The Novel To Live by Yu Hua and Its Adaptation - Essay Example

The novel “To Live” by Yu Hua and its movie adaptation by Yimou Zhang – Comparison and Contrast Yu Hua’s short stories are d for their striking and graphic portrayal of violence. However, he is gentler and more revealing in his novel, though violence and tragedy still lurks behind. The title, To Live is a narrative statement depicted as an exhortation. It is the story of a single family over the course of three generations, told through the eyes of Xu Fugui who lives to see all members of his family die. The story spans decades of history and covers the crucial political movements of the twentieth century in China. Life in rural China is portrayed by Yu Hua just as Faulkner or Steinbeck does with their familial sagas in the American context. Yu Hua has drawn inspiration for his novel from an American folk song about an elderly 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”. (Hua, P.249) At the end of the novel, Xu Fugui is left alone, with his only companion being an ox that he names after himself. He uses the mutual identity between man and beast as a metaphor for the human condition. The novel begins and ends the story through the mechanism of a double narration: one a young student collecting songs and folk stories from the peasants in the countryside and the other, old Fugui and his ox telling their story to the student. Zhang Yimou, a noted Chinese film director, has gained notoriety among his own people due to his recurring acts of exposing a dark side of his country to the outside world. But he persists with his mission in the same manner through the film adaptation of To Live. He attempts to convey several profound messages through this movie, in an attempt to prod the viewers’ conscience to awareness of injustice in the Chinese society. Though in this context, the novel as well as its film adaptation serves the same purpose there are several characteristics that distinguishes one from the other. The film and the novel are significantly different even though Yu Hua participated in writing the screenplay. Each medium offers different possibilities and at the same time suffers from different limitations too and these are reflected in the differences between the novel and the film. The novel has Fugui telling his story in installments, chronologically, with returns to the narrative present. This aspect is attributed to the novel’s being first published in serial form in a literary journal. The film has no second narrator to whom Fugui will tell his story, and the old ox is also missing. The novel is placed in China’s rural south, the thatched hut in the Xu estate where Fuguis father dies ignobly, while the movie changes locale to a small city in the north. The character of Mr. Chen, a rich town merchant and father-in-law of Fugui does not appear in the film at all. The novel has Mr. Chen taking away his daughter Jiazhen against her will from Fugui, but the film has her going back on her own. The novel recounts Fugui’s misdoings, including the relationship with his ‘fat prostitute’ more vividly, while the film focuses on Fugui’s addiction to gambling. The film viewer is introduced to the art of shadow puppets, a popular art form of the time, through the gambling house. Fugui is shown using the puppet show to make a living in town. The city locale helps to display the political struggle and the rise of communism. In the film, characters are careful of what they say, to whom they say it and how they are perceived. Fugui wants to be seen as a Mao supporter. The novel does not have any shadow puppet theme at all, and Fugui and his family live by doing hard farm labor. In the countryside, they are insulated from most of the political unrest and violence in the city. Zhang Yimou has utilized the compulsions imposed by the change of setting in the film creatively, to add a whole new dimension. The novel is much more direct in its social and political commentary, while the film contains a large amount of irony, much of it comedic. The tragic death of Fugui’s son is an act of fate in the film, while in the novel his blood is literally sucked dry by medical personnel in an attempt to save the life of the high ranking cadre’s child. The novel has the young schoolboy waiting to donate blood to the magistrate’s wife die even as the blood is being taken. In the film, an exhausted Youqing falls asleep on the floor at school and is crushed by a wall knocked down by the magistrate’s car. When Fugui’s daughter is in labor, the movie uses tragicomedy when the Chief of Obstetrics arrives from house arrest, crazed from starvation, and stuffs himself on steamed buns. He becomes so bloated that he is incapable of doing anything at all to prevent her from bleeding to death. The novel is far more matter of fact and crueler: she hemorrhages after childbirth and there is nothing the doctors can do. The hospital is portrayed as a place of dying rather than a place of healing, and readers wonder whether it is not China itself that Yu Hua is portraying as a hospital. The battlefields of North China, hardships of winter combat, the gambling dens of pre-liberation China, images of communal living, the impact of the Great Leap Forward on peoples’ lives, images of the Cultural Revolution and a Red Guard wedding are memorable images from the film. Such visual depiction is so much stronger than reading about it in a novel. The film ends with Fugui and his grandson gathering around Jiazhen in bed, suggestive of a future utopia. The novel closes with Fugui prodding his ox, suggesting that survival is an end in itself. In the novel every member of Fugui’s family dies, including his little grandson, leaving the reader bereft of hope. Hope is rekindled only when the reader realises that Fugui has persevered and survived to work the fields joking with his ox. The novel evokes passion while the film ignites anger. The novel exposes all of Fugui, his thinking, feelings and consequent action. The film is wrenching from the perspective of an insider as the communist movement rolls on. The film is certainly critical of communism, which is depicted in poor light. To Live is a powerful novel even as it is a powerful film, with a common thread running through both. Works Cited Hua, Yu. To Live: To Live. New York: Anchor Books – Random House, 2003 (P.249). Hua, Yu. To Live: Accessed on 7 December 2006 Read More