To Live

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 recent 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”):

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.