Lu Wenfu

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Lu Wenfu ( Chinese  陸文夫  /  陆文夫 , Pinyin Lu Wenfu * 1928 in Taixing , Province of Jiangsu , China ; † 9. July 2005 ) was a Chinese journalist and writer .

Life

Moved to Suzhou with his family in 1944 , Lu Wenfu went to the front as a soldier in the communist liberation movement to join the fight against the Kuomintang ; when he arrived there, however, the civil war was over.

Lu Wenfu first worked as a local reporter for the New Newspaper of Suzhou ( Xin Suzhou Bao ), where he praised the progress of the young socialist People's Republic of China , which was founded on October 1, 1949. In 1953 he began to work in literature and caused a sensation in 1956 with a short story. Together with the members of a newly founded group of writers, including Gao Xiaosheng , he tried, inspired by the Hundred Flower Movement , to found a critical magazine, which was, however, prevented from appearing by the " anti-right-wing campaign "; he himself was sent to a machine factory for re-education as an intellectual and “anti-party element”.

From 1960 he was allowed to pursue his profession as a writer again; in his stories he described the world of work without glossing over it, was therefore criticized again during the cultural revolution and in 1965 was transferred to a weaving mill as a mechanic; Lu Wenfu was on the verge of suicide. In 1969 he and his family were finally sent to a remote village for re-education.

In 1976 - after the fall of the " Gang of Four " - he began to write again and was one of the three prizewinners in the national competition for the best stories of the year; In 1978 he was allowed to return to Suzhou after his rehabilitation. From then on he dealt critically with the history of the People's Republic and supported Deng Xiaoping's reform policy . The balance of his work consisted of numerous stories until the suppression of the democracy movement ( Tian'anmen massacre ) in May 1989 brought his writing to an abrupt end; since then, Lu Wenfu has not published any more.

Until his death, Lu Wenfu was Vice Chairman of the Chinese Writers' Association and Honorary President of the Association of Cultural Creators of the City of Suzhou , where his story, the gourmet novel The Gourmet ( Chinese  美食家 , Pinyin měishíjiā, "Gourmet, connoisseur" ) is set.

Lu Wenfu was elected to the People's Congress, received literary prizes, and some works were made into films.

The gourmet

The novella, with a strong biographical impact, describes the parallel life paths of a lazy and idle, but good-natured house owner from the pre-war period, who only lives his taste buds and who has been robbed of his true purpose in life - gourmet food - by the political upheavals since 1949. The first-person narrator, his former errand boy, on the other hand, now rises to the rank of master and declares the sober ideals of socialist society - frugality, honest work and simple eating habits - to be ideal. It is precisely this food lover, however, that is now being made the boss of precisely the place where his former boss particularly liked to stay; Within a short space of time, the young hot spur turns the restaurant inside out and ruins the food culture that has been cultivated there until now - the product of a food culture that is thousands of years old - with unimaginative cheap dishes. However, it becomes too much even for the simple regular audience: After the hunger during the Great Leap Forward and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution , the much-vaunted, former quality of Suzhou cuisine is finally being restored, and after years of hardship, the former firehead has to be happy be sure that the old gourmet is still at his side as a teacher in gourmet art - the circle has come full.

With its ironic-humorous style, its sober description of the failures and humiliations of the past decades, its psychologically and humanly skillful elaboration of the minor characters and the conciliatory end, the novel has not only opened up a readership in China but also in Western countries. The deeply shaken ideals, the struggle for the autonomy of the individual and the private, shown here using the example of “gourmet food”, which is disreputable as decadent, are the actual subject of this short novel, which in parables reflects the contemporary history of China and the psyche of its inhabitants.

Anecdotal

When the French publisher Le Seuil put an alienated Mao portrait on a book by Lu Wenfu, his wife was outraged: “We suffered so much in our lives because of him, and now the cover page is also being put on him!” - Pierre Haski, Mon journal de Chine (2005)

Works

  • The gourmet. The life and passion of a Chinese foodie . Novel. From the Chinese and with an afterword by Ulrich Kautz. Zurich: Diogenes 1993. - First edition, new editions 1995 and 2005; ISBN 978-3-257-22785-7
  • The gourmet. Translation and epilogue by Stefan Hase-Bergen. Bochum: Brockmeyer 1992. (Chinathemen IV). ISBN 3-8196-0001-9

literature

Stefan Hase-Bergen: Suzhou miniatures. The life and work of the writer Lu Wenfu. Bochum: Brockmeyer 1990. (China Themes Vol. 53)

Radio plays

Web links

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Lu is the family name here, Wenfu is the first name.


Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "There was only one reason why I did not throw myself down from the Linggu Pagoda at the time: I wanted to see what happens next"; Epilogue to the 1993 edition, p. 179.
  2. ↑ "... my Siberia ... a remote nest of misery"; Epilogue to the 1993 edition, p. 179
  3. ↑ In the relevant German-Chinese dictionaries, the keywords “Feinschmecker” and “Gourmet” did not appear in either the German or the Chinese dictionary until the mid-1990s.
personal data
SURNAME Lu, Wenfu
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Jiangsu Province
DATE OF DEATH July 9, 2005