![]() ![]() In the spring of 1989, he frequently joined protesters as they gathered in central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in spite of growing tensions with Chinese authorities. ![]() In Beijing, Yu became sympathetic to the student-led movement advocating against governmental corruption and for greater social freedom. In 1988, he moved to Beijing to pursue his writing career, enrolling in graduate studies at Lu Xun Literature Institute, where he read works by Faulkner, among other foreign classics. Yu cemented his status as a rising literary star when Beijing wenxue published this avant-garde work in 1987. In 1986, Yu first encountered the fiction of Kafka, which he remarked was “a gift of fate.” Later that year, at a literary conference in Beijing, well-known critic Li Tuo complimented a draft of Yu’s short story “Shiba sui chu men yuan xing” (“On the Road at Eighteen”). In 1984, Beijing wenxue published several of his stories, one of which won the journal’s annual award, and Yu formally transferred to the Haiyan Cultural Center, where he met Pan Yinchun, whom he married in 1985. He read novels by Márquez and published his first short story in January 1983. Thereafter, Yu devoted himself to writing in his free time, living alone in order to focus on his literary efforts. In 1979, while in dental training in Ningbo, Yu encountered the work of Nobel Prize-winning Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, whose detailed novels impressed him. He later remarked that he did not like the work, eight hours a day of looking “at other people’s mouths, which are not the world’s most scenic places,” and found life as a dentist “gloomy.” He noticed that the employees of the local cultural center seemed to enjoy a relaxed work environment, and they told him that if he were able to get his writing published, he could request official permission to change his job. He learned about storytelling and imagination from expressions of jealousy, anger, and fear in the dazibao.Īfter Yu completed his secondary education in 1977, his parents apprenticed him to a dentist. The posters were a part of everyday life during the Cultural Revolution, and their vitriolic accusations and denunciations showed Yu a different side of human nature than that which appeared in his government-censored studies and reading. Dazibao were handwritten placards on which citizens posted anonymous complaints about those they claimed had deviated from official ideology. Yu found another source of literary inspiration in the dazibao (big character posters), which lined the streets of the town. He later reveled in forbidden Western classics that were circulating clandestinely in pieces. He eagerly consumed all the government-approved literature he could, especially enjoying such novels as Li Xintian’s Shanshan de hongxing (1972), the story of a boy’s coming of age in the years before the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Literature was scarce in the village, but in 1972, when Yu completed Xiangyang Primary School, the Haiyan library reopened, and his father got library cards for him and his brother. He often wandered the halls of the hospital where his parents worked, and in 1971, the family moved to the hospital staff quarters, opposite the morgue. Yu was six years old at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. When Yu was two, he and his elder brother moved with their parents to the rural Zhejiang village of Haiyan. His father, Hua Zizhi, worked in a vaccination brigade and was studying to become a surgeon, and his mother, Yu Peiwen, was a nurse. Yu was born on 3 April 1960 in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.
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