TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

Yu Hua established his reputation in the late 1980s through a provocative series of short stories and novellas that placed him at the forefront of the literary avant-garde in China. Cries in the Drizzle, written when Yu Hua was thirty-one, was his first full-length work of fiction, and marked a new phase in his career, one that would soon produce two other memorable novels, To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. In China, Cries in the Drizzle is perhaps not quite as widely read as Yu Hua's subsequent books, and its international reception has also lagged behind those more popular titles. It is nonetheless a technically accomplished novel that prefigures several themes and situations of Yu Hua's later work. Set largely in provincial Zhejiang in the 1960s and 1970s, the place and time of the author's upbringing, it also comes closer than much of his fiction to his own life experience. With its searing and elegiac vision of childhood and adolescence in the Mao era, Cries in the Drizzle easily holds its own against Yu Hua's other novels, and in the judgment of some critics may even be his finest achievement to date.

When it first appeared in the Shanghai literary journal Shouhuo in 1991, Cries in the Drizzle was entitled Huhan yu xiyu (Cries and drizzle). It was under this title that the book was published in Taipei in the following year, and that is how it is known in Taiwan to this day. In mainland China, however, the novel was soon renamed Zai xiyu zhong huhan (Crying out in the drizzle), in order to avoid confusing it with Ingmar Bergman's film Cries and Whispers, whose Chinese title sounds identical to the novel's original name. The text used in this English translation is that of the 2004 Shanghai reprint, which restores a word excised from early editions of the book.

I am grateful to Yu Hua, Zhang Yongqing, Li Hua, Jane Barr, and Catherine Barr for their advice at various stages. In transcribing Chinese personal names, I have followed the standard pinyin romanization system, with one exception. The name of the narrator's father I render as Kwangtsai rather than the conventional Guangcai, so as to distinguish more clearly the names of his three sons, which are quite different from his in Chinese.