To Live in 10 Minutes: In Forty Years of a Gambler's Life, Everyone Around Him Dies

Yu Hua packs the deepest way of surviving a Chinese life into one old ox

Text and illustrations produced by the pipeline

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福贵年轻时是地主少爷，嗜赌成性，一夜之间在赌场输光全部家产，气死父亲 — 福贵在赌场豪赌，一夜输光家产，父亲当场气绝

Start with a single image

The old farmer calls out to the ox: "Jiazhen, time to plow." He is skin and bones himself, and the ox he leads is just as thin. The two of them amble home together along a country footpath on a summer afternoon. He calls out again — "Fengxia, time to harrow." He isn't calling his own family. He's calling the names of his dead wife and daughter. And the ox itself, an animal about to go to the slaughterhouse, he has named after himself: Fugui. He sits under a tree with the folk-song collector who has stopped to hear him, telling the story of his own life in a voice so flat it could be someone else's.

Where this book comes from

To Live is a novel by Yu Hua. The standalone edition came out in 1993 from the Yangtze River Literature and Art Publishing House, after running the year before, in 1992, as a novella in the magazine Harvest. Yu Hua was in his early thirties when he wrote it, already recognized as a leading figure of the avant-garde. Then he wrote the plainest, least "avant-garde" book of his career, and it was this one that drove both him and the novel onto the short list of essential contemporary Chinese fiction. It was later adapted into a film by Zhang Yimou, starring Ge You, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes that year — but the film is too tender-hearted. Yu Hua himself has said it's a "castrated" version; the novel is far harsher.

Characters and world

There is exactly one protagonist: Fugui. As a young man he was the pampered son of a landlord family, a gambling addict who lost the family's land and its handsome brick-and-tile house to a man named Long Er in one long run of bad luck. His father died of rage on the spot; his pregnant wife, Jiazhen, was taken back to her own family by her father. Over the decades that follow, Fugui watches the people closest to him die, one after another, until all that is left is him and an old ox. On paper, the story reads like a table of contents for modern Chinese history: the Republican era, the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, land reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. But Yu Hua is not interested in giving you history. He is only interested in how many people are still sitting at Fugui's dinner table today. The rule this world runs on is simple: some people are built to survive, and being built to survive does not mean living long; the soft ones, more often than not, die quietly and pointlessly, run over by the larger age before it even notices them.

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土改中福贵因早已败光家产反被划为贫农逃过一劫，原地主龙二则被枪决 — 土改时龙二被枪决，福贵因败家反倒成了贫农

After the family's fortunes collapsed, Fugui was seized by the Nationalist army as a conscript — and note, he did not choose to go to war; he was tied up with rope and marched onto the battlefield. He went hungry with his unit and dodged shellfire through the Huaihai Campaign, watching the veterans around him die one after another, until the whole company was surrounded and disarmed by the Communist forces, who then gave the survivors travel money and sent them home. He had been away for years. By the time he got back, his mother had already died of illness, and his daughter Fengxia had gone deaf and mute after a high fever the family had no money to treat. The craft to notice: this is the book's first brush with death that does not end in death, and Yu Hua does not let Fugui charge in like a hero or run like a coward — he simply gets shoved, dragged, and carried back home by circumstance. What makes the passage work is hunger: what does Fugui think about on the battlefield? The chickens back home, the crops in the field. Not ideology. Not any cause.

That gunshot during land reform

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大跃进年代，儿子有庆因给县长夫人输血过量意外死亡，是全书最荒诞的悲剧之一 — 有庆在医院为县长夫人输血，因过量而意外身亡

文革中女儿凤霞难产大出血，因唯一的老中医被批斗关押无力抢救而死 — 凤霞产后大出血，老中医遭批斗无人施救致死

Art Direction4 plates

Before the guide was written, this book got a visual foundation — every illustration you just read grew out of it.

Character · To Live in 10 Minutes: In Forty Years of a Gambler's Life, Everyone Around Him Dies — 01Charactercharacter

World · To Live in 10 Minutes: In Forty Years of a Gambler's Life, Everyone Around Him Dies

The gambler loses the family fortune

Young Fugui's conduct would make today's trust-fund kids blush. His father married him off to Jiazhen, the daughter of a rice-shop family in town, and Fugui spent every day holed up in the gambling houses. Long Er set the trap, and Fugui walked straight into it, gambling away the entire family estate in one long stretch of bad nights. Only after he had angered his father to death, and just before the Nationalist army seized him as a conscript, did he look at his wife's face and truly see it for the first time. The craft to notice: Yu Hua drops a spoiled young man from the sky to the ground in the opening pages, so that everything "staying alive" means later carries real weight. The gambling itself is written with a restraint that borders on coldness — no "how he regretted it in his heart," just entry after entry: lost, lost again, lost it all.

Back in the village, the land reform work team arrives. Because Fugui had already gambled away all his land, he gets classified as a poor peasant — black comedy taken to its absolute limit. Long Er, who won the family's entire estate off him years earlier, gets classified as a landlord instead, and is dragged down to the riverbank south of the village and shot in front of the whole village. At the sound of the gunshot, Fugui wets his pants. The craft to notice: this is where Yu Hua drives the point about fate all the way home. Fugui survives not because he is admirable, but because his bad luck happened to land at exactly the right moment in history. The pacing turns suddenly cold here, and the chill runs down the reader's spine right along with Fugui's.

Life had barely settled down for a few years when the Great Leap Forward arrives. Every household in the village smashes its own woks to smelt steel; rice stalks in the fields are stacked taller than a man, and yield reports are inflated to thousands of jin per mu. Fugui's son Youqing is about ten by then, the school's champion long-distance runner. The school organizes students to donate blood for the county chief's wife — the county chief turns out to be Chunsheng, the same man whose life Fugui spared on the battlefield years before. The nurses draw blood tube after tube; Youqing's face goes whiter and whiter, until the doctor says, 'more,' and drains him dry. Fugui rushes to the county hospital and recognizes the county chief as Chunsheng — but Chunsheng has no idea that the countryman standing in front of him is the man who once saved his life. Youqing is dead. He is buried.

The craft to notice: Youqing's death is the passage in the whole book most likely to make you slam it shut and swear out loud. Yu Hua does not go for pathos. It is just drawn, drawn again, color going wrong, more, gone — a run of bare verbs, and a child's life gets measured out in tubes of blood. This cold-handed treatment is far more brutal than any amount of wailing would have been.

The Cultural Revolution: a difficult birth

Time moves on to the Cultural Revolution. Fengxia has grown up and married Erxi, a plain, honest porter; the two of them are sickeningly sweet together. But on the day she gives birth, she starts hemorrhaging. She is rushed to the hospital — except the one old professor who still knows how to deliver a baby was dragged off by Red Guards the day before to be denounced, and is locked up in a cowshed, unable to make himself heard even if he shouted. Fengxia bleeds to death, just like that, leaving behind a baby boy. Fugui names him Kugen. The craft to notice: Yu Hua is particularly cruel here. He hands you almost a complete happy chapter — Fengxia's wedding, the couple's daily life, bringing her husband home, the pregnancy, the labor — long enough that you start to believe the hard times are finally over. Then one cut, and all the warmth is gone. This trick of building up hope only to snuff it out again is the most poisonous move in the second half of the book.

The rest die off, one by one

Not long after Fengxia dies, Jiazhen, who has been suffering from a bone-softening illness, dies too. Erxi is crushed to death between two concrete slabs at a construction site. Kugen grows up with his grandfather, hungry through most of those years. One year the harvest is finally decent, but Kugen falls ill. Fugui, doting on his grandson, boils him a bowl of beans and saves it for him — and the boy, starved for so many years, has a stomach that can no longer handle it. A single bowl of beans kills him. The craft to notice: a child killed by a bowl of beans is the most absurd passage in the whole book, the one that looks least like tragedy. He is not shot, not denounced to death, not drained by a doctor's needle. He is killed by a bowl of beans. Yu Hua uses this to tell you that, against the scale of history, starving to death and eating yourself to death can be separated by nothing more than a single bowl of beans.

The old man and the ox

The story comes full circle, back to the image it opened with: the old farmer on the footpath, leading the old ox that is likewise headed for the slaughterhouse. Fugui does not let the butcher's knife fall. He buys the ox himself and gives it his own name, Fugui. He calls out to it as Jiazhen, as Fengxia, as Youqing, as Erxi, as Kugen — laying the names of his dead family onto the animal, one by one, so that they go on living, and so that he does too. The craft to notice: the ending mirrors the opening, but this is not just a structural trick. The old ox named Fugui is a mirror of the old man Fugui. The ox was going to be slaughtered anyway, so every extra day alive is a day gained; Fugui's whole family is dead, so every extra day alive is a day gained for him too. The two Fuguis walk slowly back toward the village together, and that image has become one of the most iconic in all of contemporary Chinese literature.

What is it actually saying

To Live is not a book of accusation, and it is not a book of inspiration. It is a book about the idea that living itself is the meaning — not living for some great purpose, just living: eating, farming, raising children, watching the people you love die one by one — and then the sun comes up again the next day, and you still have to go cook the rice.

Yu Hua has said that in writing this book, what he heard was not the crying, but the long silence that comes after the crying stops. He writes extreme suffering in the plainest, almost bare, descriptive language, and that turns out to be far more brutal than any amount of heavy color would be — because he never lets you borrow his characters' emotions, he only lets you see: a thin old man on a footpath calling out the names of family members who are already dead. For readers today, the book carries even more weight. Our generation has grown used to the story that effort is always rewarded, used to the sermon that suffering must have a purpose. To Live tells you something else: sometimes suffering is just suffering, with no meaning and no one to answer for it, but the person is still here, and being here means you keep on living.

You already know the plot — so why read the original

Because a summary can only give you the skeleton, and a skeleton is not a living thing. That voice of Fugui's — a man who has lost every single person he loves and can still sit under a tree calmly telling his whole life story — is something you can only hear for yourself by opening to page one and following Yu Hua's restrained pen all the way to the last page. What is pressed down under that calm is heavier than any amount of wailing. Then there is the passage where Youqing's blood is drawn: only by reading those short, bare verbs yourself — drawn, drawn again, more — do you feel that same choking breathlessness. And the bowl of beans, and the small grandson who never once knew what it felt like to eat until full — this is something only prose can render. No film can translate it, no voice can perform it. Treat this piece as a map. The novel itself is the ground the crops actually grow from. The sooner you open it, the sooner you can sit down beside the old man named Fugui and listen to him tell the whole of his life, slowly, to the end.

Composition · To Live in 10 Minutes: In Forty Years of a Gambler's Life, Everyone Around Him Dies — 03Compositioncomposition

Lighting · To Live in 10 Minutes: In Forty Years of a Gambler's Life, Everyone Around Him Dies — 04Lightinglighting