Family is the central social unit in Chinese society and has been for centuries, and the family is given great deference in Chinese thought and serves as a unifying force as well as the institution to which the individual returns again and again for strength and identity. The family often serves as the central social institution in Chinese films, and this can be seen in To Live (Zhang Yimou, 1994) and Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994). In both films, family rituals accepted in Chinese society, like eating together, are distorted by circumstances, political action, or personal resentments that interfere with the proper course of family life.

             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 becomes a revolutionary. .

             In the 1950s the family lives through the era known as the Great Leap Forward, a time when all Chinese are expected to sacrifice for the good of the revolution. For the family, this means giving up their pots and pans and using backyard smelters to produce metal for the revolution. Zhang mixes the story of this one family with the story of the nation from the 1940s through the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and it is the latter era that is given particular attention and made to seem particularly farcical. The family endures terrible personal losses over the decades, while the nation has its own kind of losses and demands its own sorts of sacrifices from its citizens, often at odds with what this family really needs or desires.