Ways of Being Male: Masculinities as Allegories in Yu Hua’s Brothers

This essay uses masculinity as a theoretical lens through which to read and interpret the important social and historical changes that have shaped China over the last four decades of the twentieth century. Yu Hua’s novel Brothers is a classic example in which masculinities serve as allegories for the collapse of traditional Chinese values and the rise of a market-driven ethos from the late 1970s onward. While predatory masculinity, embodied in protagonist Baldy Li, fits in perfectly well with a newly emerging market economy, soft masculinity, manifested in protagonist Song Gang, is deeply nostalgic and harks back to a self-contained agrarian culture of Confucian China. Ultimately, masculinity becomes an intriguing and contested site not only of competing values but also of contrasting socio-economic systems. One can argue that neither the ideologically rigid Maoist system nor the unbridled market economy allows for the possibility of an ideal masculinity. Like morality, masculinity is compromised and eventually becomes a casualty in China’s relentless change and transformation. As such, the notion of masculinity serves as an interesting theoretical perspective from which to ponder China’s historical trajectory, its modernization process and the gains and losses associated with it.