To Live

Fugui is a wealthy young man who gambles away his family's land and then watches the 20th century take everything else — his parents, his son, his daughter, his wife, his son-in-law, his granddaughter — one by one, each death caused by a different historical catastrophe. Land reform. The Great Leap Forward famine. The Cultural Revolution. Yu Hua writes this as a simple story told by an old man to a stranger in a field. The simplicity is the point. History as it lands on a single body across a single lifetime. The most devastating Chinese novel on this shelf and the most honest about what the Communist Party's experiments cost ordinary people.