Book Review - To Live

The story

Xu Fugui is the spoiled son of a landowning family in rural China, and when we meet him in his youth he is busy gambling away everything his family has, the house and the land included. That is only the beginning. From there the novel follows him through several decades of the last century: the civil war, the arrival of the Communists, the collectivisation of the countryside, the famine, the Cultural Revolution. We hear all of it from Fugui himself, now an old man ploughing a field with an old ox, telling his life to a young man who travels the villages collecting folk songs. And what he has to tell is, one after another, the losses of his family.

A new Kindle and four metro rides

I picked this one because I wanted to read more Chinese authors, and what caught my attention was that it was said to be full of the rural life of China in the last century. That is the kind of life my grandparents’ generation belongs to, and I was curious to see some version of it on the page. Beyond what you learn in history class and general knowledge, I did not know much about the period.

It was also the first book on a Kindle I had just bought on a good discount. I read the Seix Barral edition, where the title becomes ¡Vivir!, and it took me two days, or more precisely four sittings: two metro rides from home to work and two from university back home. It is not a long book, and it does not need to be.

Fugui, before and after

At first I could not stand Fugui. There is something hard to forgive in the way he throws away, night after night at the gambling table, everything his family had worked for. But the change starts early. From the moment his wife Jiazhen is taken back to her father’s house, he begins to reconsider, and slowly he turns into a different person, one who does everything he can to keep his family alive, because they are all he has left and the only reason he gets up each morning.

I do not think the point is to forgive him. It is to understand him. He grew up with every comfort, and that made him arrogant. When the harshness of life finally opened his eyes, he regretted all of it, and to me that regret matters more than anything he did before.

The homecoming

If I had to keep one scene, it would be the moment Fugui finally makes it back home. He has been away for a long time, and in that time the children have had to contribute whatever they could to keep the family going, at an age when nobody should have to. And Fengxia, his daughter, has been left in the condition she will carry for the rest of her life. That scene broke my heart.

It is also the moment you understand that this will not be the only misfortune this family goes through. The poor peasants in those villages did not live comfortably. They lived off breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset, with their children working alongside them from a very young age. And that is not entirely a thing of the past: you can still see it in many Chinese families who emigrated, where the children help in the family business from very early on. The scene made me realise how raw life was for these people, and for their parents before them.

Youqing’s shoes

The death that was hardest for me to swallow was Youqing’s. He was a fighter from the very beginning, a boy who looked after his animals and tried never to cause his family any trouble. The detail I remember best: he ran to school barefoot, carrying his shoes in his hand, and only put them on when he arrived, so as not to wear out the pair his mother had made him. He was not the brightest in his class, but he had a great deal of emotional intelligence, and an innocence that made him feel like a small light in the middle of the book. He did not deserve to die like that, and the circumstances of his death make it even more terrible.

Too much, or just enough

I will admit that the amount of misfortune can feel exaggerated. This family has barely recovered from one blow when the next one is already landing. But the more I thought about it, the less exaggerated it seemed. The deaths in this book are not isolated tragedies; in that period, people died in such numbers that you could not even keep count. It was the day to day. And considering the conditions so many people still live in today, what happens to Fugui’s family does not feel very far from the reality some families lived through back then. What reads as excess is, I think, the most honest thing about the book.

The frame helps with this too. You know Fugui survives, because he is the one telling the story, so you assume the family made it through as well. Only slowly do you realise that it did not.

Not a single happy day

There is one passage I have not been able to shake. When Jiazhen dies, Fugui looks back over everything that has happened in his life, and says:

Thinking about that, the tears came to my eyes again. How quickly the time had gone! From the day she married me, Jiazhen never had a single happy day. And in the blink of an eye, her time to go had already come.

(My translation from the Spanish edition.)

It is a thought Fugui has many times throughout the book, that Jiazhen never had a single happy day with him. And yet, for all the years she spent at his side, she never stopped smiling. She traded a comfortable life for one of constant suffering, but she was with the man she loved, even though that man at times mistreated her.

It made me realise that love in that period was different from the modern kind. Most people today would have walked away after the beating he gave her when she came to find him at the gambling table, and even more so once he had lost everything. Jiazhen came back, some time after her father took her away. I do not know whether it was love, the way society saw divorce back then, or something else. But through the whole book, whatever came, the two of them never stopped fighting side by side.

Not heroic, just alive

What surprised me most is how they carry all of it. I reviewed The Old Man and the Sea not long ago, and Santiago’s endurance is almost epic, one man refusing to give in to something far bigger than him. Fugui’s family does not endure like that. There is nothing heroic in how they go on. It is more as if they had already accepted it, as if they were saying:

We are not well, but life is like this. We keep going until we can no longer stand.

They have not died, so they are still alive, and if they are still alive they have to keep living. That, as far as I can tell, is what the title means.

The prose works the same way. It is incredibly simple, with no complicated structures or grand words, and it is very easy to read. Even the deaths are told almost plainly. And still, you cannot help building a vivid image of everything that happens.

Final thoughts

To Live gave me a different perspective from the ones I found in The Stranger or The Death of Ivan Ilyich. With Ivan Ilyich the situation is the exact economic opposite, a comfortable official instead of a ruined peasant, but both books capture an important part of the society of their time.

What I take away from it is how lucky we are to live with the comforts we have today. The generations before us went through extremely hard things, pushed by the gap between rich and poor, by the structure of society, and by an economy where you grew what you ate or you went hungry. It makes you appreciate what you enjoy now, knowing that many people fought, and many others died, so that the ones who came after could afford these “luxuries”.