Novels, Deep-Read · Modern & Contemporary China · No.17
Yu Hua · serialized in Harvest, 1992 · book edition 1993
Noon in the fields. A bare-chested old man is plowing behind an ox so old it can barely lift its head. He raises the whip but never brings it down; he just calls out — Youqing, Erxi, no slacking; Jiazhen and Fengxia are doing fine; Kugen's pulling his weight too.
The young man on the ridge counts for a while.
There is only one ox in that field.
A landlord's son gambles away his family's hundred-odd acres in a single night and becomes a tenant farmer on his own former land; over the next forty years he is press-ganged into the civil war, survives the Great Leap Forward and the famine, and buries his father, his mother, his son Youqing, his daughter Fengxia, his wife Jiazhen, his son-in-law Erxi and his grandson Kugen — each of them dying a specific, ordinary death — until he buys an old ox on its way to slaughter, gives it his own name, and the two of them work a field while he calls out the names of everyone who is gone.
Yu Hua (b. 1960), from Haiyan in Zhejiang, worked five years as a dentist before he started publishing fiction in 1983. In the 1980s he was the sharpest blade of China's avant-garde: On the Road at Eighteen, One Kind of Reality, 1986 are full of violence rendered with a cold, clinical calm, the narrator holding a scalpel and describing what he cuts. To Live is the book where he put the scalpel down. It ran in the journal Harvest in 1992 and appeared as a book the next year; three decades on it remains one of the best-selling serious novels ever published in China.
Yu Hua has described where it came from in his preface to the Chinese edition: he heard the American song Old Black Joe, about an old man whose life is nothing but hardship, whose family have all gone before him, and who nevertheless goes on treating the world with friendliness. That, he said, was the relationship between a man and his fate that he wanted to write.
Its slot in literary history is easy to find: the most famous act of subtraction in modern Chinese fiction. Yu Hua's contemporaries wrote the century by addition — the Great Leap, the famine, the Cultural Revolution laid out layer on layer into epic. He went the other way, compressing the second half of the twentieth century into the household ledger of one illiterate farmer, which records only two things: who arrived, who left. History never gets a line of commentary in this book. It simply keeps reaching in and taking one person out of one family.
Start with who is telling it. A young man is roaming the countryside collecting folk songs when he meets an old man driving an ox at the edge of a field. seed ① The old man's name is Xu Fugui, he is willing to talk, and he talks calmly, as if about somebody else. The whole novel is his telling, with occasional cuts back to the field ridge: the young man offers a cigarette, the old man drinks some water and goes on.
Fugui was born the son of the Xu family — a hundred-odd acres, a hired hand to carry him about, evenings spent in the town's brothels and gambling houses. One episode sums up what he was: he had a prostitute carry him on her back past his father-in-law's rice shop, calling out a loud respectful greeting each time so the old man would lose face in front of the whole street. His wife Jiazhen was that rice merchant's daughter — educated, soft-spoken, stubborn in her own quiet way. She knelt down pregnant and begged him to stop gambling; he kicked her aside and went back to the table.
At that table sat an outsider named Long Er, unhurried, smiling whether he won or lost. Fugui lost for years, and lost bigger, until in one night he signed away the land, the house and his own name. seed ② Only later did he understand there had been a whole apparatus of cheating around him, and that he had never once won — the winning nights were arranged too.
His father did not beat him. The old man sold the land, converted the money into copper coins, loaded them into carrying baskets, and made Fugui haul them into town himself to settle the debt. He would not curse his son; he made his son carry the weight of a hundred acres on his own shoulders. It took a full day; the pole rubbed his shoulders raw and the coins bent him double. The family moved into a thatched hut, and a few days later his father fell off the manure vat at the edge of the village and died.
Jiazhen's father took her back to town in a sedan chair — respectably, humiliatingly. Fugui stayed behind and learned to farm from his mother: a young master gripping a hoe for the first time. Half a year later Jiazhen came back carrying a newborn son, Youqing. She said she still wanted to live with him. Their daughter Fengxia was seven or eight then, quick and full of laughter.
Fugui rented five acres from Long Er and became a tenant on his family's own soil. He said afterwards that he thought life had reached bottom. It was the opening.
His mother fell ill. Fugui went into town for a doctor and was seized off the street by Nationalist troops — press-ganged, roped away without so much as a message home. He spent two years hauling artillery.
He met two men at the front. Lao Quan, an old hand who had been fighting for years, taught him how to stay alive: don't be brave, don't run off alone, stay in the crowd; all he wanted was to get home. And Chunsheng, a boy soldier in his teens, green with hunger, who crouched in the trench and told Fugui what he wanted from life — to drive a car, to sit behind the wheel and drive. seed ③
Their unit was encircled on open ground, hundreds of thousands of men, supplies cut, planes dropping flatbread that the soldiers fought over and ate where they stood. The wounded lay in the snow crying out at night and were silent by morning — frozen. It was here that Fugui learned the thing he never unlearned: who dies and who lives has nothing to do with ability and everything to do with luck. Lao Quan was killed at a moment when nobody expected killing, stepping out to look for a man from his home county, by a bullet from nowhere. He was facing home when he went down.
Then the People's Liberation Army arrived and the prisoners were assembled: anyone who wanted to enlist could stay, anyone who wanted to go home got travel money. Fugui took the money and walked south for half a year.
His mother's grave was already there when he got back. Fengxia had run a high fever and come out of it deaf and mute — in the two years her father was gone, the child had lost her voice. Jiazhen had held the two of them together and was worn down to nothing.
Then came land reform, the redistribution of the early 1950s. A work team entered the village, classes were assigned, landlords were called to account. Long Er was the biggest landlord there — those hundred-odd acres in his name were the ones he had won off Fugui. He refused to hand them over, said he had earned them, said some hard things besides. He was tied up at the edge of the village and shot five times. payoff ② ↑
Fugui heard the five shots, ran home, and found he had wet himself. Sitting on the doorstep he worked out what had happened: those five bullets had been meant for him. If he had not gambled the land away, the man tied up out there would have been the young master of the Xu family. The unhurried winner at the card table had taken his bullets for him. He told Jiazhen: from now on we really have to live well. The line arrives early, and every hammer that falls afterwards comes back to test it.
Life moves on. Mutual aid teams, cooperatives, then the Great Leap Forward, the mass production campaign launched in 1958: every household's iron pot is carried off to be melted for steel, everyone eats in the communal canteen, the team leader explains that communism means meat at every meal. The excitement doesn't last; the canteen runs out of grain.
Then the famine. People dig for wild greens and come to blows over a sweet potato. Jiazhen falls ill with a bone-softening disease; she goes limp by degrees, can't stand, can't work. She drags herself back to her father's rice shop in town and returns with a small sack of rice inside her jacket. When they cook it they shut the door — the smell carries.
At the worst of it, Fugui and Jiazhen give Fengxia away to another family; they cannot feed her. Days later she comes back on her own and stands in the doorway without a sound. Fugui takes her by the hand to walk her back, and halfway there he decides he will not do it. That decision buys the family several good years, and it keeps Fengxia on the road that eventually kills her.
Youqing grows into a small, thin boy with a talent for two things: raising sheep and running. He is up before dawn cutting grass for the sheep, runs to school, runs home, cuts more grass — dozens of miles a day. The cloth shoes Jiazhen makes wear through in a month and the family can't spare them, so he takes them off, tucks them under his arm and runs barefoot, seed ④ ice underfoot in winter and barefoot still. Fugui beats him for it, then stops beating him and joins him in worrying about the shoes. At the school sports day he comes first, and his teacher says the boy has something.
Then a woman in town hemorrhages giving birth and the hospital needs blood. The school sends the pupils; the children crowd the door pushing up their sleeves — donating blood was an honor in those years. Only Youqing's type matches. The man drawing the blood watches him at first, then stops watching and looks toward the delivery room. Youqing says he feels dizzy; he is told to lie still. His lips go white and he slumps sideways. A doctor comes out, glances at him, says the boy is finished, and goes back to the delivery room — where the patient is the county magistrate's wife. That county hospital seed ⑤ is, at this point, just a place name; nobody gives it a second look.
By the time Fugui reaches the hospital his son is lying in a side room with a cloth over him. He runs out to kill someone, and learns the magistrate is Chunsheng payoff ③ ↑ — the boy soldier from the trench who wanted to drive a car. He got his car. He rode it into a county magistracy, and the blood that saved his wife was drained out of Fugui's son. The smallest, most pitiable wish in the book comes true, and that is the sharpest cut in it — Yu Hua doesn't turn Chunsheng bad, he just moves him up one floor, and in this order one floor up is enough to cost a life without anyone intending it.
Chunsheng stands in front of Fugui and can't speak. Fugui's raised hand comes down — he knows the debt is Chunsheng's, and he knows the men who drew the blood don't feel they killed anyone; they simply felt the magistrate's wife mattered more.
He can't let Jiazhen know. He carries Youqing home on his back at night along the road into town, a road he has walked a thousand times, glowing so white under the moon it looks salted. That road was Youqing's own. He ran it twice a day with his shoes under his arm, barefoot, barefoot in winter too, to save the pair his mother had sewn. payoff ④ ↑ The shoes lasted over a year; the shoes are what's left. Yu Hua lays that detail down early and says nothing extra here — he simply arranges for the boy who ran the road hundreds of times to be carried down it once. Fugui buries him under a tree west of the village and tells Jiazhen the boy is being kept in hospital. A few days later she says: carry me out to see our son. At the tree she sits down by the grave and asks nothing.
Years later the Cultural Revolution arrives. Magistrate Chunsheng is dragged out, paraded, beaten until he can't walk. One night he comes to Fugui's door and says he doesn't want to live. Jiazhen listens from inside — this woman has every reason to hate him for the rest of her life, and what she says is that he has to live: you still owe this family a life, you have to stay alive and pay it. He agrees. A month or so later he hangs himself anyway. The one time in this book that anyone is talked out of dying, it doesn't hold.
Fengxia comes of age. The team leader makes a match with a porter in town, an honest man with a permanently tilted head: Erxi. At the meeting he takes one look at Fengxia and won't leave. Days later he brings a crew and re-roofs Fugui's leaking house at his own expense; on the wedding day he carries a great red bridal chair into the village and parades it around with gongs and drums so the whole place can see who he is marrying. The tenderest passage in the book is a crook-necked porter spending a street's worth of ceremony to give a mute woman her dignity in public.
Fengxia gets pregnant. She delivers a son at the county hospital and then hemorrhages, and they cannot save her. Sitting in the corridor, Fugui recognizes where he is: this is the hospital where Youqing died. payoff ⑤ ↑ Two children, more than a decade apart, carried out of the same building. Yu Hua lets Fugui say nothing at all; he just has him sit there and remember the last time. A location returning a second time is louder than any accusation.
Heavy snow that day. Erxi carries Fengxia's body and Fugui walks behind, and she is buried under the tree west of the village next to Youqing. Three months later Jiazhen goes, by then as light as a bundle of kindling. She finishes what she has to say first: her life was neither good nor bad, both children were hers, she'll be with them now, she owes nobody anything. She is the only person in the novel to die well, and the only one who gets to say that it's enough.
The baby is called Kugen. Erxi raises him alone in town, tying him to a post at the edge of the building site while he works and checking on him between loads. When Kugen is four, Erxi is crushed between two concrete slabs; the men on site say the last thing he shouted was his son's name.
Fugui brings the boy back to the village. The three years that follow are the last decent stretch in the book: Kugen goes to the fields with him, learns the animals and the crops, has a sweet mouth and knows how to please people. At seven he runs a fever, and Fugui, aching for him, boils half a pot of beans and tells him to eat all he wants — beans were a rare good thing in that village in those years. Fugui goes back out to work; when he returns the boy isn't moving. He ate himself to death. A child who had never once been full, given the first chance to eat freely, dies of it. Fugui says the fault was his.
Now there is only him. After a few years of saving he buys an ox at market — an old one, so close to slaughter that it is kneeling on the ground with tears on its face. He leads it home and names it Fugui. He decides it is like him in one respect: it refuses to sit still. When it slacks at the plow he calls out a string of names so it will believe other oxen are working alongside it. payoff ① ↑ The names are Youqing, Erxi, Jiazhen, Fengxia, Kugen — and the thing the young man on the field ridge couldn't make sense of at the opening finally has an owner: the old man isn't senile, he has brought his whole family out to work, with nobody missing.
Toward dusk he leads the ox home, singing an old scrap of a song:
"In youth I roamed, in middle age I dreamed of buried treasure, in old age I became a monk."— the old man's song, closing lines of the novel (my rendering of the original)
There is one fuse in this book and it is lit in act one: the hundred-odd acres Fugui loses at the card table. Because he lost the land he wasn't shot in land reform; because he lost the land he became a tenant with nothing but his life. Because they were poor, Fengxia was given away, burned mute by a fever, kept in the countryside; because they were poor, Youqing ran to school barefoot and ran to donate blood; because they were poor, Kugen ate his fill for the first time at seven. The cruelest stroke is that a single event both saves his life and determines how everyone in his family dies. Fate here is not an abstraction. It is one night at a card table.
Youqing's death is the center of gravity, and it repays watching how Yu Hua does it. He does three things, each of them a subtraction.
First, he puts the death inside a procedure rather than a confrontation. No villain, no plot: the school organizing donors is routine, the blood typing is routine, the delivery room mattering more is routine. The man drawing blood looks the other way, and that is enough. The killer is an entire ranking of who matters more, and it needs nobody's malice in order to run.
Second, he pushes the father's explosion back down. Fugui runs out to kill someone, recognizes Chunsheng, and his hand comes down. A recognizable enemy is harder to hate than an abstract one — Yu Hua removes the exit the reader most wants. You want him to swing, and he can't.
Third, he sends Fugui down a night road alone with his son on his back. There is almost no emotional vocabulary in the passage — walking, moonlight, a road so white it looks salted. Turning the most unbearable stretch into one visual impression is the method of the whole book: the less bearable the moment, the shorter the sentences and the fewer the adjectives. The instant lyricism enters, what the reader feels is the author's grief. Yu Hua declines to offer that. He offers a road.
Long Er's execution is the finest piece of structure in the novel, and the trick is that it converts a grudge into arithmetic: the man who won everything dies in his place. Fugui never hated Long Er and takes no pleasure in it. He is simply frightened badly enough to wet himself, and goes home saying they must live well now.
Why does this land so hard? Because it settles the book's cosmology in one stroke: there is cause and effect here, but it has nothing to do with character. The wastrel lives; the decent die. Losing the family land saves a life; keeping it costs one. Readers instinctively hunt for a thread where virtue is rewarded, and this scene cuts the thread — after it, nobody asks of any death what the person did wrong.
The ox at the end is the thriftiest stroke in the book and the most merciless. It does four things at once: it keeps Fugui company (five names are working that field); it wrecks the reader (all five are graves); it proves he isn't mad (he knows there is one ox, he is deceiving the ox and himself, and he knows he is doing it); and it explains the title — to live isn't to endure, it's to stand there every day calling those names to an animal and then finish the plowing.
Then the narration itself. This story has to be told by Fugui, and it has to be told calmly. In the third person it would be an inventory of suffering; in his own mouth, in the register of a man telling an anecdote, it becomes the record of how a person lives alongside his own life. The young man listens all day and at the end can offer him nothing — the listener who can't get a word in is exactly this book's posture toward its reader.
To Live is not a novel of ideas in the science-fictional sense, but it runs on a very clear mechanism with three parts.
The outer "I" is the young folk-song collector; the inner one is Fugui narrating himself. The frame isn't decoration, it does a specific job: it earns the right to describe the worst things in the lightest voice. An author using a cheerful register about a dead child is cruel; a seventy-year-old who has told the story many times is not. The outer layer also supplies air — every so often we return to the field ridge, the old man drinks, laughs, the reader exhales, and then the next hammer falls.
The book performs one action seven times: a person is taken. The rhythm barely varies — a few pages of good life (Youqing wins his race, Erxi re-roofs the house, Kugen learns the crops), then the removal. The repetition is itself the content: it reproduces the texture of living, in which surviving the last blow gives you no preparation for the next. Critics call this mechanized sentiment (see below), but the mechanism is the source of the effect: fate in this book neither reasons nor varies.
The Yu Hua of the 1980s was known for elaborate, chilly narration, and here he puts nearly all of it away: short sentences, plain words, so few metaphors you could count them (the moonlit road that looks salted is the famous one). This is a deliberate demotion — he hands the telling to an illiterate farmer. The cost is surface literary polish; the gain is that anyone at all can read it. Both the sales and the standing of this book come out of that trade.
Yu Hua has put it about as firmly as it can be put:
"People live for life itself, and not for anything outside of it."— Yu Hua, preface to the Chinese edition of To Live (my rendering)
Take that side at its strongest. The moment a person hangs their reason for existing on something external — a career, a lineage, descendants, a faith, a better era — losing that thing revokes their permission to go on. Fugui is a man from whom everything was taken in sequence: property, parents, son, daughter, wife, son-in-law, grandson. If meaning lives outside, he should have lain down long ago. He didn't, which means there really is a way of living that depends on no conditions at all. That isn't nihilism; it is the hardest form of shouldering: getting up without a reason, finishing the plowing without a return.
Now the other side at its strongest. The sentence performs a quiet substitution: it turns "he is still alive" into "he lived rightly." Youqing was drained by an order that ranked a magistrate's wife above a schoolboy; Kugen died on a body that years of hunger had built. These are not fate; they have causes and responsible parties. And "living for life itself" gathers all those causes into a single word — suffering — and then makes suffering the ordinary condition of life, something to be borne rather than interrogated. Once endurance is written up as a virtue, whoever manufactures the suffering is quietly absolved. Worse, in circulation the line is usually heard as advice: Fugui managed, so what gives you the right to complain.
Both sides jam at the same point: endurance is a private virtue and a public acquiescence. Said to yourself it is courage; said to someone else it is pressure. Bring it home: a person gritting through a punishing job holds onto their dignity that way — but if that dignity is then cited as evidence that the job is fine, the dignity has been confiscated and put to work. Being able to bear something and being expected to bear it are two different facts, and this novel establishes only the first.
Make the hospital's logic hold first. A postpartum hemorrhage kills in tens of minutes; a healthy boy giving a bit more or a bit less blood was, by the judgment available in that room, a margin. Attention must concentrate on the person in most danger — that is triage, and every emergency department on earth works that way. Nobody in that building decided to kill Youqing. Each person was following the rules of their own small square. Malice is absent.
Now the other side at its strongest. Triage presupposes ranking by medical urgency, and what is actually operating here is ranking by importance of person. If the woman in the delivery room had been a tenant farmer's wife, would the boy have been drawn to the color of paper with nobody glancing back? Everyone knows the answer. That is the whole technical content of the scene: privilege does not need to arrive as an order; it only needs to adjust who is worth a second look. Once that skew exists, every subsequent step can be procedure — which makes it the hardest kind of harm to hold anyone accountable for, because there is no decision to point at.
The structure is unchanged today, only re-dressed: whose number gets called, whose application gets approved, whose complaint is taken seriously. More useful than a principle is a question: the last time you were served first, did you look back at who got pushed behind you?
This is the hardest moment in the book and the easiest to misread as warmth. Chunsheng, beaten half to death in the Cultural Revolution, comes to the door at night saying he doesn't want to live. This family has every reason to let him go: their son died beside his wife's operating table. What Jiazhen says is that he owes them a life and has to stay alive to repay it.
The case that she is right: killing him returns nothing to them, and hatred, while sustainable, has to be fed daily by somebody. Jiazhen is the clearest accountant in the novel — Youqing's life is gone, and the only thing still open is how she spends the rest of hers. Her line does not mean "I forgive you." It means "I don't intend to spend what's left of my life watching you die." And she frames it as a debt: not cancelled, outstanding. That is harder than forgiveness, and truer.
The case against, at its strongest: a victim is never obliged to solve the perpetrator's conscience problem. Look at the shape of the scene — a man who wronged someone carries his own pain back to the wronged party and asks to be released. That is a second demand. And Jiazhen spoke, and a month later Chunsheng hanged himself anyway: if the absolution couldn't even hold him up, whose benefit was it for? A mother who chooses never to forgive is exercising a complete right. Recasting forgiveness as the victim's growth assignment is the world's cheapest transfer of labor.
In daily terms — the old family debt, the friend's betrayal, the colleague who took credit for your work — "let it go" out of your own mouth is freedom and out of a bystander's is pressure. The difference is that Jiazhen spoke first, at night, to a man who had come asking to die, and nobody had ever urged her to.
Nothing Fugui did as a young man is defensible: he gambled away the family land, humiliated his father-in-law, kicked his pregnant wife aside. By any moral accounting he should pay, and he does — from young master to tenant farmer, a lifetime in the fields. But the same act saves him: the land isn't in his name, so the bullets aren't for him. Was that night the largest mistake of his life or the largest piece of luck?
One answer: outcomes can't retroactively define motives. He didn't lose in order to dodge a firing squad, he lost because he was rotten, and a bad act that happens to produce a good result doesn't become a good act. This position preserves the independence of moral judgment.
The other answer is more unsettling: if consequences can invert entirely after thirty years, then "worth it" isn't a valid way of settling anything. We are used to reading a life as a ledger — effort buys return, error buys punishment — and this book spends its whole length dismantling that ledger. The most obedient child dies the most unjustly; the kindest daughter marries the best man and dies on the delivery table; the one person who dies at peace does not die at peace as a reward. What the novel cancels isn't morality. It's "therefore."
Applied to yourself it turns concrete immediately: the school you didn't get into, the deal that fell through, the person who left. In the version you tell now, most of them have become "just as well." We are all quietly rewriting our own ledgers, and the only basis for the rewrite is what happened to happen next. Fugui's composure may grow exactly there: only someone who has stopped asking whether his life was worth it could tell it all the way through and still laugh.
Line his books up and one thread is unmistakable: the ordinary body is the only honest recording surface history has.
The 1980s Yu Hua wrote violence coldly, like preparing specimens: a family destroying one another in One Kind of Reality, a history teacher driven mad by the Cultural Revolution performing classical mutilations on himself in the street in 1986. He was interested in the shape of violence. By To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant the camera has moved: no longer how violence happens, only which part of himself an ordinary man uses to take it. Fugui uses a sequence of burials; Xu Sanguan uses his own blood, selling a pint at each obstacle until they won't buy it anymore and he still has to keep going. The two books share a skeleton: a man carrying half a century on his body.
The later Brothers and The Seventh Day turn to the present, running the Cultural Revolution, the get-rich decades and a crematorium where the dead queue by rank into one absurd corridor. His subject never changes — what is left of a person after an era has driven over him — but the register drifts toward the tone of news reports, and opinion has split accordingly.
The other half of him is tenderness, and it always lands on something small: the cloth shoes tucked under Youqing's arm, the roof Erxi rebuilt for Fengxia, the little sack of rice Jiazhen carried back from town. No love in this novel is ever spoken; all of it is converted into objects and physical effort.
Without any boosting, several complaints about this book hold up:
1. The fuse is lit in act one: the land Fugui gambles away both saves his life and settles how everyone in his family will die.
2. The five bullets Long Er takes explain the rules of this world in one stroke — there is cause and effect, and it has nothing to do with character.
3. Youqing isn't killed by a villain; he's killed by a ranking of who matters more, the kind of harm with no decision to point at.
4. The boy soldier in the trench who wanted to drive a car got his car — the sharpest cut in the book falls at the moment the smallest wish comes true.
5. Two children are carried out of the same hospital thirteen years apart, and Yu Hua writes no commentary at all; he just lets a father sit in the corridor and remember.
6. The only time anyone is talked out of dying is Jiazhen telling Chunsheng to live and repay; a month later he hangs himself.
7. Jiazhen is the only one who dies well and the only one who gets to say it's enough — she squares the accounts first and owes nobody.
8. Kugen dies of his first full meal, and that single line weighs more than any description of famine.
9. "Living for life itself" is courage said to yourself and coercion said to someone else; bearing a thing and being expected to bear it are separate facts.
10. What stays isn't the seven funerals. It's an old man calling five names to an ox so it will think the field is full of working animals.