Brothers

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THE YEAR 2008 has been a watershed for modern China, for reasons both anticipated and unanticipated. From the agonizing spectacle of digging children's corpses out of the rubble of collapsed school buildings following the Sichuan earthquake, to the spontaneous outpouring of communal support and goodwill that ensued; from the international controversies that have surrounded the preparations leading up to the Beijing Olympics, to the nationalistic pageantry that was the Olympics itself, the Chinese people have experienced a year of remarkable highs and lows. As such, this past year has appeared to contain in concentrated form many of the contradictions that have characterized Chinas multidecade transition from high Maoism to hypercapitalism.

Published in 2005 and 2006, Yu Hua s Brothers spans many of these same emotional extremes. Though he originally conceived of the idea for the novel as early as 1995, Yu Hua was inspired to revisit the project during a seven-month sojourn in the United States and France that he began in late 2003. The China he left behind, meanwhile, was in the grip of a pre-Olympics beauty-pageant fever. In September of that year, for instance, a national beauty pageant was held on Hainan Island as a prelude to Chinas first time hosting the Miss World competition two months later.

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