Yu Hua Quotes

revolution was just a short step away from counterrevolution.

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.

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.

No matter how lucky a person is, the moment he decides he wants to die, there's nothing that will keep him alive.

You don't have to pay tax on bullshit

In times like these, who had either the leisure or the inclination to indulge in a touch of elegance?

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.

It was just as summer arrived that I met an old man named Fugui.

My emotional state then was cramped and confined, like a room with tightly sealed windows and doors: although love's footsteps could be heard outside the room, I felt they were steps heading somewhere else--until one day when the steps came to a halt and the bell rang.

The emperor beckons me; he wants me to marry his daughter.
The road to the capital is long and distant; I don't want her.

With relief I arrived at memory's peak,
and a broader landscape came into view.

As the black night descended from the heavens, I knew that in the blink of an eye I would witness the death of the sunset. I saw the exposed and firm chest of the vast earth; its pose was one of calling, of beckoning. And just as a mother beckons her children, so the earth beckoned the coming of night.

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 wo

The residents of the the town are attracted by the words and the pictures on the signs. They know full well the perils posed by overpopulation. Many of them have mastered the use of several types of contraceptives. Now they understand the dangers posed by traffic accidents. They know that even though overpopulation is perilous, the living must do their best to have a good time and avoid being killed in traffic accident.

Your life is given to you by your parents. If you don't want to live, you have to ask them first.