Yu Hua - Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

Few Chinese readers would miss the way in which the story— if only metaphorically — also engages with the wrenching social and economic dislocations of contemporary Chinese life. In a dizzyingly hyper-capitalistic climate in which the private sector has made a startling and often unregulated comeback, state workers such as Xu Sanguan have been rendered redundant, government officials have routinely exploited their political capital and connections to accumulate financial advantage for themselves and their families, and the infrastructure of socialism (medical care and public education) has been gutted by official corruption and privatization, Xu Sanguan’s career as a blood merchant poses a series of disturbing and politically pointed questions. Where does capital come from? What if the only capital you have is your own body? What does it mean to sell your lifeblood for a living? And what happens when there is no longer a market for your “labor”? It is in this specific sense that Xu Sanguan has become an emblematic figure for those who have inevitably been left behind by marketization, a scruffy reverse mirror image of the new entrepreneurial class so insistently touted as the masters of the future by the Chinese media in recent years.

Perhaps the most important question Yu Hua asks in this novel is this: Is there any difference between self-possession and being dispossessed? And the answer, if there is any for the taking, has perhaps to do with the way in which Yu Hua’s characters redeem themselves (and are repaid) not in blood money, but in an altogether more writerly sort of currency: words. Xu Sanguan’s wondrous verbal cookery during the famine is not just about conjuring a perversely empty pleasure from out of desperate privation. The words that he feeds his hungry children after fifty-seven days of eating gruel are a possession, a symbol of his own self-mastery, and a gift: of love, of imagination, of solidarity. What sustains Xu Sanguan and Xu Yulan through betrayal and tribulation is not so much the quasi-contractual blood bonds that brought them together but the stories they tell to each other, their neighbors, and their three children about the forgivably messy ways their lives have tangled and interwoven. And what ultimately counts most for Yile and his father is not so much blood but a simple term of address, a signal that cuts through the noise, an inaccurate yet redemptive fiction: “Dad.”

Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China. He finished high school during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist for five years before beginning to write in 1983. He has published three novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. In 2002 Yu Hua became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award. His novel To Live was awarded Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998, and To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant were named two of the last decade’s ten most influential books in China. Yu Hua lives in Beijing.

Andrew F. Jones is the translator of Yu Hua’s first collection of short fiction in English, The Past and the Punishments , as well as a collection of literary essays by Eileen Chang. He is associate professor of modern Chinese literary and cultural studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age.