To Live

Why did I choose this book to share?

It was one of my reading books in high school and it had a great impact on me. I saw in the book the responsibility of a father, the love of a mother, the filial piety of a son and the understanding of a daughter. More than that, I saw that life is not always easy, so it is all the more important to cherish the people in front of you.

With the development of the internet, the author of the novel Yu Hua is no longer the one hiding behind the paper. The large number of video interviews on the internet has made this already charismatic writer popular with secondary school language teachers and young people. The reason why Yu Hua has been able to stay popular is that his target audience is well targeted.

The story of the novel is simple, and many people who do not know the author and see the name will probably associate this novel as inspirational novels written by those Taiwanese authors. In fact, the author's protagonist, Fugui, is an ordinary person, an alive person, a person who is out of the author's control (Yu Hua's original words in the interview). It is also very much like everyone else reading, who makes mistakes in their youth out of ignorance and frivolity, and spends the rest of their lives paying for those mistakes.

 

This is also the general plot of the story, which takes place on the eve of the Liberation War. The protagonist, Fu Gui, was a young master of a landlord's family and had a high social status at that time, but he did not take it as his mission to restore his ancestral property. His father was unable to cope with the fall and fell to his death, and his mother died of illness due to the sudden change in living conditions. His wife, Jiazhen, leaves him for a time. This was the darkest moment in Fu Gui's life, but one thing kept him going, and that was to stay alive, to keep his family alive, and so his social class became the most common poor peasant of the time. It was in this capacity that he witnessed the great social changes of modern China. One by one, his family members die one by one due to various unavoidable forces, and he stands up in the midst of one blow after another and lives on with their hopes.

Excerpts from the original novel.

"I was afraid that he would know that he was the only one ploughing the field, so I called out a few more names to fool him, and when he heard that other cows were also ploughing the field, he would not be unhappy and would plough with vigour."

"You mustn't be confused, even the dead want to come back to life, you can't die as a living person."

Fugui in To Live convinced me that life belongs to each person's own feelings and not to any other person's opinion.

I think this may be the reward that reading gives me.