To Live Book

A spare and wrenching tale of rural life in China and the tragedies of one family's survival of the social and economic hardships associated with the Nationalist Revolution and later the Communist Cultural Revolution. There is a lot of similarity to "The Good Earth", but I liked it better for not feeling so much like a didactic morality tale. Written much later (1993) by a resident of modern China, it slips an almost absurdist, comic view of the mistakes and excesses of former regimes past the censors (although the movie based on the book was banned).

Fugui is the first-born son of a landowning family who makes a favorable marriage into a wealthy merchant family. But he pursues a dissolute life at the local town brothels and opium dens and loses all the family wealth and land at gambling. He turns to tenant farming and slowly wins back the love of his wife, and together they gain some self-respect raising a son and daughter in a hard-scrabble existence. But tragedies befall them, including Fugui's conscription into the Nationalist army fighting Mao. When he returns years later. Fugui picks up the pieces of his family and embraces the advent of collective farms. Ironically, their poverty saves them from the slaughter of the wealthy and educated during the Cultural Revolution. They comply with giving up their cooking pot in favor of use of a communal kitchen, but the attempt of smelt the metal for the government suffers from practical know-how, and the stupidity of state agricultural policies lead to a famine.

We know Fugui survives because the opening scene has him an old man, happily plowing his field with an old ox, stopping to tell his tale to an urban youth scouring the rural areas for a sociological harvest of stories and songs. His wisdom in the care of his ox and knowing its needs and limits makes for a lingering metaphor for the strength of the nation lying with the resilience and core human values of its rural people.