Word: fugui
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...probably best known from Zhang Yimou's award-winning 1994 film To Live. (Yu co-wrote the screenplay.) Following a peasant family from the Chinese civil war of the 1940s through the spasms of the Cultural Revolution, To Live is a historical fable with a long-suffering protagonist, Fugui, to rival the Biblical Job. If something bad happened to China over the past 60 years, it happens to Fugui and his family?again and again. The constant calamity may leave readers drained of empathy, but Yu's stringently honest prose succeeds in making an existential hero out of Fugui, whose...
...Fugui and Cheungsheng search for their adopted Nationalist Army, they hear something in the distance. It builds into a roar, and their fear is tangible, Suddenly, tens of thousands of communist soldiers storm down the hill after them. Fugui and Chungsheng run, but it is futile. Like a stream of lava overtaking them, Mao's forces surround Fugui and Cheungsheng. This scene immediately distinguishes "To Live" from any other film in recent memory. It is the work of a craftsman with a lot of money to spend. It is the stuff that makes movies larger than life...
...Fugui returns to his liberated village. As he reaches the entrance he sees Jiazhen and Fengxia delivering water door to door. Soon Fugui learns of his mother's death and that Fenxia, after a serious illness, is now mute. As always, life goes...
...When Fugui's son dies, he is consoled by the puppets and marriage of his daughter to the adoring Erxi. She becomes pregnant and Fugui and Jiazhen go to the hospital to offer support. All of the doctors, they soon learn, have been incarcerated as counter-revolutionaries. The impact of the Cultural Revolution is felt everywhere...
Erxi is able to recruit a famous doctor from the one of the "cow-pens"--internment camps. Weakened by starvation and abuse, he doctor is barely able to hold his bead up. As Fengxia enters labor, Fugui gets the doctor a basket of hot buns. The delivery is complicated and they call for the doctor, but has eaten so much be can't stand. Fengxia's life hangs by a thread and the only doctor for miles lies unconscious in the next room, stuffed with buns. Zhang Yimou takes inherently bland components and constructs a thing of beauty and dark...