Essays shed light on emerging power

CHINA IN 10 WORDS. By Yu Hua. Pantheon. 225 pages. $25.95

One doesn't need to be a close follower of national politics or international finance to know the fates of China and the United States are increasingly intertwined.

But the understanding of these two powerful nations appears to have lagged behind their burgeoning economic ties.

Yu Hua, a Beijing novelist and the first Chinese writer ever to win the James Joyce Award, makes a dent in that with his first nonfiction work.

He creatively paints an intimate picture of his country through humorous and moving essays on 10 words: people, leader, reading, writing, Lu Xun (an early 20th century Chinese writer and intellectual), revolution, disparity, grassroots, copycat and bamboozle.

Of course, words don't always translate perfectly from one language to another, and this book celebrates those ambiguities as it sheds light on China as an emerging economic power.

The book succeeds at the author's goal of staying concise and describing China "through 10 sets of eyes." The poignant introduction, where Chinese children suffer receiving vaccinations in the 1970s because the nation was so poor it had to reuse needles even after their tips had become barbed, is typical of the insightful anecdotes contained throughout.

"'Better a socialist weed than a capitalist seedling,' we used to say in the Cultural Revolution," Yu Hua writes, "Today, we can't tell the difference between what is capitalist and what is socialist -- weeds and seedlings come from one and the same plant."