63 pages • 2 hours read
To Live
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Sections 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 10 Summary
Fugui goes to town daily to help Erxi with Kugen. Most days, Erxi insists on carrying Kugen on his back because he can’t bear to part with him. Neither Erxi nor Fugui ever get over Fengxia’s loss, and so Kugen becomes the center of their lives. Fugui often stays over at Erxi’s house, and this goes on until Kugen is four years old, at which point Erxi dies in a tragic work accident. He is crushed between two cement slabs.
Fugui takes Kugen back to live with him in the country. He feels sorry for Kugen being orphaned and spoils him in ways that he never spoiled Youqing. For example, he buys him noodles and candy from in town, lets him take nap breaks while working in the fields, and lets him sleep on his side of the bed when he pees. He even has a sickle custom-made for Kugen. Fugui is happy: “With Kugen around I had a new zest for life. Seeing Kugen getting bigger and bigger by the day, this grandpa of his could rest easier” (226).
Time jumps forward and Kugen is now seven years old. A heavy rain is predicted for the next day, so Fugui is eager to harvest the cotton. He forces Kugen to help him even though Kugen says he’s dizzy and his head hurts. After working for a little bit, he lies down, and Fugui realizes that Kugen has a fever. Fugui puts Kugen to bed and makes him ginger soup and a pot of fresh beans. Kugen seems happy with the food, and Fugui goes outside to finish his work in the field. When he comes back inside at dusk, Kugen is dead. Inside his mouth are two unchewed beans. Fugui says, “Kugen had choked to death on the beans. It wasn’t that he was greedy and wanted to stuff himself, it was just that we were too poor. […] Things were so bad for us that Kugen hardly ever had the chance to eat beans” (230).
Fugui thinks about the people in his life who have come and gone, and he decides: “It’s better to live an ordinary life. If you go on striving for this and that, you’ll end up paying with your life” (231). Two years after Kugen’s death, Fugui finally has enough money to buy an ox. On his way to town to buy the animal, he sees a man getting ready to butcher an old ox. The ox is crying, and Fugui can’t stand it. Instead of buying a young ox from town, Fugui buys the old ox. Everyone in the village makes fun of Fugui for buying such an old ox, but Fugui and the ox develop a bond. Fugui thinks that it’s because the ox is grateful that Fugui saved its life. He even names the ox Fugui because he thinks that the ox resembles him.
Section 11 Summary
In this concluding section, the narrator watches Fugui and his ox walk off into the distance. The narrator listens as Fugui tells his ox about Youqing, Erxi, Fengxia, and Jiazhen. As he walks off, Fugui sings, “In my younger days I wandered amuck, at middle age I wanted to stash everything in a trunk, and now that I’m old I’ve become a monk” (235).
The narrator concludes the novel by saying:
As the black night descended from the heavens, I knew that in the blink of an eye I would witness the death of the sunset. I saw the exposed and firm chest of the vast earth; its pose was one of calling, of beckoning. And just as a mother beckons her children, so the earth beckoned the coming of night (235).
Sections 10-11 Analysis
At the beginning of the novel, Fugui’s father says that their family was once rich because they were able to move up from having a chicken to a lamb to an ox, and an ox represented wealth. Throughout the novel, Fugui’s family has a handful of lambs but never any oxen. In Section 10, Fugui finally has his ox, but it doesn’t bring wealth like his father always promised. Instead, the old ox is a symbol of Fugui’s age and his feelings of uselessness. Just like the ox, which is so old that he can only do small loads of work here and there, Fugui is in poor health and feels ill-equipped in the fields. In this way, Fugui’s acquisition of an ox at the very end of the novel represents the end of an era. Unlike Fugui’s father, who was able to build up the Xu family’s wealth and pass it on to his heir, Fugui, after squandering their wealth, is never able to rebuild it due to the changes that come with the Chinese Communist Revolution. Moreover, he has no heirs to pass anything on to anyway.
Indeed, every fresh start in Fugui’s life gives way to new grief and hardship. The family survives the famine, but Youqing dies shortly afterward. Jiazhen’s health improves somewhat, but then Fugui falls ill. Fengxia unexpectedly finds a husband only to die in childbirth. Kugen’s death is the culmination of this pattern. As a young child, he represents hope for the future, but he dies unnecessarily in circumstances that indict his society: He is so hungry and unaccustomed to good food that he eats beans too fast and chokes.
By the time the narrator meets him, Fugui has therefore given up any thoughts of advancing in society, describing even modest ambition as a recipe for disaster and death and instead prioritizing mere survival. Nevertheless, the tone of the novel’s conclusion is more bittersweet than bleak. If the ox that Fugui buys symbolizes the end of his dreams for the future, it also symbolizes the value of life in the present. To Fugui, the old ox’s existence still has worth and meaning; likewise, Fugui himself finds pleasure and joy in life despite his losses. Death is inevitable, and the closing image of night descending symbolically evokes its approach, but the novel’s final message is one of Perseverance in the Face of Hardship.
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