What makes Yu Hua so influential?

Before Yu Hua started writing stories in 1983, he worked as a dentist, and his prose retains what I guess might be the intensity of a provincial Chinese root canal. After reading some of his early stories, one critic remarked, ‘‘I can’t imagine what kind of brutal tortures patients endured under his cruel steel pliers.’’ Yu Hua has long been considered one of China’s most important novelists, and his novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant have just been translated into English for the first time; recently, they were named two of the last decade’s 10 most influential books in China. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant follows Xu Sanguan, a small-town factory worker, from youth to middle age in the second half of the 20th century — a period that included the forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward, the ensuing famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Each time a crisis befalls his family, Xu Sanguan donates blood. The process is described in brutal (not to say sadistic) detail from the moment two peasants Xu Sanguan meets on the road explain that in order to dilute their blood, so there’s more of it to sell, they drink until ‘‘our stomachs are so swollen that it hurts and the roots of our teeth start to ache’’…

In China, as in America, there is a debate about what constitutes popularity in fiction: Are Yu Hua’s best-selling novels a concession to China’s newly consumerist culture or a necessary response to the intellectually serious but hopelessly academic ‘‘postmodern’’ fiction in fashion 20 years ago in China? Whereas in the United States this discussion is an aesthetic one, the debate in China has sharper teeth; American writers may fear the culture mafia, but at least they don’t have to worry about the Ministry of Culture.

(Excerpted from an article by Nell Freudenberger at http://www.slate.com)