by Yu Hua
Mantou: When will the chickens grow up?
Fugui: Very soon.
Mantou: And then?
Fugui: And then the chickens will turn into geese. And the geese will turn into sheep. And the sheep will turn into oxen.
Mantou: And after the oxen?
Jiazhen: After oxen, Little Bun will grow up!
Mantou: I want to ride on an ox’s back!
Jiazhen: Little Bun will ride on an ox’s back.
Fugui: Little Bun won’t ride on an ox, He’ll ride trains and planes. And life will get better all the time.
Where Fugui had earlier named Communism as the ultimate evolutionary and revolutionary destination, here he is at a loss for words. It is left to Jiazhen to interject, “Little Bun will grow up!” and, by avoiding reference to Communism, suggest the failure of Maoist ideals. Fugui pushes this suggestion further by pointing to the promise of China’s new capitalist future of trains and planes.
After tracing much of twentieth-century China’s tumultuous history, the film ends with Fugui, Erxi and Kugen gathered around Jiazhen in bed, an image that suggests the possibility of a post-Communist utopia. The novel, by contrast, closes with Fugui prodding his ox, showing Yu Hua’s version to be darker and more existential, with survival an end in itself. Compared to the novel, Zhang Yimou’s film also allows more room for the hand of fate to hold sway; here Youqing’s death is attributed purely to accident, while in the novel it occurs after his blood is literally sucked dry to save the life of an important cadre. Yu Hua’s reality is much more brutal, as is his social critique. In 1918 Lu Xun raised his plea to “save the children”; Yu Hua’s belated response was to give us blood.
Yu Hua followed To Live with his brilliant 1995 novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, which in some sense revisits Youqing’s death by tracing the life of Xu Sanguan, who literally sells his blood to survive. Although there are striking stylistic similarities between To Live and Chronicle, according to Yu Hua his two protagonists have very different life philosophies:
After going through much pain and hardship, Fugui is inextricably tied to the experience of suffering. So there is really no place for ideas like “resistance” in Fugui’s mind—he lives simply to live. In this world I have never met anyone who has as much respect for life as Fugui. Although he has more reason to die than most people, he keeps on living. Xu Sanguan is another close friend of mine. He is the kind of person who is always struggling against fate—but in the end he always loses. However, Xu Sanguan doesn’t recognize defeat, and this is his most outstanding characterist.16
Beyond the violence and blood that seem to haunt Fugui, Xu Sanguan and so many other inhabitants of Yu Hua’s fictional universe, there lies a sensitivity and humanity that speaks to us all.
After Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Yu Hua entered his third creative phase, which he has devoted largely to the essay. Lu Xun had also turned to the essay during the latter phase of his writing career, but unlike Lu Xun’s essays, which exposed the social and political ills of his day, Yu Hua’s have been mainly biographical portraits, childhood reminiscences, theoretical discussions on writing and homages to his literary heroes, including Yasunari Kawabata, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner and, of course, Lu Xun. In 1994 Yu Hua began cultivating an interest in Western classical music, and in 2000 several of his essays on music were collected in Climax (Gaochao). Yu Hua’s output during this period also includes a short collection of stories, The Boy at Sunset (Huanghun li de nanhai), and a screenplay (cowritten with Ning Dai and Zhu Wen) for director Zhang Yuan’s 1999 award-winning film Seventeen Years (Guonian huijia). One can only hope that in the new millennium Yu Hua will continue adding shades to his already colorful literary palette.
Having grown up near hospitals and operating rooms during modern China’s most vicious and chaotic period, Yu Hua has created a fictional reflection of this reality, a world imbued with violence, death and unspeakable cruelty. At the same time, his world is touched by moments of poetic brilliance, a passion for life and sublime beauty—a world where moonlight on a dirt path creates “the illusion that a layer of salt had been sprinkled along it.” Writing is Yu Hua’s reality, and now readers of English will finally be able to enter that reality, in all its beauty and brutality.
1 Chinese unit of area equivalent to acre or 0.0667 hectares.
2 Chinese unit of length equivalent to ½ Kilometer or mile.
3 Fengshui, also known as geomancy, is the Chinese art of determining the geographic location of a house, tomb, office, etc., that will have the greatest positive influence on the fortune of the individual, family or company that uses it.
4 Osteomalacia, or ruan gu bing in Chinese. A disease characterized by the softening of the bones. The adult equivalent of rickets.
5 A unit indicating the quantity and quality of labor performed and the amount of payment earned in rural communes.
6 A Chinese unit of weight equivalent to ½ Kilogram or 1⅓ pounds.
7 Big character posters, or da zi bao, are large posters featuring handwritten slogans, announcements or protests, and are one of the key forms of political expression, and often political dissent, in modern China. They played an important role during the Cultural Revolution and the Democracy Wall Movement (1978–79).
8 Yu Hua, “A Work of Hypocrisy” (Xuwei de zuopin) p. 277 in The Collected Works of Yu Hua Volume II ( Yu Hua zuopin ji 2) Zhongguo shehui Kexue chubanshe, Beijing 1994.
9 Lu Xun (1881–1936) became an influential intellectual and translator and the author of poetry, fiction and essays. He is best known for his two volumes of short stories, A Call to Arms (Na han) and Wandering (Panghuang), which were revolutionary for their modem vernacular form and radical critique of Chinese culture and society.
10 Yu Hua, “Autobiography” (“Zizhuan”) pp. 385–386 in Collected Works of Yu Hua Volume III ( Yu Hua zuopin ji 3) Zhongguo shehui Kexue chubanshe, Beijing 1994.
11 Mo Yan, “The Awakened Dream Teller: Random Thoughts on Yu Hua and His Fiction” (“Qingxing de shuomeng zhe: Guanyu Yu Hua ji qi xiaoshuo de zagan”) p. 1 in Yu Hua 2000 Collection: Contemporary China Literature Reader (Yu Hua 2000 nian wenku: dangdai zhongguo wenku jingdu) Ming Pao, Hong Kong 1999.
12 Yu Hua’s stories of this period have been widely anthologized and are also available in Jing Wang (editor), China’s Avant-garde Fiction: An Anthology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998) and David Der-wei Wang (editor), Running Wild: New Chinese Writers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
13 Screaming in the Drizzle was published in Taiwan under the alternate title Screams and Drizzle ( Huhuan yu xiyu).
14 Both novels were published in book form in 1993. The current translation of To Live is based on the revised edition that appeared in Yu Hua’s 1994 Collected Works of Yu Hua Volume III.
15 Zeng Jingchao (interview), “Explaining To Live: Zhang Yimou on To Live” (Gei huozhe yige shuofa: Zhang Yimou tan Huozhe), p. 2 in Lifetimes: The Film Novel ( Huozhe: Dianying xiaoshuo) by Sun Hua, Hanguang Publishing, Taipei 1994.
16 “To Live Is the Sole Requirement of Life: In Dialogue with Book Review Weekly Reporter Wang Wei,” p. 219 in Can I Believe in Myself? Selection of Random Essays (Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji: Yu Hua suibi xuan) by Yu, Renmin Ribao Chuban She, Beijing 1998.
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are a number of individuals who have contributed their time and hard work to help make this project a reality. Thanks to my family and friends for all of their support over the years, to Yu Hua for allowing me to translate his novel and to Xudong Zhang, not only for his early encouragement, but also for initially putting me in touch with the author. Howard Goldblatt, Peter Li and Joshua Tanzer all read various versions of the manuscript and offered thoughtful comments and suggestions. I was grateful to work with John Siciliano and Katherine Bidwell during the final stages of editing. It was their literary sensitivity and editorial sensibilities that helped shape the final text. Tha
nks also go to Ha Jin, Perry Link, Tomi Suzuki, LuAnn Walther, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University and especially David Der-wei Wang for his many years of unfailing support. I would like to dedicate this translation to the memory of Cao Jun, a great friend who taught me what it means to live.
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT
In the introduction to the 1993 Chinese edition of To Live I wrote, “I once heard an American folk song entitled ‘Old Black Joe.’ The song was about an elderly black slave who experienced a life’s worth of hardships, including the passing of his entire family—yet he still looked upon the world with eyes of kindness, offering not the slightest complaint. After being so deeply moved by this song I decided to write my next novel—that novel was To Live.”
For an author, the act of writing always begins with a smile, a gesture, a memory on the verge of being forgotten, a casual conversation or a bit of information hidden in the newspaper—it is these tiny pearl-like details that sometimes transform one’s fate and spread like waves into magnificent vistas and scenes. The writing of To Live was no exception. An American slave song with only the simplest lyrics grew into Fugui’s life—a life imbued with upheavals and suffering, but also tranquility and happiness.
Old Joe and Fugui are two men who could not be more different. They live in different countries and different eras; they are of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds; even their fundamental likes and dislikes are different, as is the color of their skin—yet sometimes they seem to be the same person. They are both so very human. Human experience, combined with the power of the imagination and understanding, can break down all barriers, enabling a person truly to understand that thing called fate at work in his life—not unlike the experience of simultaneously seeing one’s reflection in two different mirrors. Perhaps this is what makes literature magical; it is precisely this magic that enabled me—a reader on the other side of the world in China—to read the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and through them, to discover myself.
I would like to thank Ha Jin for recommending To Live for publication, my friend Michael Berry for translating it, my agent Joanne Wang for her diligence in placing it and my editors at Anchor Books for publishing, at long last, this English language edition.
Yu Hua
TO LIVE
Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China. He finished high school during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist for five years before beginning to write in 1983. He has published three novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. In 2002 Yu Hua became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award. To Live was awarded Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998 and was named one of the last decade’s ten most influential books in China. Yu Hua lives in Beijing.
Michael Berry is an assistant professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of a forthcoming collection of interviews with Chinese filmmakers and the translator of Ye Zhaoyan’s Nanjing 1937: A Love Story and Chang Ta-chun’s Wild kids: Two Novels About Growing Up.
ALSO BY YU HUA
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
The Past and the Punishments
AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2003
Copyright © 1993 by Yu Hua
Translation and afterword copyright © 2003 by Michael Berry
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yu, Hua, 1960–
[Huo zhe. English]
To live: a novel / Yu Hua ; translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry.
p. cm.
I. Berry, Michael. II. Title.
PL2928.H78H8613 2003
895.1’352— dc21
2003043688
www.anchorbooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42979-7
v3.0
