Anchor Books
August 2003
ISBN: 1400031869
Fugui, the prodigal son of a wealthy country Chinese landowner, spends his days and nights in town drinking and whoring. He has little respect for his father and less for his father-in-law, whom he frequently mocks with impunity. He neglects his daughter and is abusive toward his wife. With no redeemable qualities whatsoever, Fugui seems an unlikely main character for Yu Hua’s best-selling novel, To Live. It is only in losing everything, that Fugui undergoes a profound psycho-spiritual transformation, and thereon gradually gains our sympathy and our interest.
Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Hangzhou, the son of medical doctors destined to enter a career in dentistry. Constrained by that profession’s rigidity and unable to quell a need to create, Yu Hua started writing in 1983. Since that time he has published three novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. To Live, his second novel published in 1994, was adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. The movie was banned in China, making the novel a bestseller instantly and Hua an overnight celebrity. To Live will be released this month for the first time in English translation.
August 2003
ISBN: 1400031869
Fugui, the prodigal son of a wealthy country Chinese landowner, spends his days and nights in town drinking and whoring. He has little respect for his father and less for his father-in-law, whom he frequently mocks with impunity. He neglects his daughter and is abusive toward his wife. With no redeemable qualities whatsoever, Fugui seems an unlikely main character for Yu Hua’s best-selling novel, To Live. It is only in losing everything, that Fugui undergoes a profound psycho-spiritual transformation, and thereon gradually gains our sympathy and our interest.
Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Hangzhou, the son of medical doctors destined to enter a career in dentistry. Constrained by that profession’s rigidity and unable to quell a need to create, Yu Hua started writing in 1983. Since that time he has published three novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. To Live, his second novel published in 1994, was adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. The movie was banned in China, making the novel a bestseller instantly and Hua an overnight celebrity. To Live will be released this month for the first time in English translation.
To Live is an epic and heartbreaking journey spanning four decades of recent Chinese history. It begins in the 1930s around the time of China’s second war with Japan and continues into the late 1970s reform era. In between, Hua weaves great sorrow and struggle for Fugui and his family through the tempestuous Chinese Civil War, The Great Leap Forward, and The Cultural Revolution. Fugui, whose life is one characterized by loss, remains constant in his will to live and his simple gratitude for what little he has: “As long as our family could be together everyday, who really cared about good fortune?”
The history of the Xu family and of their terrible circumstances is too sad to repeat here, and anyway it would be a crime to hoard all the tears by telling it to you - Yu Hua does a better job at that than I ever could. With deceptively simple language, he weaves characters of great spirit and resilience who endure despite the appallingly bad hand fate continues to deal them.
