Title: To Live Author: Yu Hua Creation Date: 1993 Location: China
Summary
To Live tells the story of Fugui, a wealthy landlord's son who gambles away his family fortune and is then swept through every major cataclysm of 20th-century Chinese history: the civil war, land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. One by one, with almost unbearable cumulative force, Fugui loses everything and everyone he loves — his parents, his wife, his son, his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandson — each death connected to a specific political upheaval. Yet Fugui survives, and at the novel's end he is an old man plowing a field with an ancient ox, talking to his lost family as if they were still with him. It is a story of almost mythic simplicity and devastating emotional power.
Why This Book Matters
To Live is essential because it is the great Chinese novel of the 20th century's political horrors, told not through the lens of ideology but through the body and heart of one ordinary man. It captures — in a way that no history book can — what it meant for hundreds of millions of Chinese people to live through the convulsions of revolution, famine, and political terror. It is also a profoundly humanist work: in a century that tried to reduce individuals to class categories, Fugui's stubborn survival affirms the irreducible value of a single human life.
Historical Context
Yu Hua (born 1960) grew up during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist before becoming a writer. He belongs to the "avant-garde" generation of Chinese writers who emerged in the 1980s after Mao's death, when it became possible to write honestly about the disasters of the preceding decades. To Live was published in 1993, during the economic boom that followed the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a moment when China was racing toward the future while still refusing to reckon honestly with its past.
Literary Significance
Yu Hua strips his prose to the bone — short sentences, plain language, no sentimentality — and achieves an effect of almost folk-tale-like inevitability. The novel's power comes from its relentless accumulation of loss, each tragedy more crushing than the last, yet told with a dark humour and matter-of-fact resilience that prevents it from becoming unbearable. Zhang Yimou's 1994 film adaptation (banned in China) brought the story to international attention. The novel's influence on contemporary Chinese fiction — its proof that simple storytelling could carry enormous political and emotional weight — has been immense.
Research Notes
Michael Berry's translation is clean and effective. This is a less canonical choice than, say, Mo Yan's work, but it is more accessible and arguably more emotionally powerful. The novel works as a companion piece to Lu Xun — where Lu Xun diagnosed the sickness, Yu Hua chronicles the cure that was worse than the disease. Zhang Yimou's film adaptation was banned in China, while the novel itself has circulated in print, which says something about the ambiguity of literary censorship in modern China.
The Reading
The Frame
A young man collecting folk songs in the countryside encounters an old farmer plowing a field with an ancient ox. The old man talks to the ox as he works, calling it by a series of names — Fugui, Jiazhen, Youqing, Fengxia, Erxi, Kugen — as if the animal were not one creature but many. When they stop to rest, the old man tells the young man his story. He talks the way old people talk when they have finally found a listener: unhurried, circling, sometimes laughing at things that are not funny, sometimes falling silent at things that are.
The old man's name is Fugui. The ox's name is also Fugui. He bought the ox because it was about to be slaughtered, and he saw in its eyes the same exhaustion he felt in his own bones — the look of a creature that has worked its whole life and has nothing left except the fact that it is still alive. He named the ox Fugui, and he calls it by the names of his dead family, and he plows his field, and this is his life now: an old man, an old ox, a field, and the memory of everyone he has lost.
The Young Master
Fugui was born rich. His family owned a hundred and more mu of land in a village in southern China. His father was a landlord, his mother was gentle, his wife Jiazhen was the daughter of a wealthy merchant — a woman who married beneath her station because, for reasons the young Fugui could not understand, she loved him.
Fugui did not deserve her love. He was a gambler, a drunk, a frequenter of brothels, a man who carried a prostitute on his back through the streets of town to humiliate his father-in-law. He was, by his own account, a monster of selfishness and stupidity. He gambled every night, losing steadily, winning just often enough to keep him coming back. He ignored Jiazhen's pleas. He ignored his father's warnings. He ignored everything except the click of tiles and the promise of the next hand.
One night, he lost everything. The land, the house, the family fortune — all of it gone to a man named Long Er, a professional gambler who had been slowly, patiently, methodically stripping Fugui of every mu. Fugui came home to tell his father. The old man did not shout. He did not weep. He sat down, quietly, and a few days later he was dead. Fugui had killed his father as surely as if he had put a knife in his chest.
The family moved from the great house to a thatched cottage. Jiazhen's father came and took her away, pregnant with their second child. Fugui's mother fell ill. Fugui, who had never worked a day in his life, went to Long Er and rented back a piece of his own family's land. He learned to farm. His hands, soft from a lifetime of leisure, blistered and bled and hardened. He discovered that he was not, after all, incapable of labour. He discovered that the simple rhythm of planting and harvesting had a dignity that his former life had lacked.
Jiazhen came back. She came back carrying their newborn son, Youqing, and leading their daughter, Fengxia, by the hand. She had left her father's comfortable house and walked back to the thatched cottage because she loved Fugui — not the rich young master but the broken, humbled farmer who was finally, for the first time in his life, trying. "I'm not coming back for you," she said. "I'm coming back because the children need a father." But they both knew it was more than that.
The Civil War
The Kuomintang army came to the village and conscripted Fugui. He was pulled off the road, given a rifle, and marched north to fight the Communists. He had no politics. He had no opinions about the war. He wanted to go home to his wife and children and his field. Instead, he was thrown into the chaos of the Chinese Civil War — the great convulsion that would determine whether Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong would rule China.
The fighting was senseless and brutal. Fugui's unit was surrounded, starved, decimated. Men died of dysentery, of bullets, of cold, of despair. Fugui survived by the animal instinct that would sustain him through every subsequent catastrophe: he did not think about tomorrow; he thought about the next hour, the next meal, the next breath. He found a companion, an older soldier named Chunsheng, and they kept each other alive through the siege, huddling together for warmth, sharing whatever food they could scavenge.
When the Communists overran their position, Fugui expected to be killed. Instead, the People's Liberation Army gave the captured soldiers a choice: join or go home. Fugui went home. He walked for days, surviving on scraps, until he arrived at the thatched cottage and found Jiazhen waiting. His mother had died while he was away. His daughter Fengxia had fallen ill with a fever and lost her hearing and her speech. She was deaf and mute. Fugui held her and wept.
But he was alive, and his family was alive, and by a stroke of perverse fortune, the loss of his wealth now saved his life. The Communists' land reform campaign targeted landlords. Long Er, the man who had won Fugui's land, was classified as a landlord and was shot. The land was redistributed. Fugui, who owned nothing, was classified as a poor peasant — a good class, a safe class. The very ruin that his gambling had brought upon him had placed him on the right side of history's most arbitrary line.
"If I hadn't lost the land," Fugui tells the young man, "I'd have been the one they shot."
The Great Leap Forward
The late 1950s brought Mao's Great Leap Forward — the campaign to transform China from an agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse in a few years. The village's iron pots, tools, and door hinges were confiscated and melted down in backyard furnaces to produce steel — steel that was useless, brittle, worthless, but that satisfied the quotas that the cadres reported upward. The crops were collectivised. The grain was taken. The villages starved.
Fugui's son Youqing was a bright, energetic boy who loved running. He ran everywhere — to school, to the fields, through the village streets — with the tireless, joyful energy of childhood. He had a pair of lambs that he doted on, and when the commune demanded them, he cried for days.
Then the district chief's wife needed a blood transfusion. She had the same blood type as Youqing. The boy was taken to the hospital and the doctors drew blood from him — too much, far too much, a fatal amount, because the district chief's wife was important and the boy was just a peasant's son. Youqing bled to death in the hospital. He was twelve years old.
Yu Hua writes this scene with the flat, terrible simplicity that is the book's signature. There is no melodrama. There is no rhetoric. There is just Fugui running to the hospital and finding his son's body, small and white on the table, drained of blood. He carries the boy home on his back. He digs the grave himself, in the field behind the cottage, near the spot where his father and mother are buried. Jiazhen collapses. She will never fully recover.
Fengxia
Fengxia, the deaf-mute daughter, grows into a beautiful and kind young woman. Despite her disabilities, she works hard, she is gentle, she communicates through gestures and smiles that endear her to the village. The family finds her a husband: Erxi, a simple, good-natured man who works as a porter, carrying loads on his back for a living. He is physically strong, devoted to Fengxia, and grateful to have a wife. They are happy — genuinely, simply happy — in a way that seems, in the economy of this novel, almost dangerous.
Fengxia becomes pregnant. The family is overjoyed. Fugui and Jiazhen see in the coming grandchild the continuation of the family, the proof that life goes on despite everything. Fengxia goes to the hospital to deliver.
She dies in childbirth. She haemorrhages and the doctors cannot stop the bleeding. Yu Hua does not dramatise the death. He simply reports it: Fengxia died. The baby survived — a boy, whom they name Kugen, "Bitter Root." Fugui stands outside the hospital, the same hospital where Youqing bled to death, and now his daughter is dead inside it too, and he has a grandson who will never know his mother.
The Cultural Revolution and After
The Cultural Revolution arrives, and with it a new round of arbitrary cruelty. Erxi, Fengxia's widower, is crushed to death in an accident at a construction site — two cement slabs fall on him while he works. He dies instantly. Little Kugen is left an orphan, raised by Fugui and Jiazhen.
Jiazhen, who has been ill for years — a wasting sickness that may be grief made physical — finally dies. She dies quietly, in the cottage, with Fugui beside her. "She went softly," Fugui says. "Like she was falling asleep." He buries her next to Youqing and Fengxia, in the family's plot behind the field.
Now it is just Fugui and Kugen, the old man and the small boy. Kugen is all that remains of the family — the last thread connecting Fugui to everyone he has loved. He dotes on the child with the tenderness of a man who knows that love is the most dangerous thing in the world because everything you love can be taken from you.
Kugen dies. He dies in a way that is almost absurd in its cruelty: he eats too many beans. The family has been so poor for so long that the boy has never had enough to eat, and when Fugui boils a pot of beans — a rare treat — Kugen gorges himself. His small stomach cannot handle it. He chokes. He dies. A child killed by abundance after a lifetime of scarcity. It is the most devastating death in the novel because it is the most meaningless — not caused by politics, not caused by history, not caused by the cruelty of institutions, but by the simple, stupid randomness of a world that does not care.
The Old Man and the Ox
Fugui is alone. Everyone he has loved is dead: his parents, his wife, his son, his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandson. He is an old man with nothing but a field, a cottage, and the memory of seven graves.
He buys the old ox. He names it Fugui. He talks to it as he plows, calling it by the names of his dead — "Come on, Jiazhen, pull a little harder" — and the ox, patient and exhausted, pulls the plow through the earth, and together they make their slow way across the field.
The young man listening to this story expects despair. He expects bitterness, rage, a curse against the heavens. Instead, Fugui laughs. Not the laugh of madness but the laugh of a man who has passed through everything and come out the other side into a place where the simple fact of being alive — the sun on the field, the weight of the ox against the harness, the sound of evening birds — is enough. Not good enough, not acceptable, not just — merely enough. He is alive. He breathes. He plows.
"I've had a hard life," Fugui says, "but I've lived it. That's all. I've lived it."
Yu Hua does not judge. He does not point a moral. He does not rage against the political systems that killed Fugui's family — the feudal landlord system, the Kuomintang's war, the Communist Party's famine and terror. The novel contains all of these things, but it does not argue about them. It simply shows one man's life, stripped of everything, reduced to the barest possible elements — breath, labour, memory — and asks: is this enough? Is the act of living, in itself, sufficient?
The answer the novel gives is not yes. It is not no. It is the image of the old man and the old ox walking together through the field as the sun goes down, the sound of Fugui's voice naming his dead, the earth turning under the plow, the stubborn, incomprehensible persistence of being alive in a world that has given you every reason to die.
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The standard English translation is by Michael Berry (Anchor Books, 2003), clean and effective. The novel was written originally in Mandarin Chinese.
Translated by Michael Berry. Anchor Books, 2003. The authoritative English translation.
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