Didn't you say that we would lose money after filming?

In the end, the county magistrate turned out to be Chunsheng, Fugui's comrade-in-arms from his time in the army.

Unable to withstand persecution during the later years of the imperial court, Chunsheng hanged himself.

Several years later, Fugui's daughter Fengxia got married, but died from postpartum hemorrhage.

At this point, after the deaths of Youqing and Fengxia, Fugui's wife Jiazhen also passed away, leaving only Fugui, his son-in-law Erxi, and his grandson Kugen.

After several years of living together, three generations of the family relied on each other for survival, Erxi died tragically in an accident.

After living with his grandson Kugen for several years, Kugen also lost his young life in an accident.

Finally, Fugui bought an old water buffalo that was about to be slaughtered, named it "Fugui," and lived out the rest of his life in hardship but peace.
This is the overall storyline of the book "To Live".

In reality, such a story may seem very bitter, making the whole book seem hopeless.

But if you think about it carefully, this is actually something that many people who lived in that era often experienced.

Struggle and suffering will always belong to the majority.

The romance of certain eras does not belong to the collective.

Some of the stories may be heavy, but they also give people more to think about.

Ultimately, all the words in the world can be summed up in one sentence: to live.

The word "living" is actually the fundamental understanding of life for many people.

This is what the working class of that era truly meant. For them, simply surviving was enough to exhaust all their strength.

For example, why did Xia Yuan choose this book?
It was this book that moved him.

At this point, people can often be convinced that words do indeed contain unimaginable power.

The output of written words can move people and provoke their thoughts.

Take, for example, the character Xu Fugui in the book.

Fugui, as the protagonist of this novel, is the character who deserves the most attention in this story.

His language, demeanor, and actions can all change the reader's attitude towards him.

This style of writing is extremely demanding in terms of penmanship.

At each turn of the brushstroke, one must be careful to control the degree of variation.

There should be no excessive use of flowery language, nor too much unnecessary description.

It's best to directly address the pain points!

For example, the perspective of this book is a good example.

At the beginning of the book, there is a narrator named "I".

Through the narrator's account, the protagonist, Fugui, is gradually brought to the reader's attention.

When Fugui first meets the readers, he is an old man who has seen through the essence of life and has compromised with it. He appears in the eyes of everyone with a detached and leisurely image. An old man is convincing an old ox. Later, this old man tells "me" about himself.

This is what is meant by drawing the reader into the context. Born into a landlord family, Xu Fugui was addicted to gambling in his youth, squandering his family's vast wealth and falling from a high-born rich kid to the impoverished bottom of society. His parents also died one after another due to the decline of the family business and Xu Fugui's filial impiety.

Xu Fugui squandered his family fortune. After his father passed away, he could no longer continue his old habits of drinking, gambling, and whoring, and had to take on the responsibilities of a man.

From then on, he cherished his wife and children and found precious family affection.

Because he was a lazy man, his wife Jiazhen and daughter Fengxia had to do heavy work.

He was also responsible and lived a simple and happy life with his family.

It is through this first-person perspective that readers are drawn into the story of Fugui's accidental conscription into the army.

I personally experienced that utterly miserable feeling.

During those two years, he witnessed the cruelty of war.

However, he survived two years later. Later, Fugui was captured by the new army and released.

However, upon returning home, she discovered that her mother had died and her daughter, Fengxia, had become deaf and mute after a high fever.

He began to live a peaceful life with his wife and children.

But misfortune struck again when his son, Youqing, died after doctors drained all his blood while he was giving a blood transfusion to the county magistrate's wife.

When Youqing died, Fugui rushed out of the morgue like a madman. He cried and shouted. He grabbed the doctor in the corridor and pounded his fists hard. He was pulled away by the physical education teacher. He struggled. His Youqing lay motionless under the white sheet.

After his daughter Fengxia married into a kind family, she didn't have many happy days and died in childbirth, leaving behind only her grandson Kugen. After Fengxia's death, he carried his daughter's remains back to the village. As he watched his daughter being buried in the yellow earth, he seemed to remember Fengxia, who had been sent away but then secretly slipped back.

He remembered Fengxia, who looked exactly like Jiazhen when she got married, and how she blushed when the neighbors praised her.

Lying in Youqing's room, he and Erxi watched over their daughter, who was still cold, and wept bitterly.

At this moment, anyone who sees this will feel a profound sense of sensory integration.

His wife, Jiazhen, also suffered from rickets due to long-term overwork and malnutrition, and eventually died.

The son-in-law, Erxi, was a porter who died when a crane malfunctioned and he was crushed between two rows of cement slabs. In the end, the only remaining relative—the grandson, Kugen—also died from overeating beans.

Kugen, his lips blue, collapsed on the kang (a heated brick bed). Fugui, bewildered, begged someone to call or shake Kugen. Kugen's sickle was still under the bed, and his ox hadn't been bought yet. Fugui had once said that watching Kugen grow up day by day made him feel more at ease, but now, in a trembling voice, he said, "I'm getting senile."

His loved ones had all died, leaving him only as an old farmer with white hair. He bought an ox, continued farming, and continued to live. Before he knew it, another ten years had passed.

Characters like Jia Zhen, Feng Xia, and You Qing all live lives steeped in tragedy.

Just like the vast majority of people in that era, they were shrouded in the shadow of that special period.

However, it cannot be ignored that in that dark era, when people died one after another, there must have been many Chinese people like Fugui who survived with superhuman endurance and outlived everyone else, which makes the novel shine with the brilliance of humanity.

Just like the folk song collector "I" in the "present" encountering the elderly Fugui—listening to him tell his past life experiences and stories, and becoming a listener, recorder and relayer of Fugui's own story, but not narrating Fugui's story from the perspective of an observer or in the third person.

Xia Yuan typed out the words one by one.

[Ten years younger than I am now, I had a leisurely job collecting folk songs in the countryside. That summer, I wandered like a sparrow, drifting through the sun-drenched villages and fields of Zhihe. I loved drinking the bitter tea the farmers gave me; their tea barrels were placed under trees on the field ridges. Without a second thought, I'd pick up a teacup covered in tea stains, scoop up water, fill my own water bottle, exchange a few idle words with the men working in the fields, and then strut away amidst the girls' snickers.] (End of Chapter)