Yu Hua‘s To Live (1993) offers a compelling depiction of life in twentieth-century China, capturing the complexities of existence amid periods of profound historical transformation. While the narrative documents extensive suffering—manifested through war, famine, and political upheaval—it resists framing tragedy as a simple moral lesson or cautionary account. Instead, paradox functions as the novel’s central organizing principle: the acts of living, loving, and enduring are inextricably linked to meaninglessness, loss, and stillness. The experiences of the principal characters—Fugui, Jiazhen, Fengxia, and Youqing—unfold within this dialectical structure. Through their intersecting fates, Yu Hua reveals that virtue may engender catastrophe, innocence may culminate in sacrifice, silence may acquire expressive power, and survival itself may constitute a form of sorrow.

This paper asks how Yu Hua‘s To Live constructs a poetics of “tragic endurance” by embedding paradox in the intertwined fates of Fugui, Jiazhen, Fengxia, and Youqing, and what this reveals about life, death, and moral agency in twentieth‑century China. It further examines how these paradoxes dialogue with Chinese traditions of the tragic and contemporary scholarship on life–death aesthetics in Yu Hua’s fiction.

The study adopts close reading of the novel, focusing on key episodes in each character’s trajectory—Fugui’s dispossession and survival, Jiazhen’s loyal suffering, Fengxia’s mute death in childbirth, and Youqing’s sacrificial innocence. This textual analysis is complemented by contextual and intertextual reading of existing criticism on tragic endurance, existential paradox, and life–death themes in Yu Hua’s work.

life and death, tragic fates, sacrifices, innocent Youqing, to live

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