To Live

NOTES

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 200 °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.