To Live
Good Fit
- Readers drawn to literary novels set against modern Chinese history that leave a deep, quiet impact
- Anyone who loves books that achieve powerful emotional effect through plain, unadorned prose
- Readers open to novels centered on loss, endurance, and survival
Not a Fit
- Readers looking for a fast, adventure-driven plot — the novel takes the form of a life gradually unfolding through memory
- Readers sensitive to themes of grief, loss, and death who avoid "heavy" literature
- Readers expecting a happy ending — true to its genre, the book is unsentimental, realistic, and unflinching
An unnamed narrator — a young man wandering from village to village collecting folk songs — recalls the strange, sometimes sad, sometimes comic people he meets along the way: old men weeping, secret love affairs, the small tragedies of ordinary village life.
He comes across an old farmer scolding his ox while plowing — surprised, he notices the man calls the ox by several different names ("Erxi, Youqing, Jiazhen, Fengxia, Kugen"), even though the animal's real name is simply Fugui. The farmer explains he tricks the ox into thinking other oxen are working alongside it, so it won't realize it's working alone.
Sitting in the shade of a tree, Fugui begins telling his own story — he was once the sole heir of the wealthy Xu family, and in his youth his chief pursuits were visiting brothels and gambling, treating both his father and his wife Jiazhen with cruel words.
Fugui recalls his father demanding that he "honor his ancestors" — that is, preserve the family fortune — while he himself wanted only to "enjoy life" instead. This conflict lies at the root of the family estate shrinking from 130 mu of land to just 65 mu, already in his father's time.
- The frame-story structure (one narrator listening to another's story) is a technique seen elsewhere in Yu Hua's work, rooted in the oral folk-storytelling tradition
- Plain, unadorned, almost aphoristic sentences — despite its heavy subject matter, the prose never turns overly literary or melodramatic
Another novel by the same author covering a similar historical period and theme
A similar novel tracing modern Chinese history through the eyes of a peasant family
When Fugui's son Youqing is in fifth grade, the head of his school loses a lot of blood giving birth. The children are taken to donate blood; Youqing's is a match, and they take so much that he dies. Beside himself, Fugui goes to beat up the headmistress's husband, the «governor», and recognises him as Chunsheng, his old comrade from the war.
His daughter Fengxia marries Erxi and is happy, but she bleeds to death after giving birth. Fugui says: «Both my children died because of childbirth — Youqing while someone else's child was being born, Fengxia after giving birth to her own». After a long illness his wife Jiazhen dies too. Erxi is crushed under concrete slabs at a building site, and little Kugen, ill one day, chokes to death on the beans Fugui cooked for him; «We were just very poor», Fugui says.
Fugui buries his whole family. One day he buys an old ox, weeping as it is led off to be slaughtered, and names it «Fugui» too. At the end the narrator, a collector of folk songs, watches the old man and the ox walk off together to the field, swaying, leaving tracks in the mud.
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