TO LIVE
by YU HUA
Translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. 250 pages, $13

reviewed by Allan H. Barr

Yu Hua, born in 1960, has without doubt written some of the most notable Chinese fiction of the last twenty years. Best known to the English-reading public for his violent and disturbing early stories published under the title The Past and the Punishments, he also enjoys a high reputation in China for the three novels that he wrote between 1991 and 1995, Zai xiyu zhong huhan (Crying Out in the Drizzle), Huozhe (To Live), and Xu Sanguan maixue ji (Chronicle of a Blood Merchant). To Live, the first of these books to appear in English (to be followed later this year by Chronicle of a Blood Merchant), reveals a side to Yu Hua's work that is more immediately accessible than his early stories. While the high death toll among the book's characters suggests a point of contact with the grim world of The Past and the Punishments, To Live proves to be as heartwarming as it is heartrending.

To Live recounts the saga of Xu Fugui and his family as they are buffeted by endless shocks and difficulties over a period of thirty years or more. Told largely from Fugui's perspective, in spare, unvarnished prose, the story follows his transformation from a landlord's wastrel son in the pre-Liberation era to a farmer and devoted family man after 1949, and keenly observes the interactions over time between Fugui and his wife, son, daughter, and son-in-law. The family's tribulations are set against the backdrop of revolutionary change in China; vivid scenes are set during the civil war in the late 1940s, the land reform movement, the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The story of ordinary people caught up in circumstances almost entirely beyond their control, To Live brilliantly encapsulates the Chinese experience during the central decades of the twentieth century.

To those who have seen Zhang Yimou's 1994 film adaptation of To Live, which broadly follows the plot of the novel, the above summary will sound familiar. But there are a number of memorable moments in Yu Hua's book that failed to make it into the film. The famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, which the film adaptation passes over in discreet silence, is graphically evoked in the original work, and one particular episode that is presented as a tragic accident in the movie comes across in Yu Hua's novel as a truly horrific case of ineptitude and inhumanity. Zhang Yimou's film ends with the Xu family picking up the pieces at the close of the Mao era, while Yu Hua's conclusion carefully avoids such a tidy correspondence with the officially promoted view of things. To some readers, the calamities that pile up in the novel may seem just too overwhelming, but in the book's constant interplay of light and shade, the darker notes are ultimately offset by Fugu's love of life, which glows with undiminished vigor to the very end.

To Live elaborates on a theme first introduced by the narrator of Yu Hua's novel Crying Out in the Drizzle, who remarks at one stage, "Apart from life itself, I cannot think of any other reason for going on living." In his foreword to the Chinese edition of To Live (not included in this translation), Yu Hua has expanded on this point. Seeking to explain his move away from the indignant and adversarial stance of his early stories, Yu Hua tells us that by the time he wrote To Live, what he had come to believe should inform his work was "the detachment that comes after one understands everything, an even-handed perspective on both goodness and evil alike, looking at the world with a sympathetic eye." In this respect, as he explains in both the foreword to the Chinese edition and the postscript to the English edition, the lyrics of Stephen Foster's song "Old Black Joe" served as an inspiration to him. As Yu Hua describes it: "The song was about an elderly black slave who experienced a life's worth of hardships, including the passing of his entire familyyet he still looked upon the world with eyes of kindness, offering not the slightest complaint." The song so moved him that he decided to write a novel along the same lines, or, as he puts it in the postscript, "An American slave song with only the simplest lyrics grew into Fugui's lifea life imbued with upheavals and suffering, but also tranquility and happiness." Implicitly rejecting the ideological framework that for so long in China defined the purpose of life in strictly political terms, To Live honors the joys and sorrows of its deeply human characters, and testifies eloquently to the resilience of their spirit.