Analysis Of Yu Hua's China In Ten Words

Yu Hua’s novel, China in Ten Words, the chapters Reading and Writing play a huge role about the place of literacy in Hua’s life and China as a whole. In the chapter titled Reading, Hua describes his experience with literature that other people had written and how that influenced him throughout his childhood into adulthood. In Writing, Hua transitions from talking about the plethora of works that he has read into talking about the writing that he did as a child up until he was an adult. He basically describes that the reading he had done influenced the writing that he did. Reading was difficult for Yu Hua to do as a child. Since, Hua grew up in China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, so “practically all literary works were labeled ‘poisonous weeds’ “ (Hua 37). Yu Hua had a very limited set of books he was able to read as a child in China; he only had “twenty-odd titles” to read from (Hua 37). He, in …show more content…
You would be able to write whatever you wanted privately, but if anyone found out what you were writing about, you would either be labeled a red pen or a black pen. Red pens were in support of the revolution and black pens were considered to be counterrevolutionaries. One trend that seems to be popular amongst the young was criticizing one’s teachers. The most famous of these students was a girl by the name of Liang Xiao. She was not fond of how her teacher acted in the classroom and wrote in her diary about it, and once the teacher found out about the criticism, he punished her, so Liang Xiao told her story to the local paper. Eventually, the story was published more widely and was even talked about on television. Yu Hua and 3 of his friends did a version of this at their school. They criticized their teachers and made a poster to be put up for each one of them. They made 40 posters. One teacher that Hua had, though, did not receive a poster and was upset, so he demanded “equal treatment” (Hua