To Live is one of Yu Hua’s most well-known novels. Set against the upheavals of modern Chinese history—civil war, the Three-anti and Five-anti campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution—it follows the life of Xu Fugui as he and his family are battered again and again by suffering. In the end, after every loved one has left him in death, only the old man and an aging ox remain, keeping each other company.
This novel also brought Yu Hua major recognition: in March 2004, he received the French Order of Arts and Letters, Knight class.
It took me more than a week to finish the book, reading it little by little. The writing is plain, almost conversational, without heavy ornament or dramatic posing. It tells the story of an ordinary man, Fugui, and the very unordinary life he ends up living.
His life is almost unbelievable in how much it contains. He was born into wealth, a landlord’s son, a spoiled young master, the kind of second-generation rich heir who never had to think about consequences. He later went off with the army and experienced war. He had a wife. He openly indulged himself in brothels. Relying on his family’s money, he spent his days in gambling houses until he lost everything. And then, one by one, he watched the people in his family leave him.
He goes from being rich by birth to carrying the weight of ruin. In youth he is reckless and self-indulgent; in old age, he is left completely alone. That contrast is one of the cruelest things in the book. Fugui’s life changes so drastically that it feels less like a fall and more like a long, relentless stripping away of everything a person might lean on.
I truly like this book. Once you sink into it, it becomes very hard not to connect it to your own life. Without noticing, you begin linking its sorrows and its questions to people you know, to things you have lived through, to choices you regret or still don’t understand. Sometimes it even makes you stop and think seriously about certain people, certain moments, in a way you might usually avoid. Reading Yu Hua can really shift the way you look at life as it is right now.
The title itself keeps echoing: To Live. Why live? What does it mean simply to go on living? That answer can only be felt from within; it cannot come from trying to satisfy other people’s ideas about what your life should look like. Maybe I used to care too much about how others saw me. Maybe I let those so-called judgments from other people drown out what I actually felt inside. Looking back, that was not worth it.
Even so, life goes on.
Although you’re gone, it’s alright. I still remember what you once said:
“Just live in the present. To hell with the past—the past is nothing, it’s already gone.”
What else is there to do, really?
Just smile and keep walking toward whatever comes next.