Life sometimes resembles an infinite storm without any rainbow and sunshine in the end. Every new day it tests people’s will by various ordeals and trials. Ill luck, for example, can change the whole life upside down. All the challenges and struggles, however, fall to people’s lot for a reason. Only overcoming different hardships, it is possible to understand the true taste of life. In fact thanks to hard times, we become stronger and more confident personalities who are able to enjoy every moment of life to the full. Thus, people should learn to use various problems along the road not as stop signs but as guidelines.
Every person should not perceive life as a problem to be solved but as an offer to be properly used. No matter how sharp the pain may be, try to keep going even through real hell. If you are capable of loving bad, troublesome days the same way you are enjoying the happy ones, you could live in piece with nature and make the best seller of your life story. At last, life is not about waiting for the perfect moment or for storm to pass, but about trying to find some colour in this black and white world and learning to dance in the rain.
Good example of such tragic life story that looks like one big trial is definitely the novel To Live written by Yu Hua. The main character here is experiencing the life where one loss is immediately followed by another, without any bright and happy pauses at all.
The novel To Live depicts miserable existence, where moments of idyllic happiness do not last long and just serve to prelude another much painful loss (Hong 23). The readers have an opportunity to share the thorny path together with the main character and experience life of incalculable sufferings and asperities of a single person who had nobody to find comfort in.
Being a light-minded young man, Fugui did not at first appreciate what he had and used to spend his evil life in different gambling dens and brothels (Yu 91). Due to his unaccountable behaviour and perpetual gambling, the family’s huge fortune was finally wasted leaving him a beggar. Deeply repentant, Fugui had now to adjust to severe chaotic peasant life. He settled down to try his hand at farming and began another completely different page of his life.
The restless existence of Fugui was also influenced by historical events in his country. Living in the midst of China’s Civil War, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the character had to experience all the changes that were taking place and even become a soldier against his will. Focusing on the path of life of one particular person and describing all his misfortunes and troubles, the author was attempting to demonstrate the fate of the whole Chinese population in those turbulent times.
The novel not only succeeded in evoking readers’ sympathy and lasting emotions but at the same time managed to convey quite realistic atmosphere of those difficult years of changes in the past century. Together with the main character readers had a chance to test their own fortitude, courage and the ability to act in the face of versatile adversities.
There is not an obvious explanation of the countless hardships and sufferings that were reserved for Fugui. However, his featherbrained actions can definitely be seen as the main reason of fate’s karmic retribution. Having made several serious mistakes in the past, the character entangled himself to the everlasting experience of anguish. The following decades Fugui was facing various challenges that kept on arriving on his doorstep without even a small break.
As the pages turned and history passed off, the young man was mournfully loosing all his past and future members of the family. First of all, Fugui’s father died with sorrow and dudgeon after his son gambled away the earned family fortune. That was the time of the Chinese Civil War, so the main character was obliged to join the army. During the Great Leap forward all his family’s wealth and lands were entirely lost and the period of omnipresent deaths and illnesses in Fugui’s kin was about to start. Two years later the man returned home and had to put up with his mother’s death of a stroke and his daughter’s muteness. Fengxia had also lost most of her hearing as a result of aftereffect of her childhood illness.
Though those hardships seemed enough for the reader to teach Fugui a good lesson, Yu Hua was not going to present his character a happy end. The author’s main purpose was to examine the human emotions in the situation when the person was brought to bay, that is why the mission was still far away from being successfully completed. As the story was progressing, Fugui’s vigorous and full of initiative son, Youqing, passed away while donating blood. The father did not finish bemoaning the bereavement of his only son when his daughter, Fengxia, died giving birth to her child that was definitely the result of poor availability of medical expertise.
Fengxia’s husband, Erxi who was a local member of the Red Guards had to look after their son alone, but soon he was also destined to death in a fatal construction accident upon quite disputing and vague circumstances. Even Fiugui’s caring wife, Jiazhen, who tended to be his biggest support in life as well as his last relative, his grandson Kugen, who choked eating beans, left him alone as a prey to the implacable destiny (Yu 101).
Of course the novel may look exceedingly ferocious concerning poor Fugui’s fate, but at the same time due to that incredible pain as well as agony beyond words, the character obtained unbelievable thirst for life, learnt to respect it and just lived simply to live. Even if white strips did not seem to appear on the Fugui’s thorn path at all, he was not going to give up anyway. The man walked up to the trough and never stopped to search his fortunate star. Although the whole universe was against his happiness, Fugui still hoped that things would substantially change one day.
He did not waste time bemoaning his poverty and world injustice towards his personality, but on the contrary considered that by his unbecoming conduct and misdealing he deserved to be punished in such way. The character was hundred percents sure that God assigned him only those ordeals he could really bear, so Fugui wanted to justify God’s hope and was disposed to stand the test till the very end.
The thing is that the book did not only aim to depict various problems that could hunt people in cruel world but also to glorify the bold spirits who were strong enough to outlive all the difficulties and keep on their journey of life. Fugui was experiencing extremely barbarous conditions and low quality of life as a representative of poor peasantry.
The novel suggested that the whole community was very close to the fatal starvation. Most people in such hostile environment lost their humanity and began to live using bestial instincts. Fugui, however, did not only manage to stick to his human nature, but furthermore demonstrated faithfulness to his moral principles and tried to place kindness and compassion towards others higher than all needs and desires. Even the character’s careful treatment of his only remaining companion, an old ox, showed that he did not loose love to nature and was trying to give this animal all the warmth and affection that filled up his crippled and broken heart.
This literary work is exceedingly enchanting and instructive for many readers. It is not only the depiction of life story of one human being whose extreme will-power and adamantine desire to live should be set up as an example for others. Moreover, this novel can be considered as an exploration of the philosophy of life with all its experiences and struggles along the way. The fate deprived Fugui of all members of his loving family, but he was not going to give way to grief and struggled to earn his bread through exhausting toil even in his old age.
The novel draws an analogy between personal life of the main character and politics. Yu Hua was not only against illegal conduct of the Communists but at the same time was striving to criticize the recklessness of the traditional Chinese culture. Communist China in this literary work is compared to the initial behaviour of Fugui. The author deliberately used protagonist’s story to clearly demonstrate the evident connection with illegal politics of Chinese authority. At the beginning of the story, Fugui did nothing apart from running around and wasting family’s income. The character’s narcissistic perspective on life, mistreatment of his pregnant wife, high disrespect and abandonment of his family together with immoderate gambling and sleeping around had later reflected on the fate of each member of Fugui’s family and on Fugui’s own miserable existence in particular.
Yu Hua depicted young Fugui as a “rotten piece of wood that could not be carved” (Liu 84). The rotten wood, however, was not only damaging itself but was at the same time influencing everything around it. While rooting further, it was little by little aggravating and unfavourably affecting all others in the proximity. Fugui used to enjoy the life in full and did not miss the chance to meet his own wishes and needs. The character did not even pay attention to other’s necessities and rudely mistreated those around him. Without any care for the results of his rush actions and unavoidable consequences that were to follow in the end, Fugui was simply abusing all that he could.
Chinese politics of that time completely resembled light-mindedness and lack of responsibility of the protagonist. The author believed that Chinese Communist Party was openly exploiting peasantry during the Great Leap Forward. The party expected peasants to be able to easily sustain and bear unsteady grain-taxation the same way Fugui believed he could maintain his dissolute lifestyle with the help of infinite family fortune.
Communists did not consider peasants deserved to have equal rights with all members of the society. Their role was just to serve as a self-sacrificing, almighty manpower that was easily controlled and could supply the rest of Chinese commanding population with adequate sustenance as well as means of existence.
The novel severely criticized Mao’s regime that was especially guilty of the failure of Chinese Cultural Revolution. The authority did not spend time to carefully think over each possible option and just irresponsibly put the burden on the shoulders of ignorant and inexperienced youth.
Its main purpose was to create a truly communist nation and nothing could stop Mao from the rapid and widespread realization of his cherished dream. There were even some implications that Fugui’s loss of his whole family was not only seen as the punishment for his initial behaviour.
The exploitation of Fengxia’s muteness as well as predictable worsening of Jiazhen’s illness from overwork could also be seen as fault of Mao’s regime ( Hong 113).
Turning the pages of Yu Hua’s book is like reliving different years of Chinese history. The society was modifying and these changes could not influence the plot of the novel somehow. In fact, to understand the atmosphere of those times, everybody has to perceive the lives of the characters in relation to all socio-cultural and political conditions of the time and only then they will be able to justly appraise the human reactions to the situations (Liu 56). Moreover, due to the fact that the novel is presented in the form of a recollection of memories, the avid reader has a possibility to realize how perspectives altered with time and experience in life.
One more question that should be discussed here is concerned with the fundamental message of the novel. Taking into consideration all the sufferings of the protagonist and his indefatigable longing for life, one will surely think about the reason of living in this world. The story depicted a life path of incredible ordeals but in fact everybody can experience it too. The author did not give a direct answer to this interesting question but made every reader come to a conclusion through the experiences and outcomes of the characters of the novel (Yu 47).
After incessant struggles against different misfortunes, Fugui did not longer make impracticable plans or look for the opportunity to correct past mistakes. The man learnt to swim with the stream and lived for the very sake of living and nothing else. Even if the person wakes up with the idea that new day will not bring any joy at all, there is a need to get up anyway. Fugui had more reasons to die and almost any reason to continue his miserable existence, but still he chose to keep on living. Finally, the person who expects less from life will definitely get more in any case.
On the one hand, the character lost all his family members and in the end remained alone in the whole universe. On the other hand, various adversities completely transformed the young man from frivolous reveler into dedicated husband and a devoted father. At first, Fugui had everything but was not able to appreciate it. The moment he lost the dearest, the character learnt to respect his life and jubilate in every little thing.
So, the novel To Live by Yu Hua is definitely one of the finest works of modern Chinese literature. It managed to portray the life path full of various disasters and troubles but at the same time provided a lot of evidences that no matter what really happened, the life should go on anyway. Simple peasant, Fugui was able to survive after all inconceivable adversities, so it would be possible for everyone.
Works Cited
Hong Zhigang. Another Look at Subjective Self-Consciousness and Contemporary Chinese Literature. Chinese Literature Today. Ethnic NewsWatch, 2012.
Liu Kang. The Short-Lived Avant-Garde: The Transformation of Yu Hua. Duke University Press. Academic Search Complete, 2002.
Yu Hua. To Live. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Print.
