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    China in Ten Words
    China in Ten Words
    China in Ten Words
    Audiobook7 hours

    China in Ten Words

    Written by Yu Hua

    Narrated by Don Hagen

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From one of China's most acclaimed writers, his first work of nonfiction to appear in English: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the last several decades, told through personal stories and astute analysis that sharply illuminate the country's meteoric economic and social transformation.

    Framed by ten phrases common in the Chinese vernacular-“people,” “leader,” “reading,” “writing,” “Lu Xun” (one of the most influential Chinese writers of the twentieth century), “disparity,” “revolution,” “grassroots,” “copycat,” and “bamboozle”-China in Ten Words reveals as never before the world's most populous yet oft-misunderstood nation. In “Disparity,” for example, Yu Hua illustrates the mind-boggling economic gaps that separate citizens of the country. In “Copycat,” he depicts the escalating trend of piracy and imitation as a creative new form of revolutionary action. And in “Bamboozle,” he describes the increasingly brazen practices of trickery, fraud, and chicanery that are, he suggests, becoming a way of life at every level of society.

    Characterized by Yu Hua's trademark wit, insight, and courage, China in Ten Words is a refreshingly candid vision of the “Chinese miracle” and all its consequences, from the singularly invaluable perspective of a writer living in China today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    TranslatorAllan H. Barr
    Release dateApr 9, 2012
    ISBN9781469000589
    China in Ten Words

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    Reviews for China in Ten Words

    4/5

    136 ratings13 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      ûzzûpû - ûðûûbû - ûûûûo{ - ûûûû}û - ûrûûû - ûûiûû} - ûwnûwû - ûûûûðy - ûqqûoh - û}ûûð
      People - Leader - Reading - Writing - Lu Xun - Revolution - Difference/Disparity - Grassroots - Shanzhai/knockoff - Deceive/Bamboozle

      Yu Hua, a Chinese fiction author, takes on the momentous task of framing his nation in ten words. His own life parallels the course of his own nation, from chanting crowds, and the Little Red Book (PEOPLE - LEADER) and the sudden jolt into the frenzied race of modern neo-liberal capitalism. (DISPARITY - SHANZHAI - DECEIVE)

      This is also a very personal look at China from his own stories plucking teeth and giving vaccinations in a small village to his first flirtations with banned literature (Dumas, La Dame aux camƒilias).

      The longer essays on Reading and Writing are, in my mere opinion, the best in the set. The words themselves are symbols of what meanings and phrases have changed in China over the past 35 years. It is hard to say where China will go next.
    • 5/5
      The book to read on modern China. An autobiography that elaborates on surprising continuity between (cultural) revolutionary China in which the author grew up and modern China. At times poetic, the book flags in style if not in substance towards the end.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting, educational and entertaining nonfiction. I learnt a lot about contemporary China and I liked that this book felt partially as a memoir because of personal anecdotes and stories from the author himself. A great read!
    • 5/5
      I really look forward to reading more of Yu Hua's work.
    • 5/5
      Really ten stand-alone essays on china "then and now". The author has made his living writing fiction, so I think the book is a bit more interesting than a similarly aimed book written by an economist, foreign affairs correspondent, or the like. Very funny.
    • 5/5
      I'll admit to being something of China geek. I try to keep up with whatever is being published about this fascinating country and culture. Yu Hua's book is one of my favorite recent finds. His book consists of ten essays based on ten words that he considers relevant to contemporary China. The essays are partly memoir, partly history, and partly social commentary. His childhood and teenage remembrances of China during the Cultural Revolution are especially helpful to understanding how it is that the entire country seemed to have descended into a state of brutality and chaos for a period of ten years (1966 to 1976). In the words "disparity," "copycat" and "bamboozle," Yu brings us up to contemporary times. He explains some of the contemporary thinking and behaviors in Chinese people as exemplified by these particular words. At the same time, he connects these words to the current national devotion to cut-throat capitalism (and the moral vacuum accompanying this devotion) and its origins in the Cultural Revolution. Yu Hua is a novelist, author of "To Live" (made into an unforgettable film by director Zhang Yimou), and as such, writes with elegant simplicity and heartfelt warmth, not to mention a real sense of humor. This is a very readable work, and very helpful in understanding the past 50 years of Chinese history. If the reader already knows something about this historical period, the book will be even more meaningful. If the reader does not, the books is so well-written and so full of humanity that it's worth the time to read it. The translation is excellent as well. By the way, the Chinese naming convention is to put the family name first, then the personal name. In this case "Yu" is the family name.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written title, gives a peek in to different aspects of china. However, while the content under 10 words is interesting, they don't give any sequential continuity on the progress of china and also on how China became an economic super power.

      But it is a book worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Yu Hua takes 10 words which define the thinking of the modern Chinese people and takes us on a trip down memory lane - both his and his country's - defining and illustrating the words. Born in 1960, he ended up in school during most of the Cultural revolution and that shaped how he looks at language and words - their meaning changes and gets redefined but the old meanings never get forgotten. If you are expecting a history of modern China, look somewhere else. Yes, there is a lot of history in this book but it is a mix between personal recollections and personal observations of other stories than a proper story. The 10 essays (some of them more connected with each others that others) all start with the Cultural revolution and end up today (well, the today of 2010) and they all draw comparisons between the two eras that should be as different from each other as humanly possible. And yet, they are not. Because they are old part of the same. Some of the anecdotes being told were amusing (how to find a book to read in China when all books were banned and burned for example or where to find a cold place in a hot day), some made me rethink what I thought I knew about China (hitting a teacher was something I did not expect - especially in a society known for teacher' veneration). They all add up to a picture of a China that Yu Hua wants us to see. And that is as important to remember as is what we do actually see in the text. The book was banned in China (it is still not published there - the Chinese version is published in Taiwan; parts of it were reworked into a different book in 2015 and that was published). And that is not surprising - the China of this book is ugly and not what the leadership would like to present to the world. One thing that he mentions as part of his exploration of the words usage in Chinese but which is also highlighted by his choice of words is how the same words may hint at different things depending on who uses them. The last two "copycat" and "bamboozle", especially the last one, have very different connotations in English that some of the ones that apparently are there in Chinese (but also some similar ones). And for others, the meaning comes from history. That made me thing about my struggle with English occasionally (less and less as time passes and I live in an English speaking country now) - when I see a word or an expression from the prism of my Bulgarian viewpoint. And just as a last note, at the very end of the essay about Reading , I found one of the best definitions of literature I had seen lately: "If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own."He was talking about the German poet Heine - but I suspect that any reader has their own example of this. Not a perfect book by any means (and the constant bringing up of the Cultural revolution as a parallel of the current times did get a bit annoying at parts and made me wonder if it was designed to provoke) but an entertaining one nevertheless.
    • 4/5
      Ten short essays about the special meaning and significance of ten chosen words in China. An interesting although a bit superficial insight into China`s past and present.
    • 5/5
      Hua examines contemporary China through the meaning of ten words, relating each to stories of his life and work that led him to becoming the writer and thinker he is today. Hua provides insight to Chinese life over the last several decades.
    • 4/5
      The book conveys something of the dislocations and upside-downness of growing up during the Cultural Revolution, then seeing China lurch towards capitalism (full of corruption and inequality, different than the randomness and destructiveness of Maoist times). One striking story involves books—during the Cultural Revolution, most were destroyed, and the few remaining in his village were passed around through so many hands that they tended to lose front and back pages. Desperate to know the endings, he resorted to inventing them, his first steps to becoming a writer: “I owe a debt to those truncated novels for sparking creative tendencies in me.” Discussing redevelopment, which means the destruction of poor people’s houses, he recounts a joke in which the CIA traces Osama bin Laden to an urban location. “A spy plane enters the airspace overhead, only to discover a scene of utter devastation. ‘I don’t know who ordered the bombing,’ the American pilot reports back to headquarters, ‘but there’s no way bin Laden could have survived this.’” Later, he eloquently and sympathetically identifies the “gifts” required to transact business with a corrupt broker as a form of communication: “gifts not only are the most vital prerequisite for interaction but actually constitute an alternative language, one predicated on a certain degree of personal loss but also able to communicate such sentiments as favor, homage, and esteem. … When they presented to him their cabbages, tomatoes, or eggs, they would be paying him a compliment and addressing him with deference, whereas if they arrived empty-handed, this would be to forfeit language and lose the power of speech.” He likens the Cultural Revolution to today’s economic development in how disruptive they were, how there was and is no stability in expectations.Yu devotes a whole chapter to the “copycat” and China’s copy culture, which among other things means that this book—officially banned in China—can only circulate (and does) in pirate copies. He believes that copycatting is a result of “lopsided” development. “[A]ll kinds of social emotions accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art.” Copying isn’t just piracy: he discusses a prostitution business that explicitly modeled itself after the structure of the Communist Party, with a hierarchy, self-criticism, and similar attributes. Copycatting includes making up interviews with people—something that slides into another topic, bamboozling, a term whose cozy connotations are used for everything from flattery to melamine-in-milk fraud. I was left with the strong sense that anyone who purports to tell you what will happen in this huge, diverse nation in five years is bamboozling you.
    • 5/5
       I don't know how to talk about this book, except to say that it's literally a book about China as defined by Hua's ten words. For each word, Hua talks about China (past and present), while including anecdotes about his life, growing up as the son of doctors during the Cultural Revolution. If you only read one book on China, this one is the one you should read. It doesn't cover everything, but it covers what's important to know and attempt to understand about China.
    • 5/5
      Amongst the towering stacks of useless verbiage generated by Western authors trying to decode China, this elegant book by the author Yu Hua stands out for its clarity, insight, humour and understanding. He effortlessly weaves a thread between his own youth in the time of the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Uprising and the modern economic revolution which he argues demonstrates much of the same underlying tenets as the cultural revolutionYu uses the best examples - ancedotes from his own upbringing and those of his friends - to explain a number of important themes in modern Chinese life. Anyone who has spent any time in China at all will find the chapters around the words "Copycat" and "Bamboozle" ringing particularly trueHighly recommended