To Live: Why Fugui Keeps Living After Losing Everything

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 95

# To Live: Why Fugui Keeps Living After Losing Everything

A young collector of folk songs meets an old peasant in a field. As the old man ploughs, he calls Jiazhen, Youqing, Fengxia, Erxi, and Kugen as though a whole team were working. There are only the man and an ox also named Fugui. The other names belong to his dead wife, children, son-in-law, and grandson. When he sits to tell his life, the dead return to the field through sound.

Xu Fugui begins as a landlord’s spoiled son, gambling, visiting brothels, and humiliating his family. He loses the estate to Long Er and helps break his father’s heart. Poverty teaches him labour and, during land reform, saves him from the fate of the man who won his property. He is conscripted by Nationalist troops and survives civil war, then lives through collectivisation, backyard steel, famine, and the Cultural Revolution. His relatives do not die from an abstract Fate: they die within blood collection, childbirth, long deprivation, workplace danger, and a hungry child’s body overwhelmed by beans.

To Live is often reduced to optimism under any suffering. This makes particular damage into inspirational consumption. Yu Hua is colder and more humane. Life receives no reward for endurance, and history does not compensate its survivors. Fugui remains alive after family, future plan, and stable meaning fail because life can persist through habit, memory, relationship, and daily work.

From novella to novel

  • Author: Yu Hua, born in 1960, first prominent for avant-garde fiction and later increasingly attentive to ordinary experience and autonomous character voices.
  • First publication: issue 6 of Harvest in 1992, dated 12 September 1992 and under 60,000 Chinese characters, commonly treated as the novella version.
  • Expansion: roughly another 40,000–50,000 characters were added around the screenplay process; the 1993 book established the familiar longer novel.
  • Structure: an unnamed folk-song collector meets the aged Fugui; Fugui’s oral account fills the centre; field and ox frame it.
  • Adaptation: Zhang Yimou’s 1994 film changes deaths and ending. It is not a plot substitute.
  • English: translated by Michael Berry; Vintage published To Live in 2003.

The apparently simple sequence is carefully organised. Listener, oral voice, and return to the field alter the meaning of the catalogue of deaths.

Why a stranger listens

The frame narrator is young, travelling through the countryside for songs, initially curious rather than kin, judge, or historian.

Distance permits Fugui to control tone. He jokes, exaggerates, confesses shame, and recounts dreadful death calmly. We hear a survivor arranging memory, not an omniscient archive.

Telling becomes an act of living. With no relatives left to address, Fugui gives private memory temporary social space through a stranger.

Why the ox is Fugui

The old man buys an ox marked for slaughter and gives it his name. He calls the names of dead relatives as though many animals shared the load.

The calls encourage the ox and bring the family into daily labour. Names are not restricted to graves.

Man and animal are old, working, and considered economically obsolete. Their likeness does not degrade the human; it refuses to let productivity determine whether life deserves continuation.

Why young Fugui resists sympathy

Born to a landlord household, he gambles, visits prostitutes, parades on his father-in-law’s back, and disregards the pregnant Jiazhen. Inherited wealth appears bottomless.

Yu Hua does not create an innocent and then torture him. Fugui causes ruin; his father’s collapse and wife’s humiliation are bound to his conduct.

Later sympathy is therefore complex. Responsibility for early harm and genuine transformation can coexist. Opposing suffering does not require a flawless sufferer.

Long Er’s gambling table

Long Er understands the game and steadily leads Fugui into larger stakes until house and land are lost.

Fugui’s father has the debt converted into copper coins for his son to carry. The weight makes bodily what signatures had made abstract.

This is not innocent dispossession, but the residents on the land have little say when property passes from one landlord to another. Gambling reveals a larger arbitrariness of ownership.

A father’s death and the cost beyond money

After the estate disappears, Fugui’s father rapidly loses bodily and social hold and dies. For the first time, conduct produces an irreversible consequence.

The father also inherited and used landlord power; he is not pure innocence. Wealth, masculine honour, and filial humiliation make financial loss bodily.

Fugui descends from young master to tenant labourer, beginning a moral education as well as a class fall.

Why Jiazhen returns

Her father removes the pregnant Jiazhen from Fugui. After giving birth to Youqing, she returns with the children to the impoverished husband.

This may express love and fidelity, while traditional marriage narrows female choice. Return means farm work, housework, child care, and hunger rather than restoration of comfort.

She is more than a patient-wife medal. She reproaches, decides, protects, and becomes the household’s ethical centre.

How poverty changes Fugui

As a tenant, Fugui learns the direct relation between grain, strength, and family need. There is no surplus for his former consumption.

Change comes from regret and compulsion. Poverty is no romantic moral academy; it will magnify every later death.

Labour nevertheless teaches him to see relatives as lives rather than attendants to a young master. This is his central transformation.

Seeking a doctor and being conscripted

Fugui goes to town for medicine for his sick mother and is seized by Nationalist soldiers. He chooses neither side nor duration.

A body engaged in care is reclassified as military manpower. The household loses labour; his mother dies before his return.

History enters not as a political speech but as a man trying to buy medicine disappearing for years.

Old Quan and Chunsheng

Fugui survives with Old Quan and young Chunsheng amid hunger, cold, wounds, and corpses. They wait without knowing whose strategy controls them.

Old Quan dies. Captured by Communist forces, Fugui and Chunsheng receive a route home. Fugui preserves a certificate of his service that later protects him from hostile classification.

A paper can carry more survival value under political change than personal testimony. Will and vast chance both bring him home.

Long Er’s execution

During land reform, Long Er is executed as the landlord. Fugui, having lost property and become poor, escapes the category.

His most shameful failure unexpectedly becomes protection. Had he retained the estate, he thinks, he might be dead.

This is not a morality tale punishing a gambling cheat. The state reclassifies life through class identity; survival does not prove Fugui more righteous.

Fengxia’s loss of speech and hearing

Illness leaves Fengxia deaf and unable to speak. She works, understands, and expresses affection, while marriage and social opportunity contract.

To afford Youqing’s schooling, her parents briefly give her to a household seeking a future daughter-in-law. Unable to bear the separation, they retrieve her.

Poverty makes two children’s basic chances compete. Love exists without enough resources to avoid selection.

Youqing and his shoes

Youqing loves running and protects shoes to reduce household expense, travelling barefoot and putting them on near school. A pair of shoes gathers reproach and care.

His speed makes sudden death harder. He is not a generic child victim but stubborn, affectionate, and intensely alive.

The novel accumulates ordinary personhood before an institution takes it.

Commune and backyard steel

Pots, grain, and production move into collective control. Steel campaigns consume utensils and labour. Communal dining briefly performs abundance before famine.

The family cannot decide policy, only adjust food and work to changing slogans. History is whether a cooking pot remains and how much rice exists tomorrow.

Household scale preserves material consequence without turning characters into ideological spokespeople.

Famine is not another stroke of fate

Hunger swells bodies, aggravates illness, and forces division of every mouthful. It weakens Jiazhen and the family’s resistance to later shocks.

Calling Fugui unlucky naturalises famine. Food scarcity is connected to collective institutions, exaggerated output, and resource policy.

His survival does not reduce harm or prove that the dead lacked will.

Youqing is drained of blood

The county magistrate’s wife haemorrhages in childbirth. Schoolchildren are tested, Youqing matches, and hospital personnel continue drawing blood to save an important patient until the boy dies.

This is more than ordinary malpractice. The poor child’s body becomes an unlimited supply. Urgency concentrates around the powerful life and abandons the donor’s limit.

Youqing dies beside someone else’s delivery. Later Fengxia dies in her own. Different failures of care take both children at the hospital.

Why the magistrate is Chunsheng

Fugui discovers that the magistrate is his wartime companion. Chunsheng did not perform the procedure and initially does not know its human cost.

Private comradeship collides with public hierarchy. His wife receives rescue regardless of cost; Fugui’s son becomes the cost.

“I did not intend it” cannot dissolve the parents’ anger. Privilege produces lethal effects without a beneficiary issuing an order.

Jiazhen tells Chunsheng to live

Chunsheng carries guilt. During the Cultural Revolution he is persecuted and says that he no longer wants life.

Jiazhen, whose son is dead, tells him that he owes the Xu family a life and must preserve it. She does not declare forgiveness or absolve the system. She converts debt into survival duty.

The victim does not demand symmetrical death. The debtor must bear the weight of remaining alive.

Fengxia and Erxi’s marriage

Wan Erxi’s head tilts to one side; he is honest, capable, and genuinely respects Fengxia.

They build a warm household through work, gifts, and practical forms of understanding. Disability does not make their marriage charity.

Happiness matters. Without it, characters become torture devices; their brief fulfilment establishes a real life that can be lost.

Fengxia’s death in childbirth

She gives birth to Kugen and then dies from haemorrhage. The novel’s hospital cannot save her. The film’s famous details about a persecuted doctor eating buns should not be imported as original plot.

Her death comes from obstetric risk and inadequate care amid a political order that has damaged professional capacity.

Birth does not compensate for a woman’s death or complete a supposed female mission.

Erxi after bereavement

Erxi carries Kugen, keeps working, and maintains family with Fugui and Jiazhen. Love for Fengxia becomes child care.

Male grief appears as taking a child to work and returning home rather than declaration. Fugui is not the only person who endures.

Each survivor temporarily assumes the dead person’s responsibilities.

Jiazhen’s quieter end

Long labour, malnutrition, and illness wear Jiazhen down. She dies after both children, knowing Fugui is no longer his youthful self.

Her slower death permits some farewell. Fugui loses the only full witness to his route from degradation to care.

Praise of endurance should not conceal the enormous unpaid care that she should never have borne alone.

Erxi’s workplace death

Concrete slabs crush Erxi at a construction site. Development needs his body without supplying safety, and Kugen is orphaned.

The event lacks the visibility of a political campaign and retains institutional meaning. Workplace safety decides whose body pays for construction.

Fugui takes the child. Grandfather and grandson become the last small household.

Why beans kill Kugen

Kugen is young and already works within chronic scarcity. When he is weak, Fugui cooks beans as a nourishing treat.

The hungry child eats too many; his body cannot bear them, and he dies. Ordinary food becomes fatal only because it has been ordinarily scarce.

Fugui acts in love and contributes through exhaustion, poverty, and limited knowledge to an irreversible result. It is the most private guilt of the book.

Does the death count manipulate us?

The density can feel engineered. Yu Hua compresses a family into an extreme survival chain so that distinct forms of twentieth-century violence converge on one teller.

The design sacrifices statistical ordinariness and gains a memory structure: every name opens a historical risk.

The question is not whether the author designed emotion but whether deaths retain distinct social causes instead of becoming convenient Fate.

Does living praise obedience?

Fugui does not organise resistance or propose historical theory. He absorbs events and returns to the field. That can be appropriated as praise of submission.

The novel does not say oppression is just or allow patience to win success. Living is a minimum biological and relational fact, not political consent.

Respecting survival and asking why all adaptive duty falls on ordinary people are compatible.

Was losing the estate a blessing?

The loss saves Fugui during land reform; conscription supplies a later certificate; poverty deepens family attachment. Disaster has unexpected consequences.

This does not mean suffering was beneficial. Nobody knows the path without gambling, and his father’s death, Jiazhen’s labour, and the children’s deprivation are not cancelled by survival.

Accidental protection reveals arbitrary classification, not a curriculum designed by Fate.

Long Er and Fugui under changing property

Long Er’s property victory makes him successful in one order and condemned in the next. Fugui’s failure makes him poor and therefore politically safer.

Property has no stable moral meaning; a new regime rewrites honour as evidence. Individuals cannot predict the next category.

The reversal is black comedy and a warning against treating survivor outcome as wise choice.

The irony in every name

Fugui suggests wealth, Jiazhen a family treasure, Youqing celebration, Fengxia luminous phoenix glow, Erxi doubled joy, and Kugen bitter root.

Names are wishes that reality contradicts. The irony does not mock naive namers; it preserves evidence that ordinary people still expected a future.

At the end, the old man gives every name to the ox. The wishes failed, but relation survives in language.

Why Fugui does not speak in constant grief

He jokes, confesses disgrace, uses vernacular exaggeration, and remembers small domestic actions. Long mourning does not make every recollection equally loud.

Calmness is not shallow feeling. The survivor has made catastrophe narratable. Continuous wailing would reduce relatives to tragic functions.

Humour restores temper and movement and makes death arrive more abruptly.

History through body and household

Civil war, land reform, communes, the Great Leap famine, and the Cultural Revolution all enter without complete policy exposition or leader-centred narration.

Fugui remembers seizure, cooking pots, dining halls, blood, denunciation, and a friend wanting death. History is perceived through body, food, document, and care.

This is no replacement for macrohistory. It asks macrohistory to explain whose meal, illness, and death a policy changed.

Do not aestheticise suffering

Simple language and rapid pace can turn “so tragic” into emotional consumption.

Pause at each death and name mechanisms: gambling and property, conscription, class execution, famine, overdrawn blood, obstetric care, workplace safety, child nutrition.

Specificity does not reduce universality. It prevents Fate from hiding responsibility.

Fugui’s boundary of responsibility

He is responsible for gambling, early humiliation, and selfishness. Kugen’s death also leaves an unavoidable question of care.

He is not institutionally responsible for conscription, Youqing’s blood loss, Fengxia’s failed care, or Erxi’s workplace death. Calling every loss repayment for gambling moralises unrelated deaths.

Mature reading makes him neither saint nor vehicle of deserved atonement.

The labour of Jiazhen

Because Fugui speaks, readers follow his growth. The household’s continuing foundation is often Jiazhen: pregnancy, farming, children, mother-in-law, hunger, and illness.

She does not leave for war but absorbs every change in policy and income. For much of the story, “Fugui survives” means she keeps the family alive.

Placing care at the centre makes this more than one man’s contest with fate.

The novel is not the film

The film uses shadow puppetry, changes Youqing’s death, preserves a different family configuration, and closes more hopefully. The novel has no shadow-puppet spine, extends the death sequence, and leaves Fugui with the ox.

The starving doctor and steamed buns during Fengxia’s delivery are part of the film’s treatment, not a detail to cite as the novel’s plot.

Adaptation may be excellent. Interpretation must identify which work it remembers.

A practical three-layer map

For each death, note immediate cause: excessive blood withdrawal, haemorrhage, crushing, too many beans. Add household conditions: food, care, money, and relationships.

Add historical institutions: army, hierarchy, medical order, famine, workplace protection. Three layers preserve the person and the period.

Then draw who cares for whom. After each death, observe care passing to whoever remains.

Why it remains necessary

Survivor stories are still made into instruction: if he endured, you should. This erases support, chance, and historical difference.

To Live teaches humility. A standing person is not uninjured; a fallen person is not weak.

Respect for life means more than praising resilience. It means reducing the conditions that demand extreme resilience.

Conclusion: the dead enter today’s field

Fugui remains with the ox not because he deserves life more or was selected as hope. Bodily difference, chance, habit, and acceptance contribute; no reason explains every death.

His life is not blank. He tells a stranger, calls family names, and rearranges the past through ploughing. The dead cannot return, yet affect how he treats an aged animal, understands his wrongdoing, and spends the afternoon.

The novel awards no medal for suffering. It leaves a simpler and harder fact: after meaning disappears, labour, memory, narration, and company can still maintain today. Fugui has not defeated fate. He has declined to let fate own the final sentence.

Further reading and sources

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