The Story
Before his ruin, Fugui is the pampered son of a landlord family, and he wastes his youth gambling in town and visiting brothels, spending his family's fortune without a second thought, certain that the wealth his ancestors built will always be there to catch him no matter how recklessly he lives.
At home, Fugui treats his pregnant wife Jiazhen with open cruelty, humiliating her in the street and mocking her devotion in front of others, indifferent to the child she is carrying; still she stays loyal to him, absorbing the contempt of a husband who does not yet deserve her patience.
His recklessness finally catches up with him one long night at the gambling table against Long Er: hand after hand slips away until Fugui has lost not just his money but the entire ancestral estate — every field and the family house itself — to a man he barely respects.
To honor the debt, Fugui's aging father is forced to sell what remains of their holdings and formally hand the property over to Long Er; the public disgrace of losing everything the family built proves unbearable, and not long after, the old man collapses and dies of shame.
Jiazhen's own father arrives soon after, carrying his pregnant daughter home in a sedan chair rather than let her share in Fugui's disgrace any longer; he takes her away, but their young daughter Fengxia is left behind in the ruined household, still in Fugui's care.
Stripped of everything, Fugui swallows his pride and goes to rent five mu of land from Long Er, the very man who won his estate at the gambling table, and for the first time in his life he works the soil himself, learning what real labor costs.
Months later, Jiazhen chooses to return on her own, walking away from her father's comfortable house to share Fugui's poverty instead, and she brings with her their newborn son, Youqing, born while she was away; battered but reunited, the family is at last whole and poor together.
Changgen, once a trusted servant in the wealthy Xu household, now wanders the roads as an aged beggar, reduced by the same collapse that ruined the family he served; crossing paths with them again by chance, he presses a small gift into little Fengxia's hands before disappearing for good.
When Fugui's mother falls gravely ill, he sets out along the road to fetch her medicine, but soldiers stop him before he can return, seizing him off the street and forcing him into the Nationalist army, so that a simple errand turns into years of separation from his family.
Dragged into the chaos and terror of civil war, Fugui finds an unlikely friend in fellow conscript Chunsheng, and the two men lean on each other through freezing nights, exhausting marches, and empty stomachs, their shared misery forging a loyalty that will outlast the war itself.
Starvation and constant shelling grind the unit down week after week, and their comrade Old Quan finally succumbs to it, dying before the fighting even ends, leaving Fugui and Chunsheng to wonder grimly whether either of them will live long enough to see home again.
When the Liberation Army eventually overtakes the remaining soldiers and releases them rather than punishing them, Fugui is set free at last, and after nearly two years away from everything he knew, he makes the long journey back to the village he left behind as a conscript.
Home offers no relief from loss: Fugui learns that his mother died of her illness not long after he was taken, and that a violent fever swept through while he was gone, leaving their daughter Fengxia permanently deaf and mute, unable to speak or hear him now.
Not long after his return, sweeping land reform passes through the countryside, and the five mu that Fugui had only ever rented is officially redistributed into his name — for the first time in his life, the former wastrel finds himself a legitimate landowner in his own right.
Long Er, still holding the land that was once the Xu estate, is classified as a landlord under the new order and executed for it — meaning Fugui's most humiliating loss, the gambling debt that ruined him, had unknowingly spared his life from the very same fate.
For a time Fengxia is sent to live with another family as a helper, expected to earn her keep there, but she slips away on her own and walks home simply out of longing for her parents; moved, Fugui vows he will never send her away again.
In 1958 the new rural communes sweep in and confiscate household property and livestock wholesale, and the Great Leap Forward's campaigns order even ordinary pots, pans, and tools melted down to meet iron quotas, leaving Fugui and Jiazhen with almost nothing they can call their own.
The communal kitchens that were meant to feed everyone soon collapse under mismanagement, and famine spreads through the whole region; the family scrapes by on rice quietly given by Jiazhen's father, along with foraged tree bark and grass roots, just enough to keep them from starving outright.
Amid the hunger, cold, and unrelenting labor of those years, Jiazhen's body begins to betray her: a degenerative illness sets into her bones and muscles, and with each passing month standing upright, walking, and working the fields grow harder and more painful for her to manage.
As harvests slowly recover and the worst of the famine passes, Youqing grows into a diligent, deeply likable schoolboy who raises sheep and rabbits after class to help feed the family, delighting his father with how hard, cheerful, and uncomplaining he is in everything he does.
When the county magistrate's wife suffers dangerous, uncontrolled bleeding during a difficult childbirth, local officials organize a blood drive at Youqing's school, lining up the children, Youqing among them, to donate blood so that doctors can try to save the woman's life.
Careless and hurried, the medical staff favor the magistrate's wife and drain far more blood from small Youqing than his body can spare, and he collapses and dies on the spot — and to Fugui's horror, the magistrate whose wife was saved turns out to be his old wartime friend Chunsheng.
Grief nearly breaks him, but Fugui cannot bring himself to take revenge on the friend who once starved and froze beside him in the war; Jiazhen, colder in her fury, refuses every attempt Chunsheng makes to offer money or comfort in exchange for their son's life.
Years later Fengxia meets Erxi, a local Red Guard leader with a crooked, permanently tilted head, whose gruff public authority hides an unexpected gentleness he reserves for her alone, even sending his own workers to quietly repair the roof of the family's crumbling house.
Erxi's tenderness toward Fengxia never wavers despite her deafness and muteness, and the two eventually marry in a match neither family expected, giving Fugui and Jiazhen a rare, unclouded stretch of real happiness after so many years of loss and grinding hardship.
As the Cultural Revolution turns violently against former officials, Chunsheng is denounced as a capitalist roader and persecuted relentlessly; broken and desperate, he visits the Xus once in secret, and Jiazhen, setting aside her old bitterness, tells him plainly that he still owes their family a life.
Jiazhen begs him to endure whatever comes and simply keep living, insisting that surviving is itself the debt he owes them, but the torture and humiliation continue without mercy, and Chunsheng, unable to bear it any longer, takes his own life in direct defiance of her plea.
Fengxia and Erxi move back into the household to help care for the aging, ailing Fugui and Jiazhen, and before long Fengxia becomes pregnant, filling the exhausted family with a fragile new hope they had not expected to feel again after so much grief.
When her time comes, Fengxia goes into labor and delivers a healthy son, whom the family names Kugen, meaning bitter root — a name that quietly carries the whole family's hard history inside a single small, hopeful new life.
Almost immediately after Kugen's birth, Fengxia begins to hemorrhage uncontrollably, and despite the frantic efforts of everyone in the delivery room, the bleeding cannot be stopped; she dies there within hours, leaving her newborn son motherless before he has even left the hospital.
Jiazhen, already gravely weakened by her long illness and now having outlived both of her children, fails quickly in the aftermath of Fengxia's death and dies not long after her, leaving Fugui alone to raise his infant grandson without either of the boy's parents.
Fugui eventually leaves the village behind and moves into town to live with his son-in-law Erxi and his grandson Kugen, the three of them piecing together a small, makeshift family out of whatever is left after so many losses.
Then disaster strikes the family yet again: at a construction site, Erxi is caught and crushed to death between two heavy concrete slabs in a sudden workplace accident, leaving four-year-old Kugen without a single living parent.
Fugui takes his young grandson back to the village and raises him alone for years afterward; when Kugen is about seven, left briefly with a pot of beans while ravenously hungry, the boy gorges himself on far too many of them and dies from it.
Utterly alone now, having buried his parents, his wife, both his children, and his grandson, Fugui goes to a butcher and buys a tired old ox marked for slaughter, sparing its life on impulse and naming the animal Fugui, after himself.
Having listened to the entire story, the narrator leaves the old man there in the field at dusk, calling out to his ox the names of everyone he has lost as if to keep it company, and walks away leaving Fugui and the ox alive together in the fading light.
What it means
Fugui's stubborn refusal to stop living, loss piled on loss, is the novel's whole quiet argument: existence needs no achievement, reward, or witness to justify itself — merely to endure, to keep working and breathing through whatever comes, is itself the entire meaning of a human life.
🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.
