Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (39 page)

I had little idea that famine was raging all around me.

One day on my way to school, as I was eating a small steamed roll, someone rushed up and snatched it from my hands.  As I was recovering from the shock, I caught a glimpse of a very thin, dark back in shorts and bare feet running down the mud alley with his hand to his mouth, devouring the roll.  When I told my parents what had happened, my father's eyes were terribly sad.  He stroked my head and said, "You are lucky.  Other children like you are starving."

I often had to visit the hospital for my teeth at that time.

Whenever I went there I had an attack of nausea at the horrible sight of dozens of people with shiny, almost transparent swollen limbs, as big as barrels.  The patients were carried to the hospital on flat carts, there were so many of them.  When I asked my dentist what was wrong with them, she said with a sigh, "Edema."  I asked her what that meant, and she mumbled something which I vaguely linked with food.

These people with edema were mostly peasants.  Starvation was much worse in the countryside because there were no guaranteed rations. Government policy was to provide food for the cities first, and commune officials were having to seize gram from the peasants by force.  In many areas, peasants who tried to hide food were arrested, or beaten and tortured.  Commune officials who were reluctant to take food from the hungry peasants were themselves dismissed, and some were physically maltreated.  As a result, the peasants who had actually grown the food died in the millions all over China.

I learned later that several of my relatives from Sichuan to Manchuria had died in this famine.  Among them was my father's retarded brother. His mother had died in 1958, and when the famine struck he was unable to cope as he would not listen to anyone else's advice.  Rations were allotted on a monthly basis, and he ate his within days, leaving nothing for the rest of the month.  He soon starved to death.  My grandmother's sister, Lan, and her husband, "Loyalty' Pei-o, who had been sent to the inhospitable countryside in the far north of Manchuria because of his old connection with Kuomintang intelligence, both died too.  As food began to run out, the village authorities allocated supplies according to their own, unwritten priorities.

Pei-o's outcast status meant that he and his wife were among the first to be denied food.  Their children survived because their parents gave their food to them.  The father of Yu-lin's wife also died.  At the end, he had eaten the stuffing in his pillow and the braids of garlic plants.

One night, when I was about eight, a tiny, very old looking woman, her face a mass of wrinkles, walked into our house.  She looked so thin and feeble it seemed a puff of wind would blow her down.  She dropped to the ground in front of my mother and banged her forehead on the floor, calling her 'the savior of my daughter."  She was our maid's mother.

"If it wasn't for you," she said, 'my daughter would not survive .... I did not grasp the full meaning of this until a month later, when a letter came for our maid.

It said that her mother had died soon after visiting our house, where she had passed on the news that her husband and her younger son were dead.  I will never forget the heart-rending sobs of our maid as she stood on the terrace, leaning against a wooden pillar and stifling her moans in her handkerchief.  My grandmother sat cross-legged on her bed, weeping as well.  I hid myself in a corner outside my grandmother's mosquito net.  I could hear my grandmother saying to herself: "The Communists are good, but all these people are dead .... Years later, I heard that our maid's other brother and her sister-in-law died soon after this.

Landlords' families were placed at the bottom of the list for food in a starving commune.

In 1989 an official who had been working in famine relief told me that he believed that the total number of people who had died in Sichuan was seven million.  This would be 10 percent of the entire population of a rich province.  An accepted estimate for the death toll for the whole country is around thirty million.

One day in 1960, the three-year-old daughter of my aunt Jun-ying's next-door neighbor in Yibin went missing.

A few weeks later the neighbor saw a young girl playing in the street wearing a dress that looked like her daughter's.

She went up and examined it: it had a mark which identified it as her daughter's.  She reported this to the police.

It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling wind-dried meat.  They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and sold them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices.  The couple were executed and the case was hushed up, but it was widely known that baby killing did go on at the time.

Years later I met an old colleague of my father's, a very kind and capable man, not given to exaggeration.  He told me with great emotion what he had seen during the famine in one particular commune. Thirty-five percent of the peasants had died, in an area where the harvest had been good although little was collected, since the men had been pulled out to produce steel, and the commune canteen had wasted a large proportion of what there was.  One day a peasant burst into his room and threw himself on the floor, screaming that he had committed a terrible crime and begging to be punished.  Eventually it came out that he had killed his own baby and eaten it.  Hunger had been like an uncontrollable force driving him to take up the knife.  With tears rolling down his cheeks, the official ordered the peasant to be arrested.  Later he was shot as a warning to baby killers.

One official explanation for the famine was that Khrushchev had suddenly forced China to pay back a large debt it had incurred during the Korean War in order to come to the aid of North Korea.  The regime played on the experience of much of the population, who had been landless peasants and could remember being hounded by heartless creditors to pay rent or reimburse loans.  By identifying the Soviet Union, Mao also created an external enemy to take the blame and to rally the population.

Another cause mentioned was 'unprecedented natural calamities."  China is a vast country, and bad weather causes food shortages somewhere every year.  No one but the highest leaders had access to nationwide information about the weather.  In fact, given the immobility of the population, few knew what happened in the next region, or even over the next mountain.  Many thought then, and still think today, that the famine was caused by natural disasters. I have no full picture, but of all the people I have talked to from different parts of China, few knew of natural calamities in their regions.  They only have stories to tell about deaths from starvation.

At a conference for 7,000 top-ranking officials at the beginning of 1962, Mao said that the famine was caused 7o percent by natural disasters and 3o percent by human error.  President Liu Shaoqi chipped in, apparently on the spur of the moment, that it was caused 3o percent by natural disasters and 7o percent by human error.  My father was at the conference, and when he returned he said to my mother: "I fear Comrade Shaoqi is going to be in trouble."

When the speeches were relayed to lower-rank officials like my mother, President Liu's assessment was cut out.

The population at large was not even told about Mao's figures.  This concealing of information did help keep the people quiet, and there were no audible complaints against the Communist Party.  Quite apart from the fact that most dissenters had been killed off or otherwise suppressed in the past few years, whether the Communist Party was to blame was far from clear to the general population.  There was no corruption in the sense of officials hoarding grain.

Party officials were only marginally better off than the ordinary people.  In fact, in some villages they themselves starved first and died first.  The famine was worse than anything under the Kuomintang, but it looked different:

in the Kuomintang days, starvation took place alongside blatant unchecked extravagance.

Before the famine, many Communist officials from landlords' families had brought their parents to stay with them in the cities.  When the famine hit, the Party gave orders for these elderly men and women to be sent back to their villages to share the hard life meaning starvation with the local peasants.  The idea was that Communist officials should not be seen to be using their privileges to benefit their 'class-enemy' parents.  Some grandparents of friends of mine had to leave Chengdu and died in the famine.

Most peasants lived in a world where they did not look much beyond the boundary of the village, and they blamed the famine on their immediate bosses for giving them all the catastrophic orders.  There were popular rhymes to the effect that the Party leadership was good, only the grass-roots officials were rotten.

The Great Leap Forward and the appalling famine shook my parents deeply.  Although they did not have the full picture, they did not believe that 'natural calamities' were the explanation.  But their overwhelming feeling was one of guilt.  Working in the field of propaganda, they were right in the center of the misinformation machine.  To salve his conscience, and to avoid the dishonest daily routine, my father volunteered to help with famine relief in the communes.  This meant staying and starving with the peasants.  In doing so, he was 'sharing weal and woo with the masses," in line with Mao's instructions, but it was resented by his staff.  They had to take turns going with him, which they hated, because it meant going hungry.

From late 1959 to 1961, in the worst period of the famine, I seldom saw my father.  In the countryside he ate the leaves of sweet potatoes, herbs, and tree bark like the peasants.  One day he was walking along a bank between the paddy fields when he saw a skeletal peasant moving extremely slowly, and with obvious difficulty, in the distance.  Then the man suddenly disappeared.  When my father rushed over, he was lying in the field, dead of starvation.

Every day my father was devastated by what he saw, although he hardly saw the worst, because in the customary manner local officials surrounded him everywhere he went.

But he suffered bad hepatomegaly and edema and deep depression. Several times when he came back from his trips he went straight into the hospital.  In the summer of 1961, he stayed there for months.  He had changed.  He was no longer the assured puritan of yesteryear.  The Party was not pleased with him.  He was criticized for 'letting his revolutionary will wane' and ordered out of the hospital.

He took to spending a lot of time fishing.  Across from the hospital there was a lovely river called the Jade Brook.

Willows bent over to stroke its surface with their curving shoots, and clouds melted and solidified in their many reflections.  I used to sit on its sloping bank gazing at the clouds and watching my father fish. The smell was of human manure.  On top of the bank were the hospital grounds, which had once been flowerbeds, but had now been turned into vegetable fields to supply the staff and patients with additional food. When I close my eyes now, I can still see the larvae of the butterflies eating away at the cabbage leaves.  My brothers caught them for my father to use as bait.  The fields had a pathetic look.

The doctors and nurses were obviously no experts on farming.

Throughout history Chinese scholars and mandarins had traditionally taken up fishing when they were disillusioned with what the emperor was doing.  Fishing suggested a retreat to nature, an escape from the politics of the day.  It was a kind of symbol for disenchantment and noncooperation.

My father seldom caught any fish, and once wrote a poem with the line: "Not for the fish I go fishing."  But his angling companion, another deputy director of his department, always gave him part of his catch. This was because in 1961, in the middle of the famine, my mother was pregnant again, and the Chinese regard fish as essential for the development of a baby's hair.  She had not wanted another child.  Among other things, she and my father were on salaries, which meant the state no longer provided them with wet-nurses or nannies.  With four children, my grandmother, and part of my father's family to support, they did not have a lot of money to spare.  A large chunk of my father's salary went for buying books, particularly huge volumes of classical works, one set of which could cost two months' salary.  Sometimes my mother grumbled slightly: other people in his position dropped hints to the publishing houses and got their copies free, 'for work purposes."  My father insisted on paying for everything.

Sterilization, abortion, and even contraception were difficult.  The Communists had started promoting family planning in 1954, and my mother was in charge of the program in her district.  She was then in an advanced stage of pregnancy with Xiao-her, and often started her meetings with a good-humored self-criticism.  But Mao turned against birth control.  He wanted a big, powerful China, based on a large population.  He said that if the Americans dropped atomic bombs on China, the Chinese would 'just go on reproducing' and reconstitute their numbers at great speed.  He also shared the traditional Chinese peasant's attitude toward children: the more hands the better.  In 1957, he personally named a famous Peking University professor who had advocated birth control as a rightist.  After that, family planning was seldom mentioned.

My mother had become pregnant in 1959, and had written to the Party asking for permission to have an abortion.

This was the standard procedure.  One reason the Party had to give its consent was that the operation was a dangerous one at the time.  My mother had said that she was busy working for the revolution, and could serve the people better if she did not have another baby.  She was granted an abortion, which was dreadfully painful because the method used was primitive.  When she became pregnant again in 1961, another abortion was out of the question in the opinion of the doctors, my mother herself, and the Party., which stipulated a minimum three-year gap between abortions.