I. Needles
A few months before I moved to Beijing, my parents -- who know me well -- bought me six or seven books on China. I eventually read my way through 4.12 of them (damn you, Oracle Bones!), but the one that immediately caught my attention was China in Ten Words, by Yu Hua. I read through it in about six hours, and was riveted by Yu's account of his country: by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, these essays/memoirs/ruminations on his own personal narrative and a wider Chinese history caught at me.
In one of the essays ("Reading"), Yu recounts how, as a child of the Cultural Revolution, he became a voracious reader (the story involves him asking random strangers on the street for books, hoarding tattered copies of French classics with missing identifying marks (like titles or authors), and his older brother punching a librarian in the face). In another, he describes the first time he saw an execution.
In a way, the most poignant of his stories comes from the introduction. Here, he tells us that when he was eighteen, his job was to go to factories and inoculate workers. His team would reuse the same needles again and again. One day, they inoculated children, and the children cried when the needles came out. When he examined the needles, he saw that they had become so barbed that they ripped out little pieces of skin when he withdrew them. He had never noticed before, because the workers had never complained.
