Yu Hua, Brothers, 2009

Yu Hua. Brothers. U.S.: Pantheon Books, 2009.

Reviewed by: Jess Row
Published by: New York Times

The Chinese classic known as “The Book of Rites” contains a famous description of a zither on which “one string is plucked, and three others will reverberate in murmurs so there is a lingering sound.” This quality of yiyin, “lingering sound,” has been used by Chinese scholars and critics for centuries to praise a certain evocative or suggestive quality in a poem, painting or other work of art: that is, a work of apparent simplicity that carries within it enormous resonances and reserves of feeling. The subtlety of yiyin, needless to say, is difficult to describe to someone who doesn’t perceive it intuitively. One might even say it’s analogous to the quality of poetry Robert Frost claimed is lost in translation.

Yu Hua’s “Brothers,” translated by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas, has what we might call a yiyin problem. Not because the novel is obscure or allusive or stereotypically “Chinese.” “Brothers” is, in fact, very much a social novel of the late 20th century. It deals with the emergence of China as a capitalist market state, a story familiar to anyone who reads the newspapers, and it’s as blunt, puerile, libidinous and trashily sentimental as any 24 hours of American reality TV. All that ought to make it a blockbuster in the West, as it has been in China, where on its release in 2005 and 2006 (in two volumes) it sold more than a million copies.

Yet for all these recognizable qualities, reading “Brothers” in English can be a daunting, sometimes vexing and deeply confusing experience. Partly this has to do with the difficulty of finding an English equivalent for Yu Hua’s extremely direct and graphic Chinese. In the first chapters of the novel, when one of the principal characters, Baldy Li, is caught peeking at women in a public latrine, Chow and Rojas do a heroic job of trying to capture the parallel English words for a woman’s behind — “butt,” “bottom,” “buttocks,” “backside” — but it’s hard not to suspect that we’re missing some of the pathos and humor of the situation in the gap between those expressions and the original. The novel is a whirlwind of verbal and physical violence — curses, denunciations, black eyes, beatings — and yet Yu Hua describes this violence so matter-of-factly, and repetitively, that through the filter of translation it becomes nearly impossible to absorb. (The marathon sex scenes at the end of the novel are almost unbearably toneless and bland.)

But the problem isn’t just a matter of idiom. “Brothers” simply doesn’t fit into any narrative category familiar to the Western reader. It begins as a sentimental family-epic-cum-romantic-comedy: Baldy Li and his stepbrother, the sober and dutiful Song Gang, are orphaned during the Cultural Revolution. They then fall in love with the same woman, the beautiful Lin Hong, whom Song Gang finally wins over and marries after a byzantine “Cyrano de Bergerac”-style struggle. But in the beginning of the second volume, the novel morphs into broad historical satire. Bereft and humiliated, Baldy Li turns his attention to making money, builds an empire as China’s foremost trash collector and scrap dealer, and uses his fortune to create an all-virgin beauty competition in order to prey on its contestants, yet ultimately finds that his rapacious sexual appetite is only making him miserable.

The culmination of the novel is a kind of orgiastic blend of satire, comedy and sober polemic: Song Gang, having lost his lowly factory job, is reduced to selling breast-enlargement cream in the company of a huckster, who persuades him to get breast implants as a way of advertising the product. When Song Gang becomes gravely ill, Baldy Li uses his money to aid and then seduce Lin Hong, who finds sexual ecstasy in his arms even as her husband is dying.

Imagine a novel written by William Dean Howells together with D. H. Lawrence, updated by Tom Wolfe and then filmed by Baz Luhrmann, and you’ll have some idea of what “Brothers” would be like, had it originated in the West. Translate that imaginary novel-film into Chinese, and you have the riddling circus of miscues and pantomimes that is “Brothers” in English.

What’s particularly sad about all this confusion is that in its original context, “Brothers” is a strange and wonderful thing: one of the first attempts by a Chinese novelist to create a popular epic for the generation that grew up in the Cultural Revolution, came of age in the 1980s, survived the era of the Tiananmen massacre and emerged as the winners — and losers — in China’s market economy. Yu Hua’s novels “Chronicle of a Blood Merchant” and “To Live” (made into a movie by Zhang Yimou) and the fascinating absurdist stories of “The Past and the Punishments” were major literary successes, but “Brothers” is something far more ambitious: an attempt to mark a historical moment, as Lu Xun’s work did in the prerevolutionary China of the 1920s and ’30s. While their styles couldn’t be more different, Yu Hua shares with Lu Xun a certain cultural inwardness; we never have the sense that he is addressing a non-Chinese audience or is concerned with how China is represented to the rest of the world.

What’s more, while Yu Hua’s subject matter is new, the novel’s episodic structure and its combination of broad caricature and earnest realism, vulgarity and pointed satire, are all deeply rooted in the classic Chinese novels “The Journey to the West” and “The Dream of the Red Chamber” — novels universally known in East Asia, though hardly at all in the West. To say to a Chinese reader that Baldy Li is like the Monkey King of “The Journey to the West” — an antic trickster who wreaks eye-popping destruction in the service of his own ego — would be so obvious as to be almost redundant. Almost as obvious are the parallels between Yu Hua’s love triangle and the three central characters in “The Dream of the Red Chamber”; but in case anyone was wondering, at the end of the novel Yu implicitly compares Baldy Li to the delicate, consumptive heroine of “Dream,” who dies of grief after being jilted by her young lover. At points like this, one almost wishes that “Brothers” had included footnotes; but as anyone who has ever read an academic translation knows, footnotes and brackets impede the feelings of recognition and absorption a novel depends on. There’s no substitute for that kind of yiyin.

Does this mean “Brothers” is untranslatable? Perhaps it’s better to say that the strangeness of this English version demonstrates just how wide the chasm of common reference and understanding between China and the West still is. It’s not so much a matter of how many books are translated as which books are taught and promoted and viewed as essential. I’d like to think that in another generation the heroine of “The Dream of the Red Chamber,” Lin Daiyu, could be as recognizable to English-speaking readers as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, but I’m not wildly optimistic. Until then, I’m afraid, “Brothers” will fall on ears that, while not entirely deaf, are somewhat hard of hearing.