In the movie "To Live" the main characters in the movie gone through a lot of loses and a lot of suffering. There are many ways to explain why such unfortunate events always happens to them, but look at the big picture, there is one root cause that created all the ripples effect. The one root cause is the time that they live in, the events that were happening at the time, another word, they Communist revolution that's sweeping across China. Even though it seems like they are living a better life when the Communist party took over China, they end up losing their first born daughter and second son because of that.
             During the movie, when the district director was visiting the elementary school, the mother wanted the son to stay home and sleep because he didn't get much sleep the night before. But according to the father, it would be counter-revolutionary of them to keep their son home when the director is visiting, and because of that, they force their son to go to school even though he is really tired. Later on in the movie, who find out that the son fell asleep behind a wall and the district director's car hit the wall which crushed the son to death. Now if the father didn't have that idea behind his head, that he have to be a good citizen and set a good example, he'd let the son stay home, and the son would've died.
             Also when their daughter was pregnant, and she went to the hospital, the family was nervous that all the doctors in the hospital were on teenagers but all the elder doctors were arrested for being counter-revolutionaries. They were out and find one of the professors from the hospital to watch over the operation. During the operation, the young doctors run into a problem that they were too inexperienced for, the older professor could've saved the daughter's life, but he was starved by the red guards and then choked on the buns that the dad gave to him. Their d
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