As he finished, the old man stood up, patted the dust off his bottom and called out to the old ox beside the pond. The ox came right over, walking up beside him and lowering his head. The old man put the plow harness over the ox’s shoulders and grabbed the halter, slowly leading him away.
The two Fuguis swayed slightly as they walked o f, leaving a trail of footprints in the mud. I heard the old man say to the ox, “Today both Youqing and Erxi planted a whole mu, and Jiazhen and Fengxia each planted almost 80 percent of a mu, and even little Kugen planted half a mu all by himself. How much you planted, I won’t even say — if I did you’d think I was trying to embarrass you. But then again you’re not a young fellow anymore. Planting this bit of land must have taken everything you had.”
The old man and his ox gradually got farther away, but from far off I could still hear the echo of the old man’s hoarse and moving voice. It floated through the open night like the wind. The old man sang:
In my younger days I wandered amuck,
At middle age I wanted to stash everything in a trunk,
And now that I’m old I’ve become a monk.
Chimney smoke swirled upward, dancing in the sky above the roof of a small farmhouse as the last rays of evening sunlight broke up and disappeared.
The sound of mothers calling their children home began to subside as a man carrying a load of manure walked past me. The bamboo pole he used to support the load squeaked as he went by. Gradually, the fields surrendered to silence. All around there appeared a kind of haze as the glow of dusk slowly dissolved.
As the black night descended from the heavens, I knew that in the blink of an eye I would witness the death of the sunset. I saw the exposed and firm chest of the vast earth; its pose was one of calling, of beckoning. And just as a mother beckons her children, so the earth beckoned the coming of night.
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