Review | Yu Hua’s short stories portray disturbing personal and political realities of modern China
- The April 3rd incident cements the Chinese author’s position as a literary enfant terrible, mixing techniques and times to weave narratives that are more fantasy than fiction
The April 3rd Incident
by Yu Hua
Pantheon
The April 3rd Incident collects recent short stories by China’s literary enfant terrible.
Yu Hua’s reputation owes much to his experiments with avant-garde techniques (sudden leaps in time or perspective, unholy clashes of comedy and tragedy), his relish of violence and the scatological (toilets both sumptuous and rudimentary proliferate in his international breakthrough, Brothers, 2005), and how such devices drive the political intent of his writing: the jagged edges of Yu’s fiction reflect “realities of modern Chinese society [that] are even more fantastical than fiction”.
The cherry on top of Yu’s bad-boy reputation is his standing in his homeland: having generated a critical storm with Brothers’ pyrotechnics, China in Ten Words (2010) went a step further and was banned on the mainland.
Given these destabilising contexts, it is no surprise to learn that the “incident” in Yu’s new book remains blurry. Of course, with seven stories on offer, there is no end of incidents. Most involve death, mainly of the curious variety: a man is forced to attend the funeral of someone he claims he has never met; a truck driver kills two young people decades apart, with nearly supernatural consequences. Elsewhere we are treated to earthquakes, typhoons, unwanted pregnancies, marital breakdowns, riots, unexploded bombs, and a quest to find a girl who donated her eyes to a nearly blind man.
