Through my American history classes and an handful of acquaintances, I am familiar with the idea of a draft. While the general idea is frightening because no one should be forced to go fight a way, I can understand where is coming from when they call up a person’s number and require them to report for duty. At least in this situation there is some sort of system that also includes exemptions and deferments.
I was surprised to read about Fugui’s conscription into the Nationalist army. Many of the other aspects of his army experience were familiar, like the dangers of deserting and the moans of wounded soldiers. The idea of being found on the street and thrown into an army, on the other hand, was completely foreign to me. Fugui had no say in his life from that moment until his release two years later.
A 2000 article from Los Angeles Time provides another glimpse of this strange event. Conscription really was just as random as it was depicted in To Live. According to the article, just after Fugui would have been in the army, “the last of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces retreated from the mainland in 1950, they took with them more than 4,000 …show more content…
Sometimes Fugui is talking about a general time in his life and then he is suddenly talking about one specific day. For instance, on page 71 Hua has Fugui describing the large numbers of wounded soldiers and suddenly on page 72 he is describing the snow falling on the specific day the gunfire ceased. Fugui jumps from generalizations about the time to specific days between paragraphs, so the timeline is somewhat confusing. I expect Fugui to say something like “and then, one day, blank happened,” but instead Hua writes Fugui’s scattered stream of thought. While I recognize that this is meant to be a recounting of Fugui’s memories and there may be confusing parts, I still find it hard to
I was surprised to read about Fugui’s conscription into the Nationalist army. Many of the other aspects of his army experience were familiar, like the dangers of deserting and the moans of wounded soldiers. The idea of being found on the street and thrown into an army, on the other hand, was completely foreign to me. Fugui had no say in his life from that moment until his release two years later.
A 2000 article from Los Angeles Time provides another glimpse of this strange event. Conscription really was just as random as it was depicted in To Live. According to the article, just after Fugui would have been in the army, “the last of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces retreated from the mainland in 1950, they took with them more than 4,000 …show more content…
Sometimes Fugui is talking about a general time in his life and then he is suddenly talking about one specific day. For instance, on page 71 Hua has Fugui describing the large numbers of wounded soldiers and suddenly on page 72 he is describing the snow falling on the specific day the gunfire ceased. Fugui jumps from generalizations about the time to specific days between paragraphs, so the timeline is somewhat confusing. I expect Fugui to say something like “and then, one day, blank happened,” but instead Hua writes Fugui’s scattered stream of thought. While I recognize that this is meant to be a recounting of Fugui’s memories and there may be confusing parts, I still find it hard to