To Live (27 page)
1
Chinese unit of area equivalent to
acre or 0.0667 hectares.
2
Chinese unit of length equivalent to ½ Kilometer or
mile.
3
Fengshui,
also known as geomancy, is the Chinese art of determining the geographic location of a house, tomb, office, etc., that will have the greatest positive influence on the fortune of the individual, family or company that uses it.
4
Osteomalacia, or
ruan gu bing
in Chinese. A disease characterized by the softening of the bones. The adult equivalent of rickets.
5
A unit indicating the quantity and quality of labor performed and the amount of payment earned in rural communes.
6
A Chinese unit of weight equivalent to ½ Kilogram or 1⅓ pounds.
7
Big character posters, or
da zi bao,
are large posters featuring handwritten slogans, announcements or protests, and are one of the
key forms of political expression, and often political dissent, in modern China. They played an important role during the Cultural Revolution and the Democracy Wall Movement (1978–79).
8
Yu Hua, “A Work of Hypocrisy” (Xuwei de zuopin) p. 277 in The Collected
Works of Yu Hua Volume II
(
Yu Hua zuopin ji 2
) Zhongguo shehui Kexue chubanshe, Beijing 1994.
9
Lu Xun (1881–1936) became an influential intellectual and translator and the author of poetry, fiction and essays. He is best
known for his two volumes of short stories,
A Call to Arms
(
Na han
) and
Wandering
(
Panghuang
), which were revolutionary for their modem vernacular form and radical critique of Chinese culture and society.
10
Yu Hua, “Autobiography” (“Zizhuan”) pp. 385–386 in
Collected Works of Yu
Hua Volume III
(
Yu Hua zuopin ji 3
) Zhongguo shehui Kexue chubanshe, Beijing 1994.
11
Mo Yan, “The Awakened Dream Teller: Random Thoughts on Yu Hua and His Fiction” (“Qingxing de shuomeng zhe: Guanyu Yu Hua ji qi xiaoshuo de zagan”) p. 1 in
Yu Hua 2000 Collection: Contemporary China
Literature Reader
(
Yu Hua 2000 nian wenku: dangdai zhongguo wenku
jingdu
) Ming Pao, Hong Kong 1999.
12
Yu Hua’s stories of this period have been widely anthologized and are also available in Jing Wang (editor),
China’s Avant-garde Fiction: An Anthology
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998) and David Der-wei Wang (editor), Running Wild: New Chinese Writers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
13
Screaming in the Drizzle
was published in Taiwan under the alternate title
Screams and Drizzle
(
Huhuan yu xiyu
).
14
Both novels were published in book form in 1993. The current translation of
To Live
is based on the revised edition that appeared in Yu Hua’s 1994
Collected Works of Yu Hua Volume III.
15
Zeng Jingchao (interview), “Explaining
To Live:
Zhang Yimou on
To
Live
” (Gei huozhe yige shuofa: Zhang Yimou tan
Huozhe
), p. 2 in
Lifetimes:
The Film Novel
(
Huozhe: Dianying xiaoshuo
) by Sun Hua, Hanguang Publishing, Taipei 1994.
16
“To Live Is the Sole Requirement of Life: In Dialogue with
Book Review
Weekly
Reporter Wang Wei,” p. 219 in
Can I Believe in Myself? Selection
of Random Essays
(
Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji: Yu Hua suibi xuan
) by Yu, Renmin Ribao Chuban She, Beijing 1998.
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are a number of individuals who have contributed their time and hard work to help make this project a reality. Thanks to my family and friends for all of their support over the years, to Yu Hua for allowing me to translate his novel and to Xudong Zhang, not only for his early encouragement, but also for initially putting me in touch with the author. Howard Goldblatt, Peter Li and Joshua Tanzer all read various versions of the manuscript and offered thoughtful comments and suggestions. I was grateful to work with John Siciliano and Katherine Bidwell during the final stages of editing. It was their literary sensitivity and editorial sensibilities that helped shape the final text. Thanks also go to Ha Jin, Perry Link, Tomi Suzuki, LuAnn Walther, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University and especially David Der-wei Wang for his many years of unfailing support. I would like to dedicate this translation to the memory of Cao Jun, a great friend who taught me what it means to live.
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT
In the introduction to the 1993 Chinese edition of
To Live
I wrote, “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.
”
For an author, the act of writing always begins with a smile, a gesture, a memory on the verge of being forgotten, a casual conversation or a bit of information hidden in the newspaper—it is these tiny pearl-like details that sometimes transform one’s fate and spread like waves into magnificent vistas and scenes. The writing of
To Live
was no exception. 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. Perhaps this is what makes literature magical; it is precisely this magic that enabled me—a reader on the other side of the world in China—to read the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and through them, to discover myself.
I would like to thank Ha Jin for recommending
To Live
for publication, my friend Michael Berry for translating it, my agent Joanne Wang for her diligence in placing it and my editors at Anchor Books for publishing, at long last, this English language edition.
Yu Hua
TO LIVE
Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China. He finished high school during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist for five years before beginning to write in 1983. He has published three novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. In 2002 Yu Hua became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award.
To Live
was awarded Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998 and was named one of the last decade’s ten most influential books in China. Yu Hua lives in Beijing.
Michael Berry is an assistant professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of a forthcoming collection of interviews with Chinese filmmakers and the translator of Ye Zhaoyan’s
Nanjing 1937: A Love Story
and Chang Ta-chun’s
Wild
kids: Two Novels About
Growing Up
.
ALSO BY YU HUA
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
The Past and the Punishments
AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2003
Copyright © 1993 by Yu Hua
Translation and afterword copyright © 2003 by Michael Berry
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yu, Hua, 1960–
[Huo zhe. English]
To live: a novel / Yu Hua ; translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry.
p. cm.
I. Berry, Michael. II. Title.
PL2928.H78H8613 2003
895.1’352— dc21
2003043688
eISBN: 978-0-307-42979-7
v3.0