Life

An essential masterwork from Chinese literary giant Lu Yao—winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize—available for the first time in English.

Lu Yao published only two novels before his untimely death—but their extraordinary influence catapulted the author to the top tier of Chinese contemporary fiction, establishing him as one of the most widely read and respected figures in Chinese literature.

In this first-ever translation of Lu Yao’s Life, we meet Gao Jialin, a stubborn, idealistic, and ambitious young man from a small country village whose life is upended when corrupt local politics cost him his beloved job as a schoolteacher, prompting him to reject rural life and try to make it in the big city. Against the vivid, gritty backdrop of 1980s China, Lu Yao traces the proud and passionate Gao Jialin’s difficult path to professional, romantic, and personal fulfillment—or at least hard-won acceptance.

With the emotional acuity and narrative mastery that secured his reputation as one of China’s great novelists, Lu Yao paints a vivid, emotional, and unsparing portrait of contemporary Chinese life, seen through the eyes of a working-class man who refuses to be broken.

The Chinese novelist Lu Yao (路遥) was born Wang Weiguo (王卫国) in 1949 in Shaanxi Province. He grew up in a very poor family, together with six siblings, and began writing novels when he was a college student at Yan’an University. In 1982, Lu Yao published his novella Life, which won the National Excellent Novella Award and was then adapted into a film of the same name, which won the Hundred Flowers Award (the Chinese equivalent of the Academy Awards) for Best Feature Film in 1984. Lu Yao became a national celebrity. In 1991, he published his magnum opus, Ordinary World, which won the Mao Dun Literature Prize. His writing was closely related to his own experiences, and it focused mostly on young people striving to change their lives. He died in 1992 at the age of forty-two, having published only two works, both considered masterpieces. Despite how well known Lu Yao is within China, he has remained untranslated until now. Life is the first translation of Lu Yao’s work to appear in English.

Chloe Estep was born in West Virginia, grew up in Florida, worked in Shanghai, and now lives in New York, where she is pursuing her PhD in modern Chinese literature at Columbia University.