Yu Hua and Vanguard Novels

Yu Hua, a native of Hangzhou, Zhejiang, grew up mainly in Haiyan County. Yu Hua says in his autobiography, "I lived in Haiyan for nearly 30 years. I am familiar with everything there... All my past inspiration is from there, and my future inspiration will also come from there." In 1984, Yu Hua published his first novel Stars and began to reveal his uniquely individualized literary talent. Later he published works such as A Kind of Reality, A World of Affairs like Smoke and A Story Dedicated to the Girl Willow successively, carried out bold practice in the field of vanguard novels, and formed a style of his own. Under Yu Hua's pen, the cruel interpersonal state is outlined easily in an unrestrained atmosphere. After the 1990s, the style of Yu Hua's creation changed greatly. He began to pay attention to ordinary people's daily life and feelings, and completed long novels such as To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Brothers. Though still having the characteristic of "violent" narration, they are more focused on manifesting tender interpersonal feelings and eulogizing man's kind and noble character.

To Live is one of Yu Hua's important representative works about the hard life of Fugui's family. Fugui is a landlord's son. After he gambles away the entire family fortune in his youth, his father dies with indignation. Later he is forced to join the Kuomintang army and fight on the battleground, and is captured by the Liberation Army. By the time he finally returns home, he finds that his mother has died and that his daughter Fengxia has become deaf and mute. Years later, his son Yongqing dies while donating blood to the county head's wife due to excessive withdrawal of blood. Later he finds that the county head is Chunsheng, Fugui's comrade-in-arms in the Kuomintang army. Fugui and Chunsheng used to go through fire and water together. This is a heavy blow on Fugui. Several years, Fengxia dies from dystocia and leaves a poor newborn child and his wife Jiazhen also died of prolonged illness. However, this family's disasters are not over. His son-in-law dies tragically in an accident, and his daughter's son chokes to death while eating beans. Family members die one after another, and only Fugui lives and maintains optimistic and magnanimous forever. It seems that the author dared not "kill" Fugui and left some hope and imagination to readers. At the end of the novel, as Fu Gui and his old cow gradually go away, the author wrote, "the field gets quiet, the dusk passes in the blinking of an eye, and land is calling for the advent of night." Such time change of nature on the one hand suggests Fu Gui's life is about to end and at the same time heralds a new day's inevitable arrival. The author seems to want to tell people: no matter what happens and what hardship is encountered, tomorrow will be a new day, so we should live with strong will.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant written in 1995 is another masterpiece written after Yu Hua's transition, epitomizing the author's sympathy with and compassion for hardships in ordinary people's life, his sigh over the fleetness of fate and his in-depth examination of and care for Chinese history and society. The protagonist Xu Sanguan overcomes many disasters in life through "selling blood" in exchange for continuation of his family's life, showing the sadness and helplessness of modern people facing difficult situations. Meanwhile, the novel also tells people: only by treating people around them with a warm attitude and helping others generously can they live with dignity without getting lost in cold life.

Yu Hua is one of the Chinese writers most reputed in the world. The U.S. Time magazine evaluated his To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant: they "encompass the collective tragedy of China's 20Ul century and will help one of China's top writers gain the international recognition he deserves." Yu Hua's works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean and published abroad. He won the Italian Grinzane Cavour Prize, the Australian "Suspended Sentence Award" and the French Order of Arts and Letters, and became a very active representative writer of new novels in China's modern literary circles. His To Live was also adapted into a film with the same title and evoked extensive responses

The first attempts to write Chinese modern vanguard novels were made by Liu Suola, Xu Xing and Ma Yuan in the mid-1980s and Hong Feng, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Ye Zhaoyan, etc. in the late 1980s. The biggest difference between vanguard novels and previous ones is that vanguard novels shift from describing the experiential world of man's external behavior to careful exploring man's subjective world. They include man's subjective stream of consciousness and perverted psychologies and feelings into the scope of literary manifestation, and deepen the understanding of man and the expression of the rich and complex inner world.

You Have No Other Choice, Liu Suola's first work and representative work, is a pioneering work in the development of vanguard novels. The novel depicts the life of a group of young students at an academy of music like a farce, and reveals to us their deep loneliness, emptiness of doing nothing, bewildered and agitated mentality, unstoppable creative passion and persistent pursuit. The novel manifests a strong sense of modernity, and answers fundamental questions that modern philosophy is concerned about such as "What am I?", "What is man?" and "What are nature and environment?"

Ma Yuan is another representative writer of vanguard novels. Novel collections Temptation of Gangdese and Fabrication and long novel Flat Up and Down are his representative works. Ma Yuan's novels boldly attempt to use the narrative mode of Western structuralism and at the same time focus on his own existential experience as well as narration's non-causality, non-continuity, randomness and unpredictability. He purposely created the artistic effect of fabrication and distortion to eliminate the meanings of contents themselves and leave space for equivocal association and interpretation to readers.

Besides, vanguard writers were also accustomed to tapping the "abnormal" side of love in an attempt to resist inhibition of people's hearts by the traditional concept of love. Ye Zhaoyan's The Shop at the Crossroad, Ge Fei's First Lover, etc. challenge the model of traditional love novels, cause complete deconstruction of love, and expose the other side of love, marriage and families that people do not want to see like a beautiful, magnificent and exquisite pagoda. However, it collapses after a light blow!

Vanguard novelists also had special thoughts about death, and elaborated that death was another kind of reality in the world and another kind of secret anguish in the depths of people's souls. Yu Hua clearly tells us in To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant that man obtains dignity through struggling with death. Vanguard novels survey the state of ordinary people's existence and man's spiritual essence in great depth with death as the breakthrough point.