To Live in China – Yu Hua and Lu Xun

High price to pay for China’s wealth reads this headline.
China is changing and the city people are abandoning bicycles for cars these days. Chinese automaker Geely plans to move aggressively to U.S. market by 2008.

Bikers byZhang Hongtu Zhang Hongtu or Mr Momao

Zhang Hongtu whose portrait of Mao’s last supper was featured last year when Jung Chang’s Mao book was released.

Picked up Yu Hua’s To Live from the library. It is a slim book for an epic story that was adapted to an award winning film with the same title by Zhang Yimou. Unlike the huge book on Mao by Jung Chang, Yu Hua’s light book was easy to carry on my bike. (The spouse had just finished reading Mao Tse Tung, since then he never stopped talking about Mao’s atrocity and monstrous acts on his people. He was a Sun Emperor who scorched everyone who came close to him. )

The differences of the novel and film adaptation are discussed from this review.

Film review “To Live’ as allegory of historical discourse” and this page with more photos and reviews.

A conversation with Yu Hua

This web page on Lu Xun was bookmarked about a week ago and the fate has it his name got repeatedly mentioned in the afterword section of Yu Hua’s To Live and also from the conversation from the above link.
Lu Xun wikipedia page is here.

Update: just stumbled upon on this review of Zhang Yimou’s new film “Riding Along for Thousand Miles” by Rob Smith. Zhang wrote this film for Takakura Ken a 74 years old veteran of Japanese cinema known in the west for the movie “The Yakuza” with Robert Mitchum.