Brothers, by Yu Hua

Translated by Eileen Chen-ying Chow and Carlos Rojas, 2009.

Published in 2010 by Anchor Books

646 pages

Yu Hua published Brothers in two parts, Part One in 2004 and Part Two in 2005.

Brothers is a bawdy, rollicking tragic-comic epic about two half brothers, “Baldy Li” and Song Gang. Baldy Li’s father died before ever seeing his son; the father died shamefully: drowning in excrement while trying to spy on the naked bottoms of women in the neighborhood latrine. His wife, Li Lan, is ashamed of her husband’s death and imagines no man will marry her and raise her son.  But Song Fanping, the tall, handsome man who long ago brought her deceased, excrement-covered husband home to her, proposes marriage. He, too, has a young son, and the family they create is full of love and heroism until, during the Cultural Revolution, Song Fanping, the most loyal of cadres, is denounced and publicly crucified.

Li Lan, whose own health is failing, begs Song Gang, her stepson, to watch over Baldy Li and regard him as a blood brother. Song Gang is a model of Confucian conduct, a filial son and a humble citizen willing to suffer any indignity for the sake of honor. Baldy Li is a chip off the old block. All id, he is a precocious masturbator who, just like his father, spies from beneath the women’s latrine and thereby witnesses the grail of Liu Town: the bare bottom of sixteen-year-old Lin Hong. Though he is caught in the act, Baldy Li cares not a fig for his or his family’s reputation. Instead, he leverages his carnal intelligence, trading his florid description of Lin Hong’s bottom to all the men in Liu Town. Throughout the tale, Song Gang struggles to do the right thing, embracing the precepts of Confucianism and Maoism, while Baldy Li commits himself fully to obscene levels of lust and greed. His grasping for wealth and his limitless desire for women brings him dangerously close to ruin many times over, but Yu Hua makes it clear that China’s opening up and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics creates, nurtures, and lauds criminal capitalists. Reading about Baldy Li’s real estate scams, his trade in second-hand suits, and his all-China beauty contest, as well as the quick and dirty cons of Wandering Zhou, a snake-oil salesman who sells artificial hymens and male enhancement pills, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Yu Hua’s satire is riotous, profane, and heartbreaking. Given his emphasis on the power of “the big lie” and the gullibility of the citizens of Liu Town, it might be productive to pair readings from this text with Yu Hua’s essay “Bamboozle” from China in Ten Words.

Baldy Li, our Liu Town’s premier tycoon, had a fantastic plan of spending twenty million U.S. dollars to purchase a ride on a Russian Federation space shuttle for a tour of outer space. Perched atop his famously gold-plated toilet seat, he would close his eyes and imagine himself already floating in orbit, surrounded by the unfathomably frigid depths of space. He would look down at the glorious planet stretched out beneath him, only to choke up on realizing that he had no family left down on Earth. (1)