About the author
Yu Hua is a Chinese novelist, essayist, and short-story writer whose early experimental fiction gave way to plainspoken accounts of endurance through twentieth-century upheaval. His humor and violence often arrive in the same unadorned sentence.
Yu Hua's plain prose can carry farce, political violence, private grief, and stubborn endurance without announcing a change of register. In both fiction and essay, ordinary words become entrances into a century of reversals.
Where to start
Start with To Live for Yu Hua's fiction: a family story pared down to survival across decades of upheaval. Choose China in Ten Words for autobiographical essays that approach modern China through ordinary language, memory, and contradiction.
