Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

About

Xu Sanguan pushes carts at a silk mill and supplements his wages by selling blood to the local blood chief. As the Cultural Revolution intensifies, his visits become dangerously frequent — driven by the need to feed his three sons, survive political persecution, and endure the shattering discovery that his favorite son was fathered by another man. His wife is publicly shamed as a prostitute. The poverty of Mao's regime drains him of everything except the blood ties — literal and figurative — that hold his family together. Yu Hua writes with raw emotional intensity and the unflinching eye of someone who refuses to look away from suffering or from the humor that coexists with it. Xu Sanguan's story is both specific to its time and universal in its portrait of a man holding his family together with the only currency he has. A novel about a man who sells his blood to survive — and discovers that the things money can't buy are the things worth bleeding for.