China in Ten Words

China in Ten Words
by Yu Hua, translated by Allan H. Barr
Pantheon, 2011. 225 pgs. Nonfiction.

Award-winning novelist Yu Hua provides in these essays a ground-level, historical and current view of the Chinese economic juggernaut and why, perhaps, things are not as good as they seem. In ten sections titled People, Leader, Reading, Writing, Lu Xun, Revolution, Disparity, Grassroots, Copycat, and Bamboozle, the author tells stories about his life during and after the Cultural Revolution, his "career" as a dentist, a job he was assigned and for which he had no particular skill, and the pattern of revolution and counterrevolution, denouncing and persecution which turned everyone against everyone else. "Copycat" deals with China's rampant piracy of copyrighted materials and knockoffs of patented items, and "Disparity" shows in painful detail how vast is the chasm between modern urban and rural Chinese. Yu Hua's eloquent but understated style makes these expressions of the troubles of his people and his own regrets the more poignant and painful.

LW