To Live

Born in 1960, Yu Hua grew up amid the Cultural Revolution in Zhejiang, a coastal province of China. His parents worked in the medical profession, and Yu himself practiced dentistry for several years as a young man. However, he disliked the work and soon turned his eye to writing, which was a state-sponsored profession. Yu initially struggled to find his voice, as the political environment in which he was raised had hampered his education:

I distinctly remember that writing my first story was extremely painful. I was twenty-one or twenty-two but barely knew how to break a paragraph, where to put a quotation mark. In school, most of our writing practice had been copying denunciations out of the newspaper—the only exercise that was guaranteed to be safe, because if you wrote something yourself and said the wrong thing, then what? You might’ve been labeled a counterrevolutionary (Yu Hua. “Yu Hua, The Art of Fiction, No. 261.” Interview by Michael Berry. The Paris Review, no. 246, Winter 2023).

By the mid-1980s, Yu had made a name for himself writing experimental, avant-garde short fiction influenced by the work of writers such as Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges (“To Live: About Yu Hua.” National Endowment for the Arts). However, his greatest acclaim would come in the 1990s, when he adopted the more realist style that characterizes To Live, undoubtedly his most famous work. In the 21st century, Yu would turn to works of dark comedy and absurdism such as Brothers (2005) and The Seventh Day (2015). Other notable works include Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1995) and “Leaving Home at Eighteen” (1987), the story that secured his reputation.

To Live draws on various elements of Yu’s life, including his firsthand experience of the Cultural Revolution; the “big character” posters referenced in Section 8 were something Yu saw walking to and from school as a boy (“To Live: About Yu Hua”). Yu’s family history also bears some resemblance to Fugui’s, as his grandfather was a wealthy landowner whose profligacy resulted in the loss of the family fortune and status. This history would contribute to accusations against Yu’s father, who, like several characters in To Live, was denounced as a “capitalist roader” during the Cultural Revolution. Yu’s principal inspiration was not autobiographical, however. Rather, the novel’s postscript describes Yu’s encounter with an American folk song called “Old Black Joe,” which is about an enslaved man who retains his humanity throughout a life of suffering—the basis for the novel’s exploration of Perseverance in the Face of Hardship.