I just got To Live
It only took me 15 years
I think I read most of Yu Hua’s To Live about 15 years ago. It frustrated me at the time, mainly because of the lead character’s propensity for bursting into tears. Everything that happens to him, he weeps. Now, to be fair, everything that happens to him is terrible. He loses his family fortune, he’s press-ganged into the civil war on the losing side, and then every single one of his family members dies. He has cause to weep. But Yu plays his weeping absolutely blank-faced. We’re given very little of the character’s inner life, so this constant weeping doesn’t feel well-justified. It just feels unmanly, and left me alienated from the character.
That lead character, Fugui, experiences the turmoil of 20th century Chinese history in full, so engagement with him would be a brilliant way to explore the various disasters of the civil war, communes, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. But as I was put off by him, I wasn’t feeling it.
Anyway, fast forward to 2024, and I picked up a copy of To Live in the bookshop for my younger son. Much as I didn’t like it, it is a major work of literature, plus it’s fairly short and easy to read. In that way it works a bit like The Old Man and the Sea - a book that’s easy to give to teenagers when you want them to take a step beyond Ninja Graverobbers, or whatever bizarre fantasy he’s reading. On the train, I picked it up to read that final section that I’d never gotten through before, and Bam! I suddenly got it.
To Live is an update of Lu Xun’s Ah Q. Ah Q was a coruscating satire from the early 20th century, when many Chinese writers were rather overawed by European (and Japanese) modernity, and were wondering if there was some defect in the Chinese national character that left the country hopelessly backward. Ah Q is the tale of a servile but self-important character, who revels in his moral victories - i.e. real-world defeats. It’s a tough read these days, as Lu is very clearly putting forward the argument that the Chinese people as they were then were no good.
To Live is not quite so relentlessly dismissive of the Chinese character, but it is still pretty bleak. The point, I suddenly realised, is to look at who is living at the end. And it’s Fugui, the unmanly waster hero. His dutiful wife has died; his lively son and loving daughter both gone; his chatterbox of a grandson, and the dedicated son-in-law who made up Fugui’s last living family. Fugui survives to represent them, not because of any heroic or positive quality of character, but just by chance, he makes it through the grinder of poverty. Where Lu Xun wants to tell us that the Chinese character is defective, Yu Hua suggests that the Chinese world contains all sorts, but no mechanism helps the good or punishes the evil.
The book is Dickensian in a couple of ways. First, the names! Fugui means rich and precious, which he is not. The grandson, who dies last, is named Kugen, or bitter root. Second, the panoramic vision of society, and concern for social issues. The war and its devastating effects are there, as are corruption, and the simple hardships of poverty. Third, Yu uses quite realistic characters to involve the reader (pace my own problem with engaging with his hero). But it seems decidedly unDickensian in its blank-faced refusal to think about solutions. No rich man steps out of the shadows to rescue our hero from poverty and degradation. There is no institutional critique of how the corruption came about - it is simply a fact of the world that Fugui inhabits.
So To Live still offers a grim picture of society. Once I’d drawn the connection with Ah Q, a quick google revealed that lots of people have written about this before. But it was a new thought to me, and I thought I’d write it out here. I may finally get round to reading some more Yu Hua!