April 26^th 2025 | 7:30 p.m.

National Archaeological Institute with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences  

Conversation with:

Yu Hua, China

Moderator: Elena Alexieva

 

For the first time in Bulgaria, one of the most important contemporary Chinese writers – Yu Hua!

Born in 1960 to a family of a surgeon and an internal medicine specialist, Yu Hua grew up in the middle of the Cultural Revolution in China. When he turned 18, he started working in a dentist's office and did so for the next five years, before breaking through as a writer in the 1980s. He became a modern classic and one of the most widely read Chinese fiction writers. His early avant-garde stories rank him among the authors responsible for the liberalization of Chinese literature.
After the publication of his second collection of stories, Yu Hua consciously reoriented his style from experimental to realistic, and it became especially important for him to shift the emphasis from cruelty to compassion. As a result of this change, the tragicorealist novels Cries Under the Drizzle, Alive (translated into Bulgarian by Stefan Russinov and published by Janet 45 Publishing) and Xu Sanguan Selling Blood appeared. These works, together with the novel Brothers, earned him even wider fame in China and abroad, as well as frequent mentions in bookmakers' lists of contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Along with his nine books of fiction, he wrote numerous essays, memoirs, sketch stories and literary lectures, which were composed in several collections. He was briefly a columnist for The New York Times, where he wrote about China and examined contemporary issues such as censorship, corruption and patriotism. Important themes for him are also memories, history, society, writing, literature – all of them are present in China in Ten Words (translation: Stefan Russinov, Janet 45 Publishing), his only collection of essays that has not been published in his homeland (primarily because of the first essay in which he recounts his personal experience of the Tiananmen protests in 1989, one of the great taboos in Chinese political reality). Although, according to Yu Hua, this book was written for Chinese readers, in its original language it has only been published in Taiwan, and since its creation in 2009 it has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Preserving the memory of the past is particularly important to Yu Hua – his novels often follow the fate of one or more characters through different historical periods, and in his essays he often makes ingenious analogies between the past and the present, pointing out what has been forgotten and what has only seemingly been forgotten, what is strikingly different and what is disturbingly the same between eras. He most often returns to the era of the Cultural Revolution, which he described in an interview with the Paris Review as chaos – “it was tragic, comical, all sorts of things”. At the same time, Yu Hua himself admits that memory is not always reliable and that sometimes in the flow of writing the line between documentation and fiction blurs.