LITERATURE

MISINTERPRETATIONS ABOUND AROUND YU HUA'S THE SEVENTH DAY

Or, what Chinese and American critics get wrong

By Kellie Wu

In comparing the American and Chinese reviews of Yu Hua's The Seventh Day, we can see a number of interesting problems. One, there's something about Yu's novel that has the quality of a strange mirror. It reflects the world back at the reader, but what the reader gets is not a true reflection of the world, but one distorted by ideas of justice and care. It is a powerful literary vision, but one that generates misinterpretations, both in Yu’s home country of China and in America, and those misinterpretations say more about the critics and their countries than about Yu’s brilliant work.

The main character of The Seventh Day, Yang Fei, is born in a toilet of a moving train. In less than a second, he suffers his first mishap and falls through the toilet hole and lands on the tracks, alive. Adopted by a kind switchman, who raises him in a loving environment, Yang becomes a kind of extraordinary everyman. He lives on the edges of society, and makes just enough money to survive. When he reaches middle age and dies in a restaurant explosion, he wanders aimlessly around the afterworld because he can’t afford a burial plot. Retracing his previous life, Yang encounters many souls of old friends, relatives, and strangers: his self-sacrificing father; his suicidal ex-wife; a client who dies in an apartment demolition; a girl who kills herself because her iPhone is fake; and a guy who dies in an organ selling operation. They all die in various ways, but the common thread is that they are victims of the current Chinese society. The comparison between what rich people get in the afterlife and life and what poor people get is startling. 

 

Quite a beginning

Written in a straightforward, sorrowful, and sarcastic tone, Yu catches the despair of contemporary China, its inequities, its cruelty, and, at times, random and absurd violence. It's a complex subject and has led to a great deal of trouble for Yu, an artist many people feel, including myself, is one of the greatest writers of modern Chinese fiction. Despite that, The Seventh Day has put him at odds with some important Chinese reviewers who find his work strangely off and it’s worth understanding why they find it so objectionable and why they are so wrong.

One of the main criticisms is how Yu depicts and uses real events in China. He believes that literature should bring awareness to social issues and concerns. The criticism of Yu’s goals goes something like this: this isn’t art, this is just throwing real events, one after another, onto the page. Here is an example of this line of thought from Zhihu:

I personally believe that Yu Hua’s previous artworks are about people. His successful character creation makes all the absurd storylines reasonable. In contrast, the content of The Seventh Day seems a bit hearsay. It seems like the author wrote the novel with anger and depression after reading a series of negative news, very subjectively and without any further consideration.

Most of the events of the novel come from some of the astonishing events that occur every day in China. The key point of The Seventh Day is that crazy stuff is happening, and people aren’t realizing it and definitely don’t care. The major accusation (and the author of the quote above says it) is the difference between art and reporting or journalism. He claims that Yu uses the news in the novel without any artistic transformation and that this is somehow a failure. But I would claim that Yu's novel offers his readers a literary, not tabloid, vision of the world, that his vision is transformative of the events that he rips from the headlines.

One of the main characters is Yang Fei’s auntie, Li Yuezhen, who has been a kind and caring lady her whole life. One day, she finds 27 dead infants in a river and reports this to the media.The aborting of female fetuses has been an issue in China for a long time: the one child policy kicked off this sad cultural phenomena. Unveiling the injustices and those who benefit from the deaths of these children, she attempts to avenge their needless slaughter. For her trouble, she is hit by a car and run over by a truck afterward, just to make sure that she’s dead.

Vital Statistics

Yu does borrow from the headlines, but the scope of The Seventh Day does beyond mere reportage. In the afterlife, the 27 infants follow Li around, treating her as their mom. Li lives calmly and peacefully with her dead, abandoned, and adopted children. She continues to be a kind and decent person, and even though her decency isn’t paid back in the world of the living or, for that matter, contemporary Chinese society, she does triumph in the afterlife. Yu’s vision of the world is both literary, redemptive, and just. It is a bold re-imagining of the failures of our world. His depiction of the afterlife transforms a news clip into something wild, vivid, and redemptive.

Besides the content, the writing style in The Seventh Day is another major point of contention for Chinese reviewers. On the website, Phoenix, Di CunLe criticizes the language and style of The Seventh Day:

In The Seventh Day, the change or degradation of Yu Hua's language is also severe. The language in his early novels such as ‘To Live’ is concise, light, ironic, and full of elasticity; now the language in "The Seventh Day" seems to be simple, dry, and tasteless. Yu’s writing approaches are repetitive and tend to lose the dynamic elements.

The novel is surrealistic because it is written from a ghost’s perspective, and this unique perspective demands a language that approximates that situation. Moreover, The Seventh Day has a simplicity that represents what people are experiencing in life as well as the ordinariness of how life is lived under extraordinary circumstances. Yu is not trying to recount the news. Instead, he intends to inform the audience in a relatively plain and straightforward way that terrible things are happening around us. What the critic doesn’t understand is that Yu's simple wording and plain sentences are the best solution to that particular problem. He wants to lead the audience to the key point of his writing: that these events are not happening by chance, but are the logical outcome of a society that cares little for the lives of its citizens. His straightforward writing style allows readers to pay attention to the storyline itself instead of flashy phrases, leaving a blank space for them to ponder a decidedly morbid world. Yu follows this notion and successfully brings the cruel reality to the forefront.

Yu has his critics

Similar criticisms to his writing style includes his characters or how he depicts people, which is evident from this passage from the blog Douban:

Yu Hua only outlined the appearance of the characters, and did not describe their character changes or provide any detailed descriptions. This lack of convincing makes me feel like they were made up for the needs of the plot.

The site of Yu's troubles

Many different characters are wandering in the afterlife that Yu creates. They all have different personalities, but all are the most ordinary people from the real world. Reviewers fail to realize that most people in this world are characterless: they are not changing history, just living through plain days and dying without note. Yu simply reflects the reality of daily life, and tries to give shape to ordinary people's experience in this dark society. They are all characterless but virtuous people, and ironically the cheapest victims. The lack of detailed description is the most successful element of that goal. If the characters all have distinctive backgrounds and dramatic moments in their lives, then it would bring the audience a sense that this is merely entertainment. Yu makes clear that the plainest stories are the most important ones and also the ones that get easily ignored. Yu argues that these are the ones that need to be memorialized the most. He utilizes the simplest writing style to make us aware of these stories.

In contrast to the criticism Yu has received in China, American reviewers read the novel in a completely different way. They tend to find the events hilarious and humorous without realizing how close these stories are to reality in modern Chinese society.

And now for the Americans, starting with New York

In Ken Kalfus’s New York Times review, he points out that, “The Seventh Day contains many instances of macabre comedy, though Allan H. Barr’s workmanlike translation is too wordy to deliver its best potential laugh lines.”American reviewers believe that Yu intentionally chooses a comic writing style in contrast with these dark social issues. Interpreting Yu’s intention in writing in a subjective manner, the American reviewers fail to realize that these absurd incidents are happening every day in China.

Kalfus is not the lone American misinterpreting the intention of this novel. Nishant Dahiya who publishes reviews on NPR holds the same idea.

Yu's new book The Seventh Day — by turns inventive and playful and dark and disturbing, with much to say about modern China — takes that idea and weaves it into a fabulist tale. They are in this slim volume, translated from the Chinese by Alan H. Barr, elements of the surreal, the fantastical and the absurd: Sounds explode "like boiling water," or colors are "as warm as that of snow," or the sound of breathing is "like little ripples spreading across a calm lake.

He considers Yu’s writing style as “playful” and praises his seemingly witty rhetorical writing style. However, when writing these sentences, Yu is simply exaggerating for humorous effect. Western reviewers can’t imagine how these ridiculous plots are taken from reality. They show their lack of knowledge of contemporary China by concluding that these ridiculous plots are intentionally produced as experimental creative writing.

Yu is alert to reality

One of the ridiculous storylines is a guy that Yang Fei meets in the afterlife who pretends to be a woman and works as a prostitute. When police come to arrest him, one of the police brutally kicks him in the crotch and as a result he loses his testicles. In order to rebel against police brutality, he holds a banner of “giving back my balls” in front of the police station every day. Without any positive feedback, he finally shoots a policeman and is sentenced to death. Most reviewers find this unbelievable and hilarious. They consider it as a joke. Surely it’s funny, but people fail to realize it’s more than a joke. It is the reality happening in Chinese society at the current moment. Yu is actually writing about the real world with these carefully chosen sarcastic and sorrowful stories, expressing his anger, depression, and helplessness with what's happening. He carefully adopts those ridiculous stories from real life to emphasize that the current society is allowing these to happen, which is very pathetic to a country.

Of course, Yu Hua wants to show his frustration and worries about Chinese society, but the major points he argued is how important it is for readers to understand and memorialize absurd incidents happening around us everyday. By using real news as the reference and inspiration, Yu wants to remind people of those sorrowful and outrageous cases that happened before. No matter how astonishing and tragic they are, people will eventually forget about them. Without The Seventh Day, those incidents will gradually fade from the public view. Originally published in 2013, The Seventh Day keeps alive these victims who would be forgotten.

By reading this book, the audience could always keep the social justice issues in mind and ponder if their reactions are justified or not. And that’s why these misinterpretations by both Chinese and American reviewers are so important to combat. He is doing the work of memory for people who are not fully aware of the situation and devils are trying to erase it from the public view. In The Seventh Day, 38 people died in a fire at a shopping mall. For the benefit of officers and supervisors, the news only reported that 7 people died in this disaster. It would remain a normal accident and not a major one. Many similar things are happening in Chinese society and the scary truth is intentionally hidden from the public for the government officer's benefit. Yu is trying to remember all of the anonymous people who die under a disorganized society that refuses to record what happens.

In the end, great satire is hard to take

Both in Yu's book and in reality, kind people are easy to kill, while devils stay permanently in our lives. Yu is a brave artist who is willing to stand out and point to reality under the strict censorship as well as the pressure from social opinions. He uses literature as a tool to fight against the ridiculous society, bringing back the past to people and making them aware of what is happening. Focusing on the most ordinary and easily forgettable stories that happen to ordinary people in this society, he successfully creates a thought-provoking vibe in The Seventh Day. His writing forces readers to memorialize everyday tragedies and ponder how they should react to the ironic society. The book foreshadows the reality and social issues that have happened and will continue to happen. In order to push the audience to build up awareness, Yu puts great effort into this novel, transferring reality into a more literary, but simple, style of writing. Most importantly, it incorporates the issues in the past as a hint to what may happen in the future. 

©Kellie Wu and the CCA Arts Review