To Live tells the story of a couple beginning in the 1940s. The wife is Jiazhen, and her husband is Fugui, a spineless man who loses the family money at the gambling table. When the family is reduced to poverty, Fugui has to learn how to support his family, which he does by finding a calling as part of a shadow-puppet troupe. He is dragged right away from a performance and forced to become a soldier, one of the Nationalists enlisted to fight Mao's Communist revolutionaries then battling to take over China proper. When his detachment is wiped out, Fugui switches to the other side and

Throughout the film, the puppet show becomes a device whereby Zhang mixes imagery and uses the shadows to represent ideas, attitudes, and the conception of art reshaping life. Indeed, Zhang makes the puppet show seem like his own means of catharsis, a symbolic representation of the way he himself has found to overcome the ills the revolution thrust upon him as a child so that now he as well creates shadows on a much larger screen, the shadows of the film itself. Fugui in this sense is a filmmaker with a white screen on which an imperfect black and white world stands in for the real world, much as the cinema screen stands in for the real world for Zhang now that the has achieved his position as director. The importance of the screen is evident when a bayonet splits it in half during a show as war interrupts art and life as Fugui is taken into the army.

For the three daughters, this learning experience is bound with sexual tension as they pursue different love interests. The members of the family live in a swirl of food and food preparation, but while this might signal a strong sense of life and gusto for a different family, for this family their reactions show how repressed they have become. This film is an affirmation of the power of family in this case by showing what happens when that strong force is blunted. The film itself treats these family members as part of a whole even if they want to be individuals, and the film does not explore their individuality that much but instead shows how the pursuit of individuality harms the primary social unit, the family. The members of this family barely talk to one another even at the table, where it is expected that they would and that they would be able to solve their problems, help one another, and nurture their relationships as well as their bodies. Instead, they eat resent

Some common words found in the essay are:
Chef Taipei, Indeed Zhang, Cultural Revolution, Ang Lee, Drink Woman, China United, , Forward Chinese, Mao's Communist, family endures, drink woman, eat drink woman, Zhang Yimou, eat drink, stands real world, revolutionary regime, shared fantasy, real world, family life, zhang mixes, drink woman family, stands real, woman family,
Approximate Word count = 1241
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)