Dressed in a mottled turtleneck sweater and seated in a cafe in an old Beijing hotel, novelist Yu Hua puts aside the People's Daily to talk about dazibao, the big-character posters that plastered walls across the nation during the years of the Cultural Revolution.
Walls provided Yu (a student during that tumultuous decade) with his main source of reading, as they did for millions of others, this being a time when most books were burned by the authorities as 'bourgeois poison'.
'The dazibao in the late period [of the Cultural Revolution] were well-written, but those in the early period consisted mainly of empty slogans and were bad,' Yu says. 'Writing styles, such as caricature and satire, were put to full use in those posters. It was real literature.'
Yu, 44, says he seems destined to live in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, which provides the background and material for much of his writing. His most recent novels, To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, follow the lives of ordinary Chinese people during this period.
'Childhood dominates one's whole life. It's the time when your world view is formed. All your later experience can only modify it. It won't change too much.'
Yu's stories reflect the enduring influence of his childhood years. Although he has lived in Beijing for the past 16 years, the writer sets his stories not in big cities but in the countryside of his boyhood home in Zhejiang.