1. Yu Hua is a Chinese novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
34 Facts About Yu Hua
1. 2.
Yu Hua is widely considered one of the greatest living authors in China.
3.
Yu Hua was regarded as a promising avant-garde or post-New Wave writer.
4.
Yu Hua has written five novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays, which have collectively sold nine million copies and have been translated into over 20 languages.
5.
Yu Hua's parents worked as doctors, so his family lived in a hospital compound across from the mortuary.
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Yu Hua is interested in the interplay of diverse meaning constructions, particularly between imagination and reality.
7.
Yu Hua is considered to belong to the "generation of the 60s," which refers to writers that spend their whole childhood and teenage years during the Cultural Revolution.
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Yu Hua was born in Hangzhou, but he spent his formative years in the Wuyuan Township in Haiyan, a small town that has been thought to be fairly monotonous, but much of Yu Hua's writing uses it as the setting behind his characters.
9.
Yu Hua has stated that writing makes him feel like he is going back to Haiyan; thus, many of Yu Hua's writing uses Haiyan as a story setting.
10.
Yu Hua was a dentist for 6 years but then started writing more seriously when he grew bored of that lifestyle.
11.
Yu Hua has stated that his writing has been heavily influenced by both Franz Kafka and Yasunari Kawabata, among others.
12.
Yu Hua stated that by reading Kawabata's work, he understood that the point of writing was to show human feelings.
13.
However, there is a deep connection that Yu Hua has with his country and its history.
14.
Yu Hua stated in an interview that he grew up in a time when China went through many different changes in a relatively short period of time.
15.
In recent years, Yu Hua has dedicated many of his works about China itself, both aimed at China and East Asia, and then the Western world.
16.
Yu Hua writes a monthly column for The New York Times in which he describes issues about China.
17.
Yu Hua's work is very traditional, with psychologized storylines that investigate and illustrate the challenges of cultural disintegration and identity loss and his stories are often set in small towns during historical periods that he experienced including China under Chairman Mao's rule, the Civil War and Cultural Revolution, and post Mao capitalist China.
18.
Yu Hua is known for his brutal descriptions of violence, cruelty and death as well as themes surrounding "the plight of China's underclasses" as seen in Chronicle of a Blood Merchant.
19.
Yu Hua frequently engages in diverse attitudes of aesthetic modernity in his works, earning him the reputation of being a catalyst.
20.
Yu Hua has been influenced by magic realism and incorporates pre-modern Chinese fiction elements into his work.
21.
Yu Hua is known to use dark humour and strange modes of perception and description in his writing.
22.
The linguistic humour of Yu Hua's novels is gray humour in extreme contrast, a kind of zero-degree emotional narration, and this humour often receives a surprisingly effective expression.
23.
Yu Hua creates humour mainly through the context, the situation, the context of the times, and the national cultural tradition.
24.
Yu Hua has been influenced by music, with a particular interest in classical, and the narrative structure of music; in fact, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant uses techniques borrowed from Yue opera's style.
25.
Yu Hua gained inspiration for his literary creation from musical pieces.
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Yu Hua's work has been successful at constructing mysterious and rich literary universes in both fiction and non-fiction.
27.
Yu Hua aimed to demonstrate the dark side of human psychology and society in a non-traditional way.
28.
Yu Hua changed his style after he started to gain traction in the writing world and adjusted his work away from over-complexity due to readers finding his work difficult to understand.
29.
Yu Hua is a contemporary avant-garde writer formally introduced to the literary world with the publication of "On the Road at Eighteen".
30.
Yu Hua has deepened the rational reflection of human beings on the situation of their lives in the form of novels, which has caused a lot of shock and attention in the literary world and among the readers.
31.
Yu Hua was born in 1960, and his childhood memories are the Cultural Revolution.
32.
Yu Hua is regarded as one of the greatest living Chinese writers.
33.
Yu Hua received the Grinzane Cavour Prize as his first award in 1998 for his novel To Live.
34.
Four years later, Yu Hua became the first Chinese writer to receive the James Joyce Award.