63 pages • 2 hours read
Yu HuaTo Live
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Sections 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 4 Summary
With Jiazhen gone, Fugui feels like his “strong and healthy family ha[s] been smashed apart like a clay jar” (45). Despite his sadness, Fugui works hard in the fields to support his daughter, Fengxia, and his mother. Long Er now lives in Fugui’s old house and is the landlord, but he is kind to Fugui. He allows Fugui to rent five mus of good land, for which Fugui is grateful:
Looking back now, those days were both difficult and exhausting, but my heart was at peace. I thought the Xu family was once again like a little chicken. If I kept as I had, within a few years that chicken would become a goose. And one day the Xu family would once again be rich (50).
Changgen, the Xu family’s former servant, visits Fugui. Fugui tries to invite Changgen to live with him, but Changgen declines:
After I lost our family property, Changgen was the one who suffered the most. Changgen had worked for our family all his life, and, according to custom, when he got old it was supposed to be our family that took care of him. But once our family was reduced to poverty, he had no choice but to leave (51).
Six months after giving birth to a baby boy named Youqing, Jiazhen comes back to live with Fugui. Jiazhen, despite having been born into a wealthy family and never having done manual labor, immediately begins helping Fugui farm the land. Fugui’s mother always said, “[A]s long as a person is happy at work then poverty is nothing to be ashamed of” (56), which explains why Jiazhen smiles in the fields despite being desperately tired.
Fugui’s mother becomes ill, and Jiazhen gives Fugui the small bit of money she brought from home so that he can go into town and fetch a doctor. While in town, Fugui is accosted by the magistrate’s servant because he thinks that Fugui is a beggar. The two fight and a brigade of Nationalist troops shows up: “There were about ten cannons the size of doors being pulled by horses” (60). The company commander orders Fugui and the servant to pull the cannon. The servant begs to leave, saying he needs to get back to the magistrate. The company commander allows him to leave but shoots at him as he walks away. This scares Fugui enough to make him keep pulling the cannon. He keeps thinking about escaping, but before he knows it he has been pulling the cannon for a month and is north of town, in the Anhui province. Fugui wants to desert, but he meets a veteran soldier named Old Quan who tells him that nobody gets away. Fugui, Old Quan, and a 16-year-old boy named Chunsheng quickly become friends and stick together as the troops continue north.
After the troops cross the Yangtze River, the sound of gunfire and cannons intensifies. Fugui says, “The company commander didn’t know where we were, and the peasants had all run away. I looked around in all directions. Other than some bare trees and a few thatched huts, there was nothing” (64). Before Fugui ever has a chance to fight, the company commander says that the Liberation Army has surrounded them from all sides. Unable to fight back, the company commander assures everyone that Generalismo Chiang-Kai-Shek will send aid and then orders everyone to wait it out in the tunnels. As food supplies and ammunition become scarce, the body count goes up. After seeing so many dead bodies, Fugui becomes inured: “When you’re in the kind of situation we were in, bones of the deceased are nothing to be afraid of. If you had to sleep pressed up against them you wouldn’t even have a nightmare” (67).
Fugui, Old Quan, and Chungshen manage to survive on uncooked rice, and despite the freezing temperatures and snow, they keep warm by huddling together in their tunnel. One day, while looking for food scraps, Old Quan is shot and dies. Shortly after, the company commander deserts the troops but is shot at as he flees. Things are looking dismal: “After making it through a month amid gun blasts and bomb explosions, I wasn’t really afraid of death. I just felt that dying in the dark like this was really an injustice. Not even my mother or Jiazhen would know where I had died” (76).
Chungshen leaves the tunnel to search for food, and while he’s away the Liberation Army comes into the tunnel and leads Fugui and the other soldiers south. After marching for some time, the Liberation Army feeds Fugui and the other soldiers steamed buns. The next morning, the Liberation Army gives Fugui and the other soldiers a choice: go home, or stay and help fight against the Nationalist Army. Fugui chooses to go home, and the Liberation Army allows Fugui to leave and pays for his travel expenses.
After being gone for two years, Fugui finally makes it back home. Fugui’s mother has died, and Fengxia is now deaf and mute after living through a devastating illness. Liberation is sweeping through the land, and in an act known as land reform, the Communist Party has confiscated Long Er’s land and divided it among the tenants. This means that Fugui is given the five mus of land that he originally had to rent. The same people responsible for Fugui’s turn in fortune also execute Long Er.
Section 5 Summary
The narrator reflects on what Fugui has told him so far and watches Fugui’s ox, also named Fugui, emerge from the pond and eat grass. The narrator thinks about how both Fugui the man and Fugui the ox are old and how Fugui treats his ox like a human. The narrator listens as Fugui tells his ox, “Jiazhen and the rest of them have already started working. You’ve rested enough. I know you haven’t eaten your fill, but who told you to stay in the water so long?” (86). Jiazhen and the rest of Fugui’s family passed away long ago, but Fugui mentions them to his ox as if they were still alive. Fugui sits back down beside the narrator and continues his story.
Sections 4-5 Analysis
The majority of Section 4 revolves around Fugui’s experience in the Chinese Civil War, which took place in 1945 at the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Chinese Civil War was a fight between the Kuomintang-led government, or the Nationalist Army, and the Communist Party of China, or the Liberation Army. The war represents an ideological shift in China. While the Nationalists were once the dominant political party in China, by the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Communist Party had grown considerably, with an army consisting of 1.2 million troops. The Communists overtook one-quarter of the country’s territory and one-third of its population in what became known as “The Liberated Zone.” Despite financial backing from the United States and initial momentum, the Nationalists lost the war. Historians note that the Nationalists were weakened from the Second Sino-Japanese War and had fallen out of favor with the common people. The Communists, on the other hand, appealed to peasants by promising them farmland from their landlords, an act that later became known as “land reform.” With popular support on their side, the Communists deemed themselves the defenders of the nation.
This idea that the Communists, or the Liberators, appealed to the common people is seen throughout Section 4, developing the theme of Political Systems and Class Divides. Fugui is forced into the Nationalist Army by threat of death and treated horribly during his time with it. However, once the Liberation Army captures him, he is allowed to go free and is even given money to get back home. Additionally, once he arrives back home, he is freely given five mus of land from his landlord, Long Er, due to Communist-initiated land reform. The first of many land reform campaigns, the first wave of land reform happened after the Communists won the Civil War. Fugui, like other peasants in rural China, freely received land that had been forcibly taken from the landlords. While this was of course good for poor peasants like Fugui, it also resulted in millions of deaths for landlords, like Long Er, who were deemed Nationalists by the Communists.
Fugui’s close connection to his ox—which, significantly, shares his name—highlights the role animals and nature play in conjunction with the theme of Perseverance in the Face of Hardship. Amid the turbulence of this period of Chinese history, the characters take comfort in the enduring presence of nature. Moreover, as farmers, their survival is tied to the land and its creatures, such that Fugui and his father even express their hopes for the future via animal symbolism, using the image of a chicken turning into a goose to suggest the family’s prospects.
