe it’s his sense of humour.
Yu was at Book Expo Thailand in Bangkok last week to launch Nanmee Books’ Thai editions of his four titles – “China in Ten Words”, “A Blood Merchant”, “Brothers” and “To Live”.
Yu, speaking through an interpreter, called himself an accidental novelist who made the big time. He spoke openly and calmly about the book ban and was frank about the Tiananmen Square massacre and the communist leadership.
“China in Ten Words” is blocked in his homeland because it addresses the bloodshed of 1989. His other works are fiction, and Yu is known to evade the censors by changing details.
Zhang Yimou turned “To Live” into a film in 1994. It was a box-office success elsewhere but never shown in China, even though the novel is on sale, and in fact an international bestseller thanks in part to the movie.
Yu’s readiness to change the names and dates of political events in his novels is perhaps why he’s escaped the political harassment that befell visual artist Ai Weiwei and is able to live peacefully in Beijing.
Yu is nevertheless influential as a writer – a profession selected for him by the government. He’s affiliated with the Cultural Bureau in the capital.
“In China, you don’t select a profession on your own,” Yu explained. “It’s the government who tells you what profession you’re going to have.”
Born in Hangzhou in Zhejiang province in 1960 and attending high school during the Cultural Revolution, Yu is an unlikely candidate for global acclaim, but his novels, short stories and essays have been translated into a dozen languages.
Many of his tales are marked by his experiences during the Cultural Revolution. He has a penchant for detailed descriptions of brutal violence – a protester hammering a nail into his skull, peasants selling their blood for money.
The 10 words in “China in Ten Words” are people, leader, reading, writing, disparity, revolution, grassroots, copycat, bamboozle and Lu Xun – the influential writer of the last century.
In 2002 Yu became the first Chinese writer to win the James Joyce Foundation Award. “To Live” had won Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour a few years earlier and been declared one of the decade’s “10 most influential books in China”.
All this from a dentist: That was the first career chosen for him by the government. For five years, during his 20s, he was a “copycat dentist” in a hospital, without college training or medical certification. He learned how to drill teeth from an older copycat dentist.
“In five years I took out about 10,000 teeth. I looked into a lot of people’s mouths, and they were all bad mouths because, if their mouths had been any good, they wouldn’t have come to me.
“So the next day I said to myself I couldn’t stand taking out any more teeth or looking inside any more bad mouths.”
In the meantime he’d noticed government officials strolling around the local market all day, seemingly with nothing but free time. He asked one of them what he did for a living. The reply changed Yu’s life.
“I’m employed as a culture official attached to the Cultural Bureau,” the man said, “but my job is walking in and out the market.”
The Cultural Bureau was just opposite the hospital. The young dentist fancied the idea of being a culture official and having lots of free time.
To get a job at the Cultural Bureau, Yu was told, he needed to be able to paint, compose music or write stories. Yu felt confident enough about his writing.
“I couldn’t paint or compose a song, but I could write in Mandarin – although my vocabulary was very limited at the time,” he said.
The Cultural Bureau hired him. Yu arrived two hours late on his first day. “I was really worried that I’d be reprimanded, but it turned out that I was the first person in the office!”
Yu’s first short stories were sent to Chinese literary magazines and he soon became a household name.
The translations that followed prompted a foreign critic to call Yu “China’s Hemingway” and the tag caught on. Yu still laughs about it. They were confusing the American novelist’s deliberate pursuit of simple sentences with Yu’s sheer poverty of words.
“When I started out I had very limited word power, but the local and foreign critics said my stories were clear and economical with words. In fact, I just didn’t know many Chinese characters back then!
“So I said that if I was the Hemingway of China, that meant the original Hemingway must not have known many English words!” Yu said, exploding with laughter.
The critics in turn (defensively, no doubt) hailed Yu’s self-effacement and wry sense of humour.
Through his translated works, Yu wants to convey a more realistic portrait of his homeland, where social extremes persist despite world acclaim for China’s emergence as an economic superpower.
The imbalance of wealth in China is one of the reasons there are so many copycats there, said the former copycat dentist.
“Copycats are everywhere in China, including in the publishing industry,” Yu said. “No one thinks copycats are bad.
“I once spotted a pirated copy of my novel on sale. When I told the shopkeeper, he said it wasn’t a pirated version of my novel, it was just a copied version!”
And more uproarious laughter ensues.