Why this book

Yu Hua wrote it as China itself convulsed through famine and revolution. Therefore this is not only one family's tale, but a whole nation's endurance, told through the veins of a single man who never once believed himself a hero.

The Story

Xu Sanguan pushes silk carts for a living and earns very little. One day he visits his grandfather's village, where he learns a curious belief: a man who sells his blood is strong, while a man who cannot is thought too frail to marry. He listens, intrigued.

But selling blood has its rules. Two seasoned sellers, Ah Fang and Genlong, teach him the customs: drink bowls of water until the blood swells, then afterward eat fried pork livers and drink warm rice wine to restore your strength. Xu Sanguan follows them, nervous but willing.

Therefore he sells his blood for the first time and walks away with thirty-five yuan — more than half a year of pushing carts. The money feels enormous in his hand. He decides such precious earnings must be spent on something that could truly change his life.

So Xu Sanguan sets his eyes on Xu Yulan, the town beauty famous for selling fried dough. He buys her snacks all afternoon, then boldly tells her she now owes him marriage. But Yulan, it turns out, is already promised to another man, He Xiaoyong.

Undeterred, Xu Sanguan visits Yulan's father and argues that his family name deserves an heir. Therefore the father, charmed and persuaded, gives his blessing over He Xiaoyong. Yulan, swayed by the day's kindness and food, agrees, and the two are quickly married.

In the years that follow, Yulan bears three sons. Xu Sanguan loves them fiercely and believes his little household is finally complete. He names the eldest Yile — One Joy — and dotes upon him most of all. But the town has begun to whisper about that boy.

The neighbors say Yile looks nothing like his father and everything like He Xiaoyong. Stung, Xu Sanguan demands the truth, and Yulan finally confesses: before their marriage, He Xiaoyong forced himself upon her once. Yile, it seems, may not be his son at all.

Therefore Xu Sanguan feels the ground open beneath him. For nine years he has fed and raised another man's child while the whole town laughed behind his back. He turns cold toward Yile, insisting he is only a stepfather, no longer bound to love the boy.

But trouble arrives when Yile, defending his younger brothers, strikes a neighbor's boy with a rock and cracks his skull. The injured child's family demands the hospital fees. Xu Sanguan refuses to pay for a son not his own, and He Xiaoyong refuses just as flatly.

Therefore the creditors come and begin carrying his furniture out the door to settle the debt. To save his home and his pride, Xu Sanguan swallows his resentment and walks once more to the hospital — not as a patient this time, but to sell his blood for Yile.

Around this time Xu Sanguan strays. A woman named Lin Fenfang breaks her leg, and he visits her, bringing meat and fruit bought with blood money. But guilt gnaws at him, and when Yulan learns of it, the old wound in their marriage now cuts both ways.

Therefore the household limps on — until a far greater hunger swallows the whole country. The Great Leap Forward collapses into famine, and for fifty-seven days the family survives on thin corn gruel, growing weaker and weaker, dreaming aloud of food they cannot have.

But Xu Sanguan cannot bear his family's hunger. So on a bitter winter day he sells his blood again and announces he will take everyone to the restaurant for a hot bowl of noodles — a real feast none of them have tasted in many long months.

Therefore he leads Yulan and the two younger boys toward the noodle house. But to Yile he gives only a coin for a plain roasted sweet potato, saying no blood of his will feed another man's son. The boy, crushed, wanders off alone into the cold.

Yile, hungry and unwanted, walks into the freezing dusk still searching for the man he calls father. When Xu Sanguan finally finds him weeping in the dark, something breaks open in his chest. He lifts the boy onto his back and carries him to the noodles at last.

Therefore, from that night, Xu Sanguan stops pretending. Blood or no blood, Yile is his son, and he will feed him, defend him, and one day bleed for him like the others. The distinction that shamed him for years quietly dies there in the snow.

But history is not finished with them. The Cultural Revolution arrives, and Yulan is dragged out as a worn shoe, an adulteress, her head half-shaved, forced to stand for hours in the street beneath a heavy placard while the crowd jeers at her.

Therefore Xu Sanguan does the one thing that truly matters: he stands by her. Each day he brings her rice hidden beneath plain vegetables, and he tells their three sons that whatever the world screams, their mother is a good woman who suffered, not a sinner to disown.

As the boys become men, the two elder sons, Yile and Erle, are sent to distant villages for hard rural labor, as the times demand. Xu Sanguan sells his blood yet again so they might return home carrying meat, cigarettes, and a little dignity to offer their overseers.

But then comes the blow that nearly ends everything: word arrives that Yile has fallen gravely ill with hepatitis in his village. He must reach a great hospital in Shanghai, far downriver, or he will surely die. The treatment will cost more money than Xu Sanguan has ever held.

Therefore Xu Sanguan borrows what little the neighbors can spare and sends Yulan ahead by boat, cradling their burning son toward Shanghai. He himself stays behind with a desperate plan — to follow the river slowly, town by town, and sell his blood at every single stop along the way.

So begins the most terrible passage of his life. In the frozen winter, Xu Sanguan sells blood in one river town, then boards a boat to the next and sells again, far sooner than any body should. His skin turns grey and his lips blue, yet he does not stop.

But in one town his overdrawn body finally fails. He faints from the cold and the loss, and doctors must pour blood back into his own veins to keep him breathing. The seller becomes the bought — therefore, weeping at the wasted money, he sells again the moment he can stand.

Town after town, vein after vein, Xu Sanguan bleeds his way down the whole length of the river. Therefore, half-dead and clutching his crumpled banknotes, he reaches Shanghai, where Yulan and the doctors are fighting for Yile. His blood, spilled across a hundred miles, buys the boy's cure.

But the sacrifice is not wasted. Yile slowly recovers, and the family returns home whole — poorer than ever, yet still together. Xu Sanguan says little of what the journey cost him. The years pass; his three sons grow up, marry, and build steady lives of their own.

Therefore the day comes when the family no longer needs his blood at all. Old now and white-haired, Xu Sanguan walks past the hospital one afternoon and feels a sudden longing — not for money, but to sell his blood once more and treat himself to fried liver and warm wine.

But the young blood chief laughs in his face. Xu Sanguan's blood, he sneers, is too old now, fit only for a painter to smear on furniture — no hospital would ever take it. For the first time in his life, no one wants the very thing he has always given.

But Yulan comes running when she hears, and their grown sons gather round, embarrassed that strangers think their father cries over some small thing. Yulan takes his arm and leads him — not away, but into the finest restaurant, ordering three full plates of fried pork liver and warm rice wine.

Therefore Xu Sanguan sits at last as the one being cared for, not the one who cares. Yulan tells him a man is not measured by whether his blood can still be sold, and that to her he has always been worth everything. Slowly, the old man's tears turn to peace.

What it means

Therefore the old man weeps openly in the street, drifting from corner to corner with tears streaming into his collar. For forty years his blood had rescued his family from every disaster. Now that it is worthless, he feels that he too has become worthless, a tool no one needs.

Here is the quiet truth Yu Hua leaves in our hands: love was never in the blood at all. Xu Sanguan raised a son who wasn't his and bled himself dry to save him — proving that family is not what runs in our veins, but what we willingly pour out for one another.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.