China in Ten Words

In this essay, Yu Hua recounts his early experiences with reading, dividing them into four distinct sequences that span his childhood and adolescence during the Cultural Revolution. Growing up in a time when and a place where books were scarce and heavily censored, Yu Hua’s love for reading developed under unique and challenging circumstances. He describes the impact of the Cultural Revolution on literature: Most works by foreign and Chinese authors were labeled as “poisonous weeds” and destroyed in book burnings (37). Despite this harsh environment, Yu Hua’s passion for reading persevered, and he found ways to access books and share them with his friends and classmates.

The first phase of Yu Hua’s reading journey began in 1973 when the town library reopened after being closed for several years. However, due to the extensive book burning during the Cultural Revolution, the library’s collection was severely depleted, offering only a handful of titles deemed acceptable by the authorities, mainly works of “socialist revolutionary literature” (37). Undeterred by the dry and ideologically driven content of these books, Yu Hua read them all, motivated by a deep hunger for any form of written story. He compares his situation to that of a starving man who isn’t picky about his food, emphasizing the scarcity of reading material available to him at the time.