Thoughts on Yu Hua's Brothers

This page was translated by AI

I first read one of Yu Hua’s books in my final year of high school. In fragments of time at noon, I finished To Live on a Kindle, reading how Fugui fell from being a landlord to becoming an outcast. Later, at university, I finished Wencheng in my dormitory. Recently, I replaced my Kindle with a domestic e-reader and finished Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Brothers on WeChat Reading.

Literature is wondrous, and so is Yu Hua. His prose has a kind of magic: it reads smoothly and makes you want to continue. He is the kind of writer whose words flow with remarkable naturalness, without feeling repeatedly polished.

He is also exceptionally good at writing about death. When I read of Fugui carrying Azhen along a moonlit field ridge, I suddenly understood the true meaning of Haruki Murakami’s words: “Death is not the opposite of life.” Yu Hua weaves death into the brocade of existence, making every farewell an everlasting imprint and allowing every soul that leaves this world to continue taking part in the lives of the living through memory. This almost cruel tenderness resembles the ashes drifting into space at the end of Brothers: on a cosmic scale, they achieve the ultimate transcendence of suffering.

From the Jiangsu-Zhejiang water towns of To Live to the northern expanse of Wencheng, from the small towns of Jiangnan in Chronicle of a Blood Merchant to the magical realism of Brothers, Yu Hua’s thirty years of tireless writing have traced deep rings across the spiritual landscape of the Chinese people. The moment I closed my e-book, I seemed to see countless Fugui-like figures stepping out of the text. Carrying the scent of earth and the marks of blood and tears, they still take stubborn steps toward the horizon where dawn is breaking in the east.