China in Ten Words Quotes

“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.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: “Death is the cooling night.” That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me. 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. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“We survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“We were fishers of memory waiting on the banks of time and waiting for the past to swallow the date.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“At first, writing actually felt the more arduous of the two activities. But in order to reach cultural-center nirvana, I forced myself to continue. I was young then and it was no easy matter to persuade my bottom to maintain such constant intimacy with my chair”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“The timid die of hunger, the bold of overeating.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat. Reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“Every time I read one of the great books, I feel myself transported to another place, and like a timid child I hug them close and mimic their steps, slowly tracing the long river of time in a journey where warmth and emotion fuse. They carry me off with them, then let me make my own way back, and it's only on my return that I realize they will always be a part of me.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“That is the real tragedy: poverty and hunger are
not as shocking as willful indifference to them.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“Why, when discussing China today, do I always return to the Cultural Revolution? That’s because these two eras are so interrelated: even though the state of society now is very different from then, some psychological elements remain strikingly similar. After participating in one mass movement during the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another: economic development.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed that light carries farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what “the people” means.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“As we Chinese say, you don’t have to pay tax on bullshit. That being so, why not bullshit to the max?”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“China during the Mao era was a poor country, but it had a strong public health network that provided free immunizations to its citizens. That was where I came in. In those days there were no disposable needles and syringes; we had to reuse ours again and again. Sterilization too was primitive: The needles and syringes would be washed, wrapped separately in gauze, and placed in aluminum lunch boxes laid in a huge wok on top of a briquette stove. Water was added to the wok, and the needles and syringes were then steamed for two hours, as you would steam buns.

On my first day of giving injections I went to a factory. The workers rolled up their sleeves and waited in line, baring their arms to me one after another – and offering up a tiny piece of red flesh, too. Because the needles had been used multiple times, almost every one of them had a barbed tip. You could stick a needle into someone’s arm easily enough, but when you extracted it, you would pull out a tiny piece of flesh along with it. For the workers the pain was bearable, although they would grit their teeth or perhaps let out a groan or two. I paid them no mind, for the workers had had to put up with barbed needles year after year and should be used to it by now, I thought. But the next day, when I went to a kindergarten to give shot to children from the ages of three through six, it was a difference story. Every last one of them burst out weeping and wailing. Because their skin was so tender, the needles would snag bigger shreds of flesh than they had from the workers, and the children’s wounds bled more profusely. I still remember how the children were all sobbing uncontrollably; the ones who had yet to be inoculated were crying even louder than those who had already had their shots. The pain the children saw others suffering, it seemed to me, affected them even more intensely than the pain they themselves experienced, because it made their fear all the more acute.

That scene left me shocked and shaken. When I got back to the hospital, I did not clean the instruments right away. Instead, I got hold of a grindstone and ground all the needles until they were completely straight and the points were sharp. But these old needles were so prone to metal fatigue that after two or three more uses they would acquire barbs again, so grinding the needles became a regular part of my routine, and the more I sharpened, the shorter they got. That summer it was always dark by the time I left the hospital, with fingers blistered by my labors at the grindstone.

Later, whenever I recalled this episode, I was guilt-stricken that I’d had to see the children’s reaction to realize how much the factory workers must have suffered. If, before I had given shots to others, I had pricked my own arm with a barbed needle and pulled out a blood-stained shred of my own flesh, then I would have known how painful it was long before I heard the children’s wails.

This remorse left a profound mark, and it has stayed with me through all my years as an author. It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart. So when in this book I write of China’s pain, I am registering my pain too, because China’s pain is mine.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“Unequal lives give rise to unequal dreams.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“Three or four years ago, a city education bureau announced a new measure to raise the quality of local teachers and enable graduating high school seniors to be more competitive in the university entrance examination.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“You don't have to pay tax on bullshit”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“As soon as the train pulled into the station, the red guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“Those immediately behind number 50 were anguish personified. They let loose an endless stream of foul language and it was hard to tell whether they were cursing themselves or cursing something else. My neighbours and I in the last third of the queue only felt a pang of disappointment whereas those who just missed out on the coupon were like people who see the duck that they had cooked flap its wings and fly away.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“revolution was just a short step away from counterrevolution.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“the”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“When I lay down on that clean concrete bed, I found the ideal place for an afternoon nap. On many baking afternoons that followed, if I saw that the morgue was not otherwise occupied, I would lie on the slab and savor its soothing coolness; sometimes in my dreams I would find myself in a garden full of blooming flowers.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“Benim endişem şu ki, kandırmak aleni bir şekilde insanların yaşam şekli haline geldiğinde, bu ister bir kişi olsun, ister bir ülke, herkes aldatmanın kurbanı haline gelir.”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

“developed”
― Yu Hua, China in Ten Words