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.
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.