Yu Hua To Live Reading Order

Yu Hua's To Live (1993) is one of the most celebrated novels of twentieth-century Chinese literature — a work of devastating simplicity that follows the life of Fugui, a dissolute landlord's son, from the 1940s through to the Cultural Revolution, as he loses everything: his fortune, his family members one by one, and finally his reason for living except life itself. The novel covers forty years of Chinese history — civil war, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution — through Fugui's testimony, told in a voice of such plainness and directness that it amplifies every loss into something unbearable. Yu Hua's restraint is the key to the novel's power; he never editorializes, never asks for sympathy, never explains the historical events that destroy Fugui's family. To Live won the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy and was adapted by Zhang Yimou into one of the most celebrated Chinese films of the 1990s.