This review is part of the Literature World Tour.
Yu Hua’s long novel is a brilliant, unflinching chronicle of the last four decades of modern Chinese life. Despite its irreverent portrayal of the Cultural Revolution and subsequent capitalist boom, it has sold over a million copies in China, and the very human story of Baldy Li and his stepbrother Song Gang is one of the most compelling examples of the historical family epic of recent years.
This is Yu Hua’s fifth novel, and it begins in a sleepy rural outpost known as Liu Town, where fourteen-year-old Baldy Li is caught peeping at women’s bottoms in a latrine. The whole family is shamed. He becomes known as a compulsive public masturbator, and his obsession continues into adulthood: he ends up hosting a beauty pageant for virgins (all of whom rely on doctored hymens to gain entrance). The China of Mr. Yu’s black comedy is a society in which everyone is scrambling to get rich and con artists abound. Song Gang, the older brother, has part of his chest surgically enlarged to help sell a line of breast-enhancement gels for women in the countryside. Many Chinese critics have lashed out at the author, who has long been one of China’s most respected novelists, for producing what one called a trashy, Hollywood-style portrait of the country. Others have praised the work as a sharp picture of an increasingly materialistic, self-indulgent and even unhinged society.
Upon finishing Brothers, you get the disoriented feeling of stepping off a fast-moving vehicle that’s been taking you through a strange land for a long time. The foreignness of the setting is exciting, and provokes the desire to stop and look around while being bound to something that inexorably moves on.
Previously in China: Jim Murdoch’s review of Stick Out Your Tongue
Next stop on the Literature World Tour: Japan!
