Inga Wiehl: The rocky story of a spoiled son who became a farmer | Literature
I have a friend who is so generous that she will lend me a newly purchased book before she read it herself. I’ll read it quickly, of course, and return it ASAP.
I couldn’t quite let go of Yu Hua’s novel “To Live”, so I borrowed it a second time. It is a story told by a young man who spends a summer collecting stories and folk songs. One story, by a man named Fungui, strikes him as unlike any other he hears. As a tale of a man’s transformation, a tale of lives well lived under a given set of difficult circumstances, it grabs it in “the way an eagle’s talons grip the branches of a tree.” .
Fungui grew up as the son of a wealthy landowner. Child and young adult, it is carried on the back of a servant or a prostitute wherever it goes. He is reckless and inconstant, and even marriage to the daughter of the owner of a local rice store and the subsequent birth of a daughter does not change his ways of playing and prostituting himself.
Giving up your money and your position does. When paying off his gambling debts requires selling everything he owns, his father dies and Fungui must move with his mother, wife, and daughter to a small house that was once part of his estate. Managing to lease part of the land that once belonged to him, he earns a living by planting and harvesting his crops.
The daily grind of existing gives us a sense of lives lived in a way that will evolve into the diktat of routine until death puts an end to it. But in the case of Fungui, it is not. While traveling to town to get medicine for his mother, he is kidnapped and made a soldier in the Chinese civil war that pitted the ROC government led by the Kuomintang KMT and the Communist Party. After long years of battle, the Communists take control and establish the People’s Republic of China.
This diet corresponds to a life lived in great restrictions, as Fungui learns on his return from his years as a soldier. Her mother died and her daughter, Fengxia, contracted a fever that made her unable to hear or speak.
A son joins the family, grows up and goes to school, and a certain normality sets in, but with great political and economic constraints. Forced to sell his lambs to buy a bag of rice, Fungui takes the animals to the market accompanied by his son, Yourging, who loved and fed the animals and who can’t stand to see them leave.
You get rid of people as easily as animals, it seems. Long Er, who had profited from collecting Fungui’s gambling debts, is humiliated for being a wealthy landowner and subsequently killed. So Fungui, who would have been Long Er’s place if he hadn’t bet his money, saves his life by losing money and position!
The push to cope in a world of deprivation includes the local hospital, which becomes a place of death rather than healing. As we accompany Fengzia there after complications following the delivery of Fungui’s grandson, we watch her die as she is cared for by underqualified staff. Considering the general tenor of the story, we have no trouble seeing the hospital environment as the microcosm of Yu Hua’s China.
And he never tires of it. When a young woman in the senior executive is taken to the hospital and her need for a blood transfusion may be met with a measurement of Younguin’s blood, too much blood is drawn for him to survive, resulting in a new one. preventable death.
We leave Feng’s world as he converses with his ox, his way of doing his chores in a world of mourning and loss.
• “To Live” by Yu Hua was originally published in 1993 and translated into English in 2003. It was originally banned in China but was later named one of the most influential books of this country.
• Inga Wiehl is a retired English writer and teacher at Yakima Valley College. She holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Washington and has taught there, as well as at the universities of Utah and Texas. She has written four non-fiction books and writes about books for SCENE in an occasional column.