Life

by Lu Yao

The world depicted in Lu Yao’s Life—the world of rural China at the beginning of the 1980s—is a world that no longer exists. Nearly four decades on, the center of gravity of Chinese society has shifted from the countryside to the city, in the process gutting villages, dissolving clan cohesion, and collapsing social structures that had existed for millennia. The great dramatic balance of Lu Yao’s tale—Gao Jialin’s hesitation between the virtues of rural life and the thrilling unknowns of urban modernity—has since been decisively resolved. These days, the Gao Jialins of twenty-first-century China are abandoning the countryside in droves.

Traditional rural culture tells one, in no uncertain terms, the right way to live. How to exist in the cities, however, is an open question.

Gao Jialin’s feelings are not so unusual. His horror of becoming a peasant is merely the horror of any young person of promise who feels that life has been charted out in advance, who can look down the course of the coming years, all the way to the moment of death, and know that nothing unexpected lies in wait.

Chinese readers continue to argue about the book and remain evenly split between those who cannot forgive Gao Jialin for his betrayal of his roots and those who think he was right to reach for a new and better life.

If you’re a farmer, then you’re a farmer, just one of the many under the sun. No worse off than the party cadres. We have mountains and rivers here, good air, and as long as your family sticks together, you’ll have a wonderful life . . .”

“Nonsense! Good or bad teeth, it’s all up to fate. What damn difference does brushing them make?

I’m so out of sorts, a bit of hard work and pain will help me forget everything

He had shown everyone that he possessed the most valuable quality for a good farmer—the ability to bear hardship. And that he had a strong character, although that might cause him to make mistakes in certain situations.

“People are iron, but food is steel, and hunger will always win out.”

Those of us who do hard labor all year long are too tired to eat when we get home

When love first awakens a young person, it bestows a great power. This is especially true in the case of those who have entirely lost faith in themselves—in them, passionate love can cause the spirit to come alive again.

He spent his days like any other peasant, constantly busy.

The day was for working, but he had very pleasant evenings. Everything he suffered was endurable precisely because he had something so happy to look forward to.

Everything felt burdensome and painful. When would the winds of modern civilization blow through this backward, unenlightened place? His heart thudded in his chest. It seemed too difficult to imagine staying in the countryside much longer, but what other choice did he have? He looked up out of the gully where the great mountain all but blocked his view. The world was so narrow!

I never saw my beloved again! And I never took a wife, ever. Marrying the wrong wife is like drinking cold water—tasteless and dull.”

as the villagers say, a falling leaf must return to its roots. It’s been my greatest desire to spend my final years in my old home.

all cats smell fishy

Everyone’s so busy, and no one has time to ask how anyone else is doing. I tried my hardest to find someone to chat with, but couldn’t.”

It didn’t matter what her parents or society thought; she had her own ideas.

She was her own person, and no one had the right to interfere in her pursuits, not even her very loving parents.

Don’t look back. Don’t be weak. You have to make sacrifices in order to have a great future. And sometimes you have to be cruel to yourself.

Huang Yaping intoxicated him like high-proof liquor—but she also gave him a headache. He knew all her irrational behavior stemmed from her love for him;

“It’s said that the higher you climb, the harder you fall!” Old Deshun advised him. “No matter how much time passes, you mustn’t lose touch with your roots . . .”

She had thought about dying. But when she looked at the mountain valley she had lived and labored in for more than twenty years, when she looked at the earth and plants that she had kept green with her own sweat, those thoughts dissipated instantly. She was reluctant to leave this world; she loved the sun, loved the earth, loved work, loved the clear and bright Great Horse River, loved the grasses and wildflowers that grew on the riverbank . . . She couldn’t die! She should live! She wanted to work the land. There was something in the earth that could be found nowhere else.

the bosom of mother earth was so broad that it could accommodate all the world’s suffering.

“Don’t complain about life. Life is always fair. You should complain about yourself!”

The town hadn’t really changed at all; it was his feelings that had. Whenever someone returned from a big, bustling city to a lonely mountain town, they always had this kind of reaction. Gao Jialin walked along the main road, his stride steady and carefree. He felt even more confident in his future. Although he hadn’t been gone long, he felt like now he basically understood the outside world. As he compared the little town in front of his eyes with the big universe beyond it, he felt he no longer had to live a shrunken life. He could stretch his arms and legs . . . It was like he had returned to his small pond after a trip across the ocean.

They’d never believed in anything other than fate, and there was no arguing with destiny.

Sister, you really do have the heart of a bodhisattva

I’ve loved and I’ve suffered, I’ve used these two hands to do hard labor, I’ve planted the five crops, I’ve planted trees, I’ve repaired roads . . . Don’t these things also create a meaningful life? To use a word you young people like, it’s called happiness. Happiness! You young people don’t realize, but when I pick the fruit from my trees and give it to the children, my heart is so . . . happy! How much of my fruit did you eat when you were little? You’re too young to understand, but when I plant a tree, I think about how when I die, later generations will pick fruit from that tree, and they’ll say, ‘This is one of the trees that old bachelor Deshun planted.’”

In 1982, Lu Yao published his novella Life, which won the National Excellent Novella Award and was then adapted into a film of the same name, which won the Hundred Flowers Award (the Chinese equivalent of the Academy Awards) for Best Feature Film in 1984.