To Live by Yu Hua
To Live begins promisingly enough: an old man recounting his life’s hardships of course carries inherent dramatic weight. Yet what should have been a profound meditation on human perseverance quickly devolved into something that felt less like literature and more like authorial manipulation masquerading as profundity.
However, the fundamental problem isn’t the suffering itself, but how hollow it feels. Yu Hua seems to confuse relentless tragedy with meaningful storytelling, piling misfortune upon misfortune without ever establishing why we should care about the people enduring it. The protagonist, Fugui, never emerges as a genuine person to me. He’s more akin to a narrative vessel designed to absorb whatever catastrophe the author needs to advance his thesis about human endurance.
The most grating element is Fugui’s constant refrain of “who would have known this” or “who could have known that”—a verbal tic that becomes increasingly nonsensical as the story progresses. (And a verbal tic is not a substitute for a personality.) Often, the disasters he expresses surprise about are entirely predictable given the circumstances. This isn’t character development; it’s lazy writing.
More damaging is how every character behaves not according to their own psychology, but according to whatever the plot demands. Deaths arrive with the arbitrary suddenness of natural disasters, but without the emotional weight that should accompany them. It’s like suddenly being told that there was cake available, but it’s gone now: oh well, too bad, moving on. The tragedy feels gratuitous rather than earned.
Compare this to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where every moment of suffering serves to illuminate the profound bond between father and son. In that novel, we understand who these people are through their actions and choices, making their eventual fate genuinely devastating. We aren’t explicitly told who the father is, but see it emerge clearly through his actions. Yu Hua’s characters, by contrast, feel like puppets dancing to the authorial thematic agenda rather than autonomous beings worthy of our emotional investment.
To Live reads like an exercise in literary endurance rather than a meaningful exploration of it. The relentless parade of misfortune without proper context or character development transforms what should be moving into something merely exhausting.
That said, the novel’s enduring reputation and passionate defenders suggest it resonates deeply with many readers. Perhaps those more attuned to its cultural context or less troubled by its structural choices. Maybe in its original language it reads as nuanced prose. For me, however, perseverance as a theme requires us to first care about who is persevering, which is precisely what this novel fails to establish. The worthy subject matter deserved more nuanced treatment than it received.