by Yu Hua
“I’ll repay you in a couple of days when I sell the cotton,” I promised.
“Don’t worry about it, Fugui,” he said.
In addition to the ginger soup, I also cooked Kugen a bowl of porridge. Only after I watched him finish did I eat. As soon as I finished I went right back out to the fields. On my way out I said to Kugen, “You’ll feel better after you get some sleep.”
But as I went out the door, I still couldn’t get Kugen out of my mind. I decided to pick half a pot of fresh beans for him. When I went back inside to cook them, I made sure to add some salt. I moved the stool over next to the bed, putting the half-filled pot of beans on top of the stool. I told Kugen to eat, and seeing that they were beans, he smiled. As I went back outside I heard him say, “How come you’re not having any?”
I didn’t go back into the house until dusk. By the time all the cotton was reaped I felt like all my joints were out of place. It was only a short walk from the field to my hut, but by the time I got to the door my legs were trembling. As I walked in I called out, “Kugen, Kugen.”
Kugen didn’t answer; I assumed he was asleep. As soon as I went over to the bed I saw his twisted body. His mouth was half-open, and I could see two unchewed beans inside. The second I saw his mouth like that I began to feel lightheaded, and my ears rang wildly—Kugen’s lips were blue. I shook him with all my might and screamed his name. His body swayed back and forth in my arms but he didn’t answer. I was flustered, so I sat down on the bed to figure out what to do. I wondered if Kugen could be dead—the second the thought crossed my mind I couldn’t keep from crying. I shook him again, but still he had no reaction. I realized he might be dead. I went outside and saw one of the young guys from our village.
“I beg you, please come take a look at Kugen. I thik he might be dead,” I pleaded.
The young man stared at me for a while before picking up his feet and running over. He shook Kugen back and forth and pressed his ear up to Kugen’s chest. Only after listening for a long time did he finally say, “I can’t hear a heartbeat.”
A whole crowd of people from the village came. I begged them to look at Kugen. After shaking him and listening to his chest they told me, “He’s dead.”
Kugen had choked to death on the beans. It wasn’t that he was greedy and wanted to stuff himself, it was just that we were too poor. Every kid in the village had it better than Kugen. Things were so bad for us that Kugen hardly ever had the chance to eat beans. And just like always I was my old muddleheaded self, giving Kugen too many beans at once, never stopping for a second to think about what might happen. In the end it was my clumsiness and stupidity that killed Kugen.
From then on I had to get by alone. I thought I wouldn’t have many days left, either. Who could have known that I’d make it this long? I’m still the same as before. My back’s sore and my vision is blurry, but my hearing is still keen. When the villagers are talking, I can tell who’s speaking without even looking. Sometimes when I think back I feel sad, and sometimes I feel a kind of peace. I took care of the funerals for everyone in my family. I buried them all with my own hands. When the day comes that my body goes stiff, there will be no one left to worry about. I’ve also made up my mind that when it’s my turn to die, I’ll go peacefully and quietly. There’s no need for me to worry about not having anyone to bury me—I’m sure the people in the village will take care of it. The moment my body starts to stink, I’m sure the smell will be unbearable and they’ll get rid of me in a hurry. I won’t let them bury me for nothing; there’s ten yuan under my pillow, and even if I have to starve to death there’s no way I’m touching that ten yuan. Everyone in the village knows that money is for whoever buries me. They also know that after I die I want to be buried with Jiazhen and the others.
It seems this life of mine will be over soon. It’s been an ordinary life. My dad thought I would bring honor to our ancestors. He thought wrong. As for me, this is my fate. When I was young I used the money my ancestors left me to screw around for a while, but as time went on I became worse and worse off. In the end, though, things worked out for the best. Look at the people around me, like Long Er and Chunsheng. They each had their day in the sun, but in the end they lost their lives. It’s better to live an ordinary life. If you go on striving for this and that, you’ll end up paying with your life. Take me, for instance: The longer I’ve managed to squeeze by, the more useless I’ve become, but in the end I’ve lived a long time. One by one, everyone I knew died, but I’m still living.
Two years after Kugen died, I had finally saved up enough money for an ox. Seeing that I still had a few years left in me, I decided I should go ahead and get one. An ox is like half a person. He can help me work, and when there’s free time he can keep me company, and when I’m bored I can talk to him. Taking him by the reins is just like taking a child by the hand.
The day I went to buy the ox I tucked my money away in my shirt and headed out to Xinfeng, where there’s a big animal market. On the way there I passed through one of the neighboring villages and saw a crowd of people gathered around the drying field. When I went over to have a look I saw this here ox. He was lying on the ground with his head tilted to one side, and tears were streaming from his eyes. Next to him was a bare-chested guy squatting on the ground and sharpening a butcher’s knife. The people crowding around were trying to determine the best spot to make the first incision. Seeing this ox weeping so intensely, I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. I thought it must be really terrible to be an ox. All their lives they’re driven to the point of exhaustion for the work of man, and as soon as they get old and their energy starts to go they get sent off to be slaughtered and eaten.
I couldn’t stand to watch this ox get slaughtered, so I quickly left the drying field and went on my way to Xinfeng. But after walking for a while I still couldn’t get him out of my mind. He knew he was going to die. Under his head there had been a pool of tears.
The farther I walked the more agitated I became, and then I thought, why don’t I just buy him? I quickly turned around and headed back toward the drying field. When I got there they had already tied up the ox’s feet. I squeezed my way through the crowd and said to the guy sharpening the knife, “Okay, that’s enough. What do you say you sell me this ox?”
The bare-chested man was testing the blade with his finger. He looked me over for a while before asking, “What did you say?”
“I want to buy this ox,” I repeated.
He cracked his lips and began to giggle. Everyone around was roaring with laughter. I knew that they were laughing at me. I took my money out from under my shirt and put it in his hand, saying, “Go ahead and count it.” The bare-chested guy was stumped. He looked me over and scratched his head.
“Are you for real?” he asked.
I didn’t say a word. I just stooped down and undid the rope binding the ox’s legs. I patted him on the head and stood up. The ox was really smart; knowing he wasn’t going to die, he immediately stopped crying and stood up. As I pulled the ox’s leash I told the guy again, “Go ahead and count it.”
He held the money in front of his eyes as if checking its thickness. “That’s okay, take him away,” he said, once he was sure there was enough money.
As I led the ox away, the crowd was laughing at me behind my back. I heard the guy who sold me the ox say, “I really made out today! Not bad at all.”
Oxen have feelings just like people do. As I pulled on this one’s leash to guide him home, he knew that I had saved him. He rubbed his body up against me to show his affection. I said to him, “Look at you, what’s there to be so happy about? I’m taking you home to work, not to be pampered.”
When I brought him back to the village, everyone gathered around to see the excitement. They all said I was a fool for buying such an old ox. One guy even said, “Fugui, he looks like he’s older than your father!”
Another guy who knew a lot about oxen told me that at most this one would live only two or three years. I
figured two or three should be enough. I was afraid that even I wouldn’t live that long. Who could have guessed that the two of us would still be alive and kicking today? Everyone in the village is shocked. Even just the other day someone said we were “a couple of old bastards that just won’t die.”
Once the ox was home he became a member of my family, so I thought it only right that I give him a name. I thought about it and decided to go with Fugui. After settling on his name, I was really pleased with myself. He really does resemble me. Later, people in the village also started to say that we looked alike. I just giggled—I’d known that for a long time.
Fugui is a good ox. Of course he gets lazy sometimes, but even people drag their feet from time to time—how can you expect an animal not to? I know when to make him work and when to let him rest. If I’m tired then I know he must be tired, too. When my energy returns, then it’s time for him to get back to work.
As he finished, the old man stood up, patted the dust off his bottom and called out to the old ox beside the pond. The ox came right over, walking up beside him and lowering his head. The old man put the plow harness over the ox’s shoulders and grabbed the halter, slowly leading him away.
The two Fuguis swayed slightly as they walked o f, leaving a trail of footprints in the mud. I heard the old man say to the ox, “Today both Youqing and Erxi planted a whole mu, and Jiazhen and Fengxia each planted almost 80 percent of a mu, and even little Kugen planted half a mu all by himself. How much you planted, I won’t even say—if I did you’d think I was trying to embarrass you. But then again you’re not a young fellow anymore. Planting this bit of land must have taken everything you had.”
The old man and his ox gradually got farther away, but from far off I could still hear the echo of the old man’s hoarse and moving voice. It floated through the open night like the wind. The old man sang:
In my younger days I wandered amuck,
At middle age I wanted to stash everything in a trunk,
And now that I’m old I’ve become a monk.
Chimney smoke swirled upward, dancing in the sky above the roof of a small farmhouse as the last rays of evening sunlight broke up and disappeared.
The sound of mothers calling their children home began to subside as a man carrying a load of manure walked past me. The bamboo pole he used to support the load squeaked as he went by. Gradually, the fields surrendered to silence. All around there appeared a kind of haze as the glow of dusk slowly dissolved.
As the black night descended from the heavens, I knew that in the blink of an eye I would witness the death of the sunset. I saw the exposed and firm chest of the vast earth; its pose was one of calling, of beckoning. And just as a mother beckons her children, so the earth beckoned the coming of night.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
I understand now better than ever why I write— all of my e fort is directed at getting as close as possible to reality.8
—YU HUA
In 1906, while studying at Sendai University in Japan, a young Chinese medical student named Zhou Shuren saw a news slide from the Russo-Japanese War that changed his life. Depicting a Chinese prisoner being executed by Japanese soldiers, it prompted him to abandon medicine in favor of literature. For Zhou, who would adopt the pen name Lu Xun9 and come to be regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature, this indelible image of decapitation and the indifferent expressions of the Chinese onlookers would fuel his literary imagination and drive him to “save the children” suffering from what he perceived to be a long tradition of Chinese cultural “cannibalism.”
In 1960, twenty-four years after Lu Xun’s death and just miles away from his hometown of Shaoxing in Hangzhou, Yu Hua was born. His parents were doctors, and pursuing a career in medicine seemed a natural course for him. After attending a one-year course at a school for public health, he began to practice dentistry in his home province of Zhejiang. But he disliked the regimented lifestyle of a dentist and resented the limitations it placed on his creativity. As he would recall in an autobiographical essay, “My earliest motivation for writing professionally grew out of a desire to cast off the environment I was ensnared in. At the time my greatest wish was to join the cultural center. I saw that most of the people there were carefree, which made me think that what they did would be the perfect job for me. So I began writing.”10 Where Lu Xun’s decision to become a writer had been driven by his realization that it was the Chinese spirit rather than the Chinese body that needed to be saved, Yu Hua— and others writing in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao—felt that the role of the writer could no longer be that of cultural savior.
In 1984 Yu Hua published his first work of fiction, a short story entitled “Star” (“Xingxing”) about a child violinist. It was a promising debut from a young literary talent. That promise would be fulfilled in 1987 with “On the Road at Eighteen” (“Shiba sui chumen yuanxing”), the first in a string of powerful and provocative works of short fiction that shook China’s literary scene in the years leading up to the 1989 crisis in Tiananmen Square. Yu Hua’s stories from this period, including “1986” (“Yijiubaliu nian”), “One kind of Reality” (Xianshi yizhong), “Mistake at River’s Edge” (Hebian de cuowu) and “Classical Love” (Gudian aiqing), stood out for their brutal, matter-of-fact depictions of violence, prompting Mo Yan, the author of Red Sorghum, to remark, “I’ve heard that [Yu Hua] was a dentist for five years. I can’t imagine what kind of brutal tortures patients endured under his cruel steel pliers.”11 This reputation, in combination with his daring linguistic experimentation, earned Yu Hua a place among China’s foremost avant-garde writers.
The award-winning volume The Past and the Punishments, wonderfully translated by Andrew F. Jones, collects eight of the best stories from Yu Hua’s early experimental period.12 Avant-garde fiction, however, is but one facet of Yu Hua’s literary imagination. In the early 1990s he took a major turn from short fiction to the novel and adopted a more traditional narrative style that seemed to betray the brutal and uncompromisingly experimental nature of his early work. To date, his career can be divided into three creative periods, each one marked by very different aesthetic concerns and literary forms: the short story, the novel and the essay.
Published in 1992, To Live (Huozhe) was Yu Hua’s second novel, following the previous year’s Screaming in the Drizzle ( Zai xiyu zhong huhan)13, the first-person story of Sun Guanglin, a child growing up in a cold, desolate world of neglect and loneliness.14 To Live stood out from Yu Hua’s earlier work for its deceptively simple language as well as its sweeping historical vision, spanning over four decades of modern Chinese history, an era marred by war, internal strife, natural disasters and political turmoil. Beginning around the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), To Live traces the struggle of Fugui and his family to survive the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists (1945–49), the founding of the People’s Republic (1949), the land reform era (1949–52), the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and into the reform era (1978– ). Against this vast historical backdrop, Yu Hua’s sensitivity to the details of everyday life has left the deepest impression on his readers.
To Live, the first installment of a projected trilogy, proved to be one of Yu Hua’s most beloved works. It has been a bestseller in China for a decade and received several major international literary awards, including Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998. Even before its publication in book form, To Live— initially published in serial form in a literary journal—had attracted the attention of China’s premier film director, Zhang Yimou (b. 1951):
I had originally planned to make another one of Yu Hua’s works into a film—a short suspense thriller entitled “Mistake at River’s Edge.” In order for me to get a better understanding of his work, Yu Hua gave me a complete set of what he had published up to that time. To Live, which was originally serialized in the Shanghai literary journal Harvest, was his most rece
nt novel. I started reading it that very night and couldn’t put it down. I ended up staying awake until four o’clock in the morning and finished the book in one sitting. I met with Yu Hua the following day to discuss the script, but no matter where our conversation went we couldn’t seem to get away from To Live. Finally we just looked at each other, and I said, “Okay, let’s just do To Live!” It was really love at first sight.15
The script was adapted by the author in collaboration with Zhang Yimou and the screenwriter Lu Wei, and when it premiered in 1994, To Live (titled Lifetimes in some English-language markets) proved to be a major critical success. Among the numerous honors and awards it won were the Grand Jury prize and the Best Actor award (for Ge You’s portrayal of Fugui) at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. The international success of the film and the controversy that surrounded it in China—it was banned there—made the novel an instant bestseller and catapulted Yu Hua into celebrity in his homeland.
There are several key differences between the film and the novel. In the film the locale has been changed from China’s rural south to a small city in the north; the shadow puppetry has been added; and Fugui’s final companion, the ox, is absent, as is the second narrator, who mediates Fugui’s narration in the novel. The recurring parable about the Xu family’s transformation from a chicken to an ox illustrates some of the differences between the film and the novel. In the film, when the parable is told to Youqing, it is given a playful political dimension:
Fugui: Our family is like a little chicken. When it grows up it becomes a goose. And that’ll turn into a sheep. And the sheep will turn into an ox.
Youqing: And after the ox?
Fugui: After the ox is Communism! And there’ll be dumplings and meat every day.
Fugui says this with an honest smile and a hopeful off-camera gaze. His faith in Communism represents a political idealism that is all but absent in the novel. Later in the film the parable is told to Kugen (who is renamed Mantou, or “Little Bun”):
