Lu Yao

Lu Yao the Chinese novelist (1949-1992) whose panoramic fiction of rural and small-town life in the loess highlands of northern Shaanxi made him one of the most widely read writers of the reform era. His great novel Ordinary World, published in three volumes, follows two peasant brothers across a decade of social change and has remained a bestseller in China for more than three decades.

Early Life and Education

Lu Yao was born Wang Weiguo on 3 December 1949 in Wangjiapu, a village in Qingjian county in the northern part of Shaanxi province. His family were poor peasants, and because they could not feed all their children he was given as an adopted son at the age of about seven to an uncle in the neighbouring county of Yanchuan. This early uprooting and the poverty of the loess plateau became the emotional foundation of all his later writing. He attended school in the county town and showed unusual ability, and in 1973 he entered Yan'an University to study Chinese literature.

He began publishing short stories while still a student, and his first notable work appeared in the early 1970s. After graduating he worked for several years as a teacher and then as an editor, devoting his spare time to fiction that drew directly on the villagers he had known since childhood. In 1979 he published the novella The Wandering Girl, a tender story of a young man and a beggar girl that brought him national attention. The work announced the themes that would define his career: the dignity of ordinary country people, the tension between ambition and loyalty, and the wrenching changes that reform was bringing to the countryside.

The Life of a Writer

Lu Yao wrote slowly and with intense emotional involvement, returning again and again to the villages of northern Shaanxi to collect material. He was a meticulous observer who filled notebooks with local speech, weather, prices and the small details of daily labour, and he insisted that fiction about peasants must be built on direct experience rather than on second-hand report. His best-known middle-period novella, Life, published in 1982, tells of a peasant boy who climbs into a clerk's job in the city and then abandons the village girl who loves him.

The story was enormously popular and was adapted for film, and it fixed in the public mind his central moral question of how a person should behave when opportunity and obligation pull in opposite directions. He worked for the literary journal Yanhe as an editor and later joined the Chinese Writers Association. In the mid-1980s he withdrew from city life and returned to a coal-mining district to write the long novel that he regarded as his life's task, sacrificing his health and much of his income to the enormous labour of composition.

Ordinary World

Ordinary World, his masterpiece, was published between 1986 and 1988 in three volumes and runs to more than a million characters. It follows the brothers Sun Shaoping and Sun Shaoan from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, tracing Shaoan's struggle to build a brick kiln and lift his village out of poverty while Shaoping leaves home to labour in a coal mine and to educate himself through reading. The novel weaves a large cast of officials, merchants, students and peasants into a broad picture of a society emerging from collective farming into market reform.

Its tone is neither nostalgic nor revolutionary but sympathetic and unsentimental, and its characters face illness, accident, betrayal and early death as well as modest triumph. It gives an unusually full account of the texture of Chinese provincial life in the transition years. Ordinary World won the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 1991, the highest honour for a Chinese novel, and it has sold millions of copies in successive editions. Generations of readers, especially young people from poor families, have found in it a mirror of their own striving, and it remains one of the most borrowed books in Chinese university libraries.

Themes and Style

Lu Yao wrote in a plain, direct realist manner rooted in the nineteenth-century European tradition of Balzac and Tolstoy and in the native storytelling of the Shaanxi countryside. He preferred clear narrative and strong feeling to experimental form, and he trusted that the ordinary struggles of ordinary people were sufficient material for serious art. His recurring subjects are the harsh beauty of the loess plateau, the closeness of family bonds, the pull of the city upon rural youth, and the question of whether personal advancement can be reconciled with moral duty.

He treated his peasant characters with respect and without condescension, showing their ignorance and their generosity with the same steady eye. Underlying his fiction is a hopeful view of human effort. He believed that hardship could refine character and that honest labour carried its own dignity, and he wrote in a style designed to move as well as to instruct. Critics have called his work a bridge between the earlier socialist realism and the more varied fiction that followed.

Influence and Legacy

Lu Yao died of cirrhosis of the liver on 17 November 1992 in Xi'an, at the age of forty-two, only four years after finishing his one great novel. His early death, brought on partly by the exhaustion of writing it, gave him a romantic and almost tragic standing among Chinese readers and deepened the emotional reception of his books. His influence has been lasting. Ordinary World was adapted into a widely watched television series, and Chinese leaders and educators have praised it as a portrait of perseverance.

Writers of later generations who came from provincial towns have acknowledged him as a model, and his name is attached to literary prizes, memorials and reading programmes across the country. Lu Yao stands as the pre-eminent novelist of the Chinese countryside in the first decade of reform. By refusing to turn away from the poor and the obscure, he gave a vast and rapidly changing nation one of its most enduring images of its own recent past, and his work continues to be read as both literature and social history.

See also

• Ordinary World
• Mao Dun Literature Prize
• Shaanxi literature
• Chinese realist fiction