余华 Yu Hua's novel 活着 To Live came up again in this year's iteration of my Renmin course (in fact already in the first class session) so I decided it was time to reread it. Like many, I was more familiar with the prize-winning film Zhang Yimou made of it, and it was good to be reminded of the ways the original book is different. It was interesting also to read it explicitly as one of the books sometimes referred to as the "Chinese Job" (Camel Xiangzi is another), but I emerge from the experience puzzled, even confounded. And intrigued. What are my students seeing in Job that makes this seem a kindred tale?The story is in some ways quite simple. Fugui, the wastrel son of a wealthy family, loses the family property gambling and the family is cast into poverty. His father dies of shame. His pregnant wife leaves him with their young daughter - but returns. He is conscripted into the Nationalist army for two years, losing comrades and returning as the civil war nears its end to find his mother has died and his daughter become deaf-mute. He and his wife and two children farm a small plot of what had been his family's land, suffering with the rest of China the ups and down of collectivization, the starvation attending the Great Leap Forward, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Over time, he loses everyone - his son (drained of blood by callous doctors during the cultural revolution to help the wife of a magistrate in childbirth), his daughter (in childbirth, nobody helps her), his wife (of a long wasting illness), his son-in-law (in an accident) and finally his grandson (nearly starved, he chokes to death on a bean). When the narrator meets him, years later, Fugui is living with an old ox he has given his own name, apparently at peace.
What makes this a Job story? Well, superficially, it's the story of someone who loses everything. But Fugui is no moral hero, although his character has been changed from its early thoughtlessness. (His family are unequivocally good people, though.) Also, Fugui isn't exceptional. I'm told everything that happened to him was something which had happened to people Yu Hua met in his early career as a country dentist. What Fugui suffered was suffered by everyone, or might have been. Fugui is Everyman, not Job.
Is the Job-likeness to be found, then, in Fugui's attitude to his suffering? Like one version of Job, he never complains, not just as an old man worn down by a difficult life, like a gnarled tree, but even early on. He gets angry at people who treat him or his family wrong, but isn't angry at fate. His wife Jiazhen doesn't really wish for a different lot either. I hope that I’ll be able to spend my next life together with you again, she says on her deathbed. Her view isn't quite Job-like either.
The moment Jiazhen said she was willing to be my wife again in the next life, my tears trickled down onto her face. After blinking her eyes twice she smiled and said, “Even though Fengxia and Youqing both died before I did, I can still rest easy. I don’t need to worry about them anymore. No matter what, I’m still a mother. Our kids were good to me when they were alive, and just for that I should know contentment.
“You’ve got to keep on living,” she told me. “There’s still [son-in-law] Erxi and [grandson] Kugen to take care of.” (211-12)
Fugui's final view, after Erxi and Kugen, too, have died, isn't so different from this.
Sometimes when I think back I feel sad, and sometimes I feel a kind of peace. I took care of the funerals for everyone in my family. I buried them all with my own hands. When the day comes that my body goes stiff, there will be no one left to worry about. (230)
Along with the villagers, Fugui is surprised at how long he and Fugui, the ox, have lived. To have outlived all the others is not a reward or punishment but it is some kind of achievement. He stayed alive for different reasons along the way, including but not restricted to caring for his family. That his children didn't get to live long is a cause for sadness, but not complaint. To whom would he complain?
The difference with Job isn't just that there's no God for praise, pleading or protest. There's no expectation of justice. And yet one lives on. What does Fugui live for? "Man lives for the sake of life itself, not for anything other than life," Yu Hua apparently wrote in the preface to the Chinese edition (not included in the English translation; I learned of it from student papers last year). Job has given up on life: he longs for his lost life, or for death, or for vindication after he dies. (Instead he gets an awkward abundance of new life.)
On reflection, the affinity my students felt may be something deeper than these differences. Both Job and Fugui live in a morally topsy-turvy world, a world which doesn't just visit suffering on the innocent but one where nothing can be counted on. The way Fugui tells his story, things no sooner settle into some pattern, happy or unhappy, but change comes. The shift usually happens within one of Yu Hua's already compact paragraphs, with some variant of We never expected... or Who could have known... or Who would have guessed... what was about to happen next. Fate is not just arbitrary but utterly unpredictable.
At times this might seem a version of the frontiersman Saiwang's long-run "who's to know that's not good?" Because Fugui has lost the family land, for instance, he is spared when the communists come to power and execute landowners. Sometimes apparent curses are really blessings - and vice versa. But at other times the unforeseeable plot twist is just confounding - as when Fugui, madly attacking the magistrate for whose wife's life his own son has been bled to death, is stunned to find this is a man he knows. It is Chunsheng, his teenaged companion during the years of military conscription. Each thought the other had been killed in the war. If there's a moral sense to this, it's impossible to scan.
“Chunsheng,” I said, “my only son is dead.”
Chunsheng heaved a deep sigh, saying, “How could it have been your son?”
I thought of my son lying all alone in that little room—the pain was unbearable. I said to Chunsheng, “I want to see my son.”
No longer did I want to kill anyone. Who could have guessed that Chunsheng would suddenly appear? I took a few steps and turned around to say to him, “Chunsheng, you owe me a life. You’ll have to repay me in your next lifetime.” (156)
This last line might seem a nod to karma but it's really an acknowledgment that, in this life, things don't get worked out. And the next life, as Jiazhen saw it, isn't really likely to be any different. The only peace, in fact, comes from the finality of death. Fugui's family is complete and, somehow, safe now that all have died. And yet, Fugui lives on in a kind of Daoist simplicity - there's no reason. This life doesn't operate on reasons.
Five of last year's students wrote their final essays comparing Job and To Live, noting some of the things I've mentioned here. Fugui is more accessible, they wrote, being an ordinary person - and writing in the first person. His story, while awful, is more realistic too - he doesn't get it all back. China's Tian is unlike Job's God - not in control and not accountable - and Fugui's attitude is understandably different. And yet, one of the best concluded,
But I think sometimes it's not a good thing for Chinese to be too patient. It may be easier to live without thinking too much about asking why, but we lose the spirit of doubt and the thought of human destiny. Job tried to find answers about his suffering. I admire Job very much for this. His questions may not be answered, but it is the performance of a person's thinking ability. Man is a reed grass that can think. It is the ability of thinking that makes us different from other animals. In conclude, [To Live] makes me cry, but The Book of Job makes me think. I think this is the reason why The book of Job become a classic work.
But while To Live is clearly read, here and abroad, as describing a particularly Chinese experience, Yu Hua's intention was something universal. The novel, he explained in both the Chinese and English prefaces, was inspired by a song about a slave in the antebellum American South.
I once heard an American folk song entitled ‘Old Black Joe.’ The song was about an elderly black slave who experienced a life’s worth of hardships, including the passing of his entire family—yet he still looked upon the world with eyes of kindness, offering not the slightest complaint. After being so deeply moved by this song I decided to write my next novel—that novel was To Live. … An American slave song with only the simplest lyrics grew into Fugui’s life—a life imbued with upheavals and suffering, but also tranquility and happiness. Old Joe and Fugui are two men who could not be more different. They live in different countries and different eras; they are of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds; even their fundamental likes and dislikes are different, as is the color of their skin—yet sometimes they seem to be the same person. They are both so very human. Human experience, combined with the power of the imagination and understanding, can break down all barriers, enabling a person truly to understand that thing called fate at work in his life—not unlike the experience of simultaneously seeing one’s reflection in two different mirrors.
(A whole essay could be written about the circulation of identities in Yu Hua's use of this song - not a Negro spiritual but a "parlor song" published by the white composer Stephen Foster in 1853.)
I'm left wondering... wondering if I should perhaps include To Live in my New School class on Job and the arts. What might students at an American university make of Fugui and Job?
