RHET:1030:0055
Alexander Masada Corey
World Literature, P.4
2/13/2015
To Live Final Essay
The main character of To Live, by Yu Hua, is Fugui. He is a dynamic protagonist that changes and learns through the hardships that he faces living his life during a tumultuous period in Chinese history. In spite of the hardships that Fugui faces, he changes and adapts to overcome them and becomes a completely new character by the end of the book.
For Fugui, his first significant moment of change was when he first brushed with death and considered killing himself after gambling away his family fortune, “I simply wanted to hang myself with my belt and be done with it... it took only one look for me to realize that I had not the slightest inclination to take off my belt. I didn’t really want to die, I just wanted to find a way to punish myself. I figured there was no way that damned debt would hang with me...” (28). This is a significant moment for Fugui because although he was born into a privileged class that enabled his gambling addiction, he recognizes his faults and chooses to change and take responsibility for his actions. This is in direct contrast to the habits that had allowed him to amass such a debt by gambling on a tab that allowed him to avoid immediate responsibility. Fugui choosing to take responsibility for his debt and turn to a life of honest work also causes him also to change his attitude towards others. Rather than looking down on others as he always had and taking their respect for granted, Fugui is now seeing life from the other side and living as an equal to many of the people in the village that he had once overseen as his workers. This change in social class forces him to adapt to an entirely different set of customs and practices that humble him as a character, a change that influences every part of his life and interaction with others from that point forward in the book. This change also affected Fugui’s interactions with Long Er, “Since I rented Long Er’s land, I was his tenant. I couldn’t call him Long Er like I used to; I had to call him Master Long” (53). This change in his interactions with Long Er also would extend to anyone else now ‘above’ him in the Chinese social ladder, practically any business or land owner would now have the same attitude towards him that he once had towards many of them.
A second moment of significant change in Fugui’s character comes in the aftermath of Long Er’s execution. Long Er, the gambler who cheated Fugui out of his fortune, was executed for being a landowner that refused to give up his land to the new Communist movement in China. This could easily have been Fugui’s fate if he hadn’t lost it all to Long Er through his gambling addiction. Although Fugui had lost his fortune, he was still committed to working hard and improving his standing in life, “Poor Youqing-his sister had the opportunity to have four or five good years, but he only stayed in town for six months. Then he came to suffer with me. I feel it’s my son I’ve let down the most” (56-57). Fugui clearly wants to try and make life better for his children and family in spite of his shortcomings, and he believes that the opulent life that Fengxia once lived is how he could make their lives better. His goal is to provide for his family and he feels that the longer they live in poverty, the more he has failed them. However, Fugui’s view changes after his conversation with Jiazhen about how close he had come to sharing Long Er’s fate, “Jiazhen was right. As long as our family could be together every day, who really cared about good fortune” (85). Fugui clearly realizes that family is more important to him after seeing Long Er executed for all he had once known and this marks another important shift in how he views his priorities. He has decided that he will take family first over an easy life or good fortune and that is significantly different from wanting good fortune for his family, where one is a goal and one is motivation. This change in Fugui’s heart is important because it ultimately helps him to deal with tough exterior situations by enjoying the fact that he still has his family.
The final change for Fugui came after he has lost his entire family and he is reflecting on how he’s going to die,“I’ve made my mind up that when it’s my turn to die, I’ll go peacefully and quietly. There’s no need for me to worry about not having anyone to bury me-I’m sure the people in the village will take care of it” (231). This is significant because throughout the book, Fugui had usually associated death with worrying about who was going to bury the deceased. Usually he would think about how the family was supposed to bury whoever had died, a function that he considered an important reason to have a healthy lineage in place. However, with his own family gone, he has placed his faith in the village, that they will bury him once he dies. This is a significant change for Fugui and one that starts after he has fallen out of his wealth, when he invites Changgen, a former and now unemployed servant, to live with his family so that he can have work again. Fugui is essentially adopting the village as his family, bringing them close to himself in a way the is different than how he once towered over them in his wealth.
Fugui is undoubtedly a dynamic protagonist, shaped by the changes around him and forced to adapt to the challenges that he meets daily. This adaptive change that he undergoes is the most common and natural change that one can make, because by changing himself he can better cope with situations that move beyond his control. Although Fugui was in the beginning a wealth inheritor gambling away his time and fortune who abused his wife and subjugated a village, in the end he became a field laborer who missed the wife he came to love and care for, and adopted a village as his own kin.
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