A letter reached me in September from a retired teacher in Fife, and it contained a single sentence I have been unable to leave alone. She had read Yu Hua's To Live on a train, she wrote, and could not decide whether she had been comforted or flattened. I replied that I had been putting the same question to that book for a good many years, and that I no longer thought it a muddle. I thought it was the book itself, stated by a reader who had paid attention.
For those who have not met the novel, it is the life story of Xu Fugui, told by Fugui himself to a collector of folk songs who comes upon him in a field, talking to the ox he is ploughing with. Fugui begins as the idle son of a landowning family, a gambler who treats his wife with cruelty and his inheritance with contempt. He loses everything at the tables, and his father does not survive the loss. That is the first chapter of his ruin. The remaining chapters, which cover roughly the middle decades of the twentieth century in China, are the rest of it, and the book first appeared in the Shanghai journal Harvest in the early 1990s.
What follows is a sequence of misfortunes arranged with the patience of a watchmaker. Fugui is pressed into the Nationalist army while looking for medicine for his sick mother, and he returns after nearly two years to find her dead and his daughter, Fengxia, left deaf and mute by a fever. Then comes the grim joke at the novel's centre. The man who won Fugui's land at the gambling table, a landlord named Long Er, is executed when land is redistributed, and Fugui, who has nothing left to be taken, is spared. His vice has saved his life. Yu Hua does not point this out. He lets it sit on the page, as a farmer might leave a stone in a field.
A reader of Chinese philosophy will think here of the Zhuangzi, in which a gnarled old tree stands for centuries beside a village shrine because it is of no use to any carpenter. Timber that is straight gets felled, and timber that is crooked is left alone. Fugui's catastrophe, the gambling that wrecked his house, is what makes him crooked timber in the eyes of the age. A man with land is a target and a man with nothing is overlooked, and history, which comes through the village like a woodcutter, passes over him for exactly that reason. I do not claim that Yu Hua had the tree in mind. I claim only that the book is easier to understand once one has met it.
After that the book becomes almost unbearable, and I mean the word as a description rather than a complaint. Over the following decades Fugui's family is taken from him one member at a time: a son who gives so much blood at his school that he dies, a daughter in childbirth, a wife to a wasting illness, a son-in-law to an accident on a building site, a grandson who chokes on beans that his grandfather has cooked for him. The causes are sickness, accident and the indifference of institutions. Not one of them is a villain's work, and Yu Hua is a writer who will not hand us a villain to hate. The absence is the point.
The campaigns and famines of those decades enter the story as weather enters a farmer's day, as things that happen to him and over which he has no authority. Yu Hua does not argue with them. He is not interested in indicting a policy; he is interested in what a family does when a policy arrives. That restraint is one reason the book travels well, since a reader in Fife or in Seoul does not need to know the dates in order to know what it is to be told by some distant authority that a child must give blood.
The person who bears the most in the book, and complains the least, is Jiazhen, Fugui's wife. He is cruel to her in the early chapters, she leaves him when his gambling has taken the house, and she comes back, and she goes on coming back to whatever is left. The National Endowment for the Arts materials remark that Fugui grows, as hardship accumulates, grateful for his stoic wife and respectful of her, and that seems to me the only genuine moral development in the book. It is also, of course, the kind that arrives too late to be of any use. A weaker writer would have given Fugui a speech of repentance, and Yu Hua gives him none.
Yu Hua has said that the novel began with an American song. He heard "Old Black Joe", a song about an old enslaved man who has lived a hard life and still regards the world with kindness, and he was struck that a man in such circumstances could look at things so gently. This, he has suggested, is what literature is able to do: it shows a Chinese peasant and a man in a Southern cotton field to be, in spite of everything that separates them, simply human. Strictly speaking, "Old Black Joe" is a parlour song by Stephen Foster and not a folk song at all, but I do not think that spoils the point.
There is a further reason the book suggests a song. Fugui's listener is a collector of folk songs, a man whose trade is to take down what ordinary people sing and say before it vanishes. Burns, who spent much of his last decade gathering and mending Scots songs for James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, would have recognised the occupation at once. The collector's gift is to be quiet while another person talks. Yu Hua's whole novel is built on that discipline, and it is no accident that the person who asks the questions never appears to judge. The story is delivered as speech, with a speaker's repetitions and a speaker's mercy, and it reads in the end less like a novel than like a very long ballad told in prose.
The Chinese title is two characters, 活着, and I have never seen it satisfactorily rendered. The first means to live, or to be alive. The second, 着, is a particle that marks a continuing state. Together they say something like living on, the condition of being alive, with no object, no purpose and no adjective attached. English has settled for an infinitive, To Live, which sounds a little like an aspiration. The Korean edition, translated by Baek Won-dam and published by Prunsoop in 2007, was reissued in 2023 to mark forty years of Yu Hua's career as a writer, and it is called Insaeng, written with the characters for person and life. That is a human life seen whole, as a course with a beginning and an end. Three languages, three grammars, and three slightly different books.
In November 1785 Robert Burns turned up a mouse's nest with his plough and, if his brother Gilbert's account is to be believed, saved the creature from the spade of the boy who was holding the horses. The poem that followed, which appeared in the Kilmarnock edition of 1786, is addressed to the mouse as to a fellow mortal. Its last stanza is what I think of whenever I think of Fugui. The mouse, says Burns, is happier than he is, because it lives only in the present, spared both regret for the past and dread of the future, while the poet looks back on a bleak history and guesses fearfully at what lies ahead.
Yu Hua's novel imagines a man to whom the mouse's condition has been delivered by force. With his past taken from him, family by family, and with his future taken likewise, Fugui is left with the present alone: the ox, the field, the next meal. It is not a blessing, though it is a kind of mercy. Yu Hua does not console us; he shows us what remains when consolation has been used up. The old man at the end of the book, alone with an ancient ox he saved from the butcher and named after himself, is the nearest thing in modern fiction I know to Burns's mouse grown tall.
That, I told my correspondent, was my answer to her question. The comfort the book offers is the comfort of the mouse, and no one would choose it. Yet it is a comfort, and it is real, because it tells the reader that endurance does not require a reason. A man may go on living without a cause, a creed or a consolation, merely because he has not stopped. For anyone who has sat in a hospital corridor with nothing to offer except attendance, I think the point lands very hard indeed. She had also asked, with the honesty of someone who has taught for forty years, whether it was permissible to find consolation in a story of such losses. I said that it was permissible and also unavoidable, since a reader cannot stand in front of that much endurance without being steadied by it.
The writer Wang Ping has called the novel a Chinese Book of Job, as the materials prepared for the National Endowment for the Arts record, and as a man raised within earshot of the Kirk I understand why. But Job argues with heaven. He demands an answer, and he receives one of a sort. Fugui makes no such demand. There is no heaven in his account to address, and the nearest thing to an audience is a farm animal. That difference is the source of the book's strangeness, and also of its power to disturb readers who expect suffering to arrive with an explanation.
I first read the novel in English, in Michael Berry's translation, which appeared in English in 2003. Berry, I learn from the same Endowment materials, was a twenty-two-year-old senior at Rutgers when he faxed Yu Hua to ask for permission. Kirkus, reviewing the book that summer, was less than enchanted by the English, complaining of awkward phrasing and American slang. I cannot adjudicate between a reviewer and a translator. I can only report that the plainness, which is the quality that matters most, reached me intact, and that Scottish readers are more forgiving of American slang than reviewers sometimes assume.
Zhang Yimou's 1994 film, which won the Grand Jury Prize and the prize for best actor at Cannes, changed many of the novel's details, according to the same discussion materials. I will say no more about it than that. The novel needs no help, and those who know the film first should expect a harder, plainer and less sentimental book than the one they remember.
So I told the teacher in Fife that I thought To Live did both. It flattens first and comforts afterwards, and the order matters. The flattening is the cost of honesty, and the comfort, which arrives later and without ceremony, is the dividend. She wrote again in October. She had missed her stop, she said, and had stood a long while on the platform of a small station she did not know, not minding. I have kept that letter beside my copy of the book. It is the best review the novel has had from anyone I know.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: To Live, Yu Hua (translated by Michael Berry), Amazon
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Insaeng (인생), Yu Hua, Aladin Bookstore
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
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