Brothers by Yu Hua; trans. by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow & Carlos Rojas

Yu Hua’s Brothers is a novel of epic breadth, following two brothers named Song Gang and Baldy Li from 1959, just after the end of The Great Leap Forward, to almost present day. The sweep of the novel is breathtaking, but so is the economy of the writing. The story’s four decades are mostly confined to Liu Town, an afternoon’s bus ride from Shanghai, and the brothers in question are really stepbrothers?their parents married when they were seven and eight, respectively. From that point on, the story is told mostly from within their restricted world view. Because work, girls, politics?in short, everything?is viewed solely through this shared lens, the departures from their world are especially jarring.

Part I, which fills only about one third of the novel, is mostly a prelude to what happens next. The Cultural Revolution being what it was, Song Fanping, their larger-than-life father, was imprisoned, tortured, and killed while trying to escape. His jailer was eventually also outed as a rightist, and ended his life in imprisonment by driving a nail through his own head. This is called the revolution eating its own children.

The novel really gets started with a haunting invocation,

“The dead had departed; the living remained. Li Lan [their mother] headed into the netherworld, walking along a penumbral path in search of Song Fanping’s spirit amid a sea of ghosts. She was no longer aware of her sons’ wanderings in the mortal world.”

And so we are left with the two brothers. As different as they are?they are a head apart in height, they share neither parent in common, and indeed nothing in particular about them to bind them except their common upbringing in a world gone mad?they are iconic of two faces of the Chinese soul, much as a certain troika of brothers defined the Russian soul. These two faces, call them the scholar and the warrior, are rarely as clearly distilled as they have been here, and they are, of course, difficult to reconcile. Still, they get along, as brothers do. They go on.

In this novel, Hua shows us that the Cultural Revolution continues to haunt everyone who survived it; he shows us that it never ends, and the perversions of language concomitant with all totalitarian regimes continue to distort the speech of the characters. Everyone continues using bits of Chairman Mao’s verse, and everyone still sings the old revolutionary songs (I can confirm this happens in real life, my parents’ friends sing karaoke with these songs at parties). This syndrome is exemplified when, in a fit of anger, Baldy Li tells Song Gang “If you like her, we can no longer be brothers, but instead will become enemies, and more specifically, class enemies!”

The “her” in question is Lin Hong, none other than the town’s resident beauty, whose bare bottom Baldy Li surreptitiously peeped at from under a public latrine’s partition. The love triangle between the two brothers and Lin Hong is one of the controlling themes of the second part of the novel. Everything the two brothers do, in some way or other revolves around Lin Hong. Just because the world has gone mad doesn’t mean that people don’t still do ordinary things?like falling in love?however bizarre the results may turn out.

But the world never quite recovers from madness. Instead of revolutionary purity, the idols became money and sex. The world becomes stranger, certainly. After directing a factory for disabled workers into great profits, a sex-crazed Baldy Li goes into business for himself?only to lose all of his investors’ money, and he ends up collecting trash until, implausibly, he collects a fortune large enough to buy himself a spaceflight from the Russians. What happens to Song Gang is more bizarre still. After losing his state-owned factory job, he works at the docks until he wrecks his back until he is reduced to selling flowers on the street, and then works at a cement plant until he ruins his lungs and ends up selling breast enhancement cream with?his very own pair of surgically enhanced breasts.

The most grotesque moment, though, may be the Inaugural Virgin Beauty Pageant, a giant publicity stunt on the part of Baldy Li, and obviously a send-up of the Olympic madness that had gripped China from the moment they were chosen to host the 2008 Olympics. As smoothly as the Olympics turned out, it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to get the unsavory, dirty disaster of a spectacle the Virgin Beauty Pageant turned out to be. Recall here the controversy about the lip-syncing episode from the opening ceremonies. What the Chinese government would have liked to pass off as innocence is revealed by Yu Hua to be refurbished (read: counterfeit) in a totally fantastic setting.

What finally struck me about the book was just how much sense the book made, despite the obviously fantastic happenings in it. If a man can kill himself by driving a nail through his head, then so can a refurbished “virgin” systematically sleep with all the judges in the course of a three day long competition. The book tells the story of a world that has broken, and irreparably so, but this is a story of what people do to go on living in that world. Stomach-twisting and lyrical, this is a novel that will haunt you.

Reviewed by James Liu

Brothers by Yu Hua, trans. by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow & Carlos Rojas
Pantheon Books, 2009.
Cloth, 656 pps, $29.95
ISBN-10: 0375424997