Yu Hua's To Live

Born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China, Yu Hua trained initially to be a dentist. After five years in dentistry, he tells Michael Standaert, a graduate student at the University of Iowa that “I didn’t like the job because I was looking into people’s mouths the whole day. The mouth offers the worst scenic view in the world. I was still young and I wanted to see other more interesting things” (Standaert 2004). Hua emphasized, in addition, that he saw writers walking around the cultural center observing life and people. The pay was the same regardless and writers could set their own hours, so Hua decided that was the life for him.

Hua’s novel, To Live, follows the protagonist Fugui over the course of four decades, through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and through the upheavals, grief, and joy of family life. Fugui symbolizes not only tradition, but also shift to modernity which takes place over the course of the novel. Fugui initially gambles away his family’s fortune and they lose their home. Fugui is taken into service and cannot return for several years, reuniting with his estranged wife at that point. The couple has a daughter, deaf and mute, and a son.

I enjoyed the novel a great deal. Despite all their struggles, both politically and personally, Fugui manages to keep a positive attitude toward life. Grief befalls our protagonist in the novel as he loses his entire family by the end and is left to wander with only an oxen as companion. He compares himself to the oxen.

At the end of the novel, I discovered that Hua was actually inspired to write this story from an American slave song. The experiences Hua discusses and refers to are undoubtedly uniquely Chinese, however, the universal experience of human life are remarkably similar. Hua states that “human experience, combined with the power of imagination, can break down all barriers, enabling a person truly to understand that thing called fate at work in his life” (250).

In the interview, Hua discusses some of his writing technique. Hua emphasizes to Standaert that if he listens to his character’s voices, he can feel what they feel and the characters he creates tell him what to write. Most writers employ this universal technique. So it comes as no surprise to me to hear Hua talk about his style in this manner. The voices in his head are, in fact, real.

Standaert, Michael. Interview with Yu Hua. MCLC Resource Center. 2004. Web.
http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/yuhua.htm

Hua, Yu.
To Live. New York: Random House: 250 (2003). Print.