One Bright Moon

by Andrew Kwong

  Building the dam required moving mountains of earth across a valley. The volunteer labourers used their spades and hoes to break the virgin ground. They carried the rocks and soil on their backs in sacks and baskets, or in carts pulled by teams of other workers and an occasional water buffalo or two.

  Every Monday before sunrise, Baba set out on foot for another week at the dam site. Before he left home he would stroke our faces and kiss us goodbye while we were still asleep. He usually returned home on Saturday evenings, wheeling an empty wooden tank to collect nightsoil from residents in the street; he and his fellow workers transported this human fertiliser to the hills, where they grew vegetables to supplement their diet. This was their extra contribution to the Great Leap Forward. Baba told us how the red earth at the dam site was clay-ridden and dry, only good for weeds and the tough pines. It took him months to loosen and prepare the soil near his hut before he could grow sweet potatoes and other hardy vegetables. He tended to his small garden with the little spare time he had between his daily ten hours of volunteer labour and his evening meetings. ‘It gives me respite watching the vegetables grow,’ I overheard him tell Mama.

  At bedtime I often listened to the quiet rumbles of their voices in our shared room. They discussed how the family would survive the unpredictable continual revolution Chairman Mao demanded, and now the worsening starvation as well. I had no idea what they meant by surviving something unpredictable, but from their tone and the way they whispered during the day, they seemed to be concerned that something serious and urgent was imminent. I wasn’t sure if it was revolutionary or counter-revolutionary. Whenever I turned to listen, they changed the subject and smiled to show their contentment that we were together. That togetherness was important for our happiness, even though it didn’t completely reassure me. It seemed to be the most important thing the family possessed, and it helped me feel more confident as I worked hard towards finally getting my Red Scarf at school.

  CHAPTER 13

  At the height of the famine in 1960, we arrived home from school to find our Street Committee Member supervising a gang of workers who were building brick walls against one side of the levee wall to create a series of rectangular, one-metre-deep reservoirs; these would be subsequently filled with water. Even though we could still reach the top of the levee wall by climbing onto the reservoir walls first, they dramatically shrank our playground.

  We heard the workers saying how the smooth concrete surface of the street was ideal for holding water. The Street Committee Member was excited about cultivating some green algae in these ponds; she said that brilliant scientists somewhere up north had discovered rich protein in this algae that would supplement our diet. It looked as though our hunger might soon be over. Our hopes surged once more, like Red Star, our champion kite, soaring into the bright sky.

  Ah-dong rubbed his big tummy with his skinny hand. ‘It’s a shame about the wall, but think about the food, my friends.’

  ‘Yeah, anything for more food,’ I agreed, wondering exactly what, how and when.

  Every day we fastened our gaze on the new ugly structures that had taken over our street, hoping to witness the promised revolutionary phenomenon erupting soon in Kwong Street. The water was greening rapidly before our eyes with billions of tiny particles. There we hung our hope.

  ‘See, we’ll be big and strong one day,’ said Ah-dong, flexing his tiny arms and straightening his back to look taller, though he couldn’t tuck in his belly. Yiu-hoi was too tired to talk. Others nodded.

  Each day we sat on the levee wall, breathing in the faint but nauseating smell of the concentrated algae, and felt proud to have made sacrifices for the revolution.

  One day, curiosity overtook us. When those in charge weren’t looking, we jumped off the wall, scooped up the thickened green muck and examined it closely. It smelled almost like Ah-ki when he’d slipped into the sewer pit when he was younger, after using the public lavatory near the commune’s vegetable garden.

  We screwed up our noses and yelled out, ‘Yuck, how can we eat this?’

  ‘No way would I eat this,’ said Ah-dong, trying to expel the odour from his lungs. Yiu-hoi and Earring nodded. Weng and Ah-ki just stared, too lethargic to be bothered.

  ‘Me neither,’ said Yiu-hoi. ‘I’d rather eat rats.’

  ‘Ah-dong,’ I said, ‘why don’t you go and ask your mother how she’ll cook this stuff?’

  So Ah-dong headed off and soon returned holding a piece of cake. ‘My mother said this is how you cook with the algae: you put it in anything from rice to cake, even biscuits,’ he declared, trying to look authoritative.

  Even from ten steps away, the scent of the cake’s burnt crust was mouth-watering. My stomach rumbled in a frenzy, aching and cramping more than ever. I was ready to offer Ah-dong my leadership of the gang in return for the cake.

  ‘Great Leap Forward cake,’ he affirmed, his sallow face beaming with pride, albeit faintly.

  He broke it into small pieces, one each, and I gulped mine down in one mouthful. The burnt crust was tarry and bitter. It stuck to my throat like the black oil used for cooking vegetables, almost suffocating me. But at least it was soft and edible: a mixture of pumpkin, sweet potato, lentils and the algae, all bound together with a coarse, greasy flour made from rice husks.

  We stayed on the wall and swung our legs, and thanked Chairman Mao for the treat.

  ‘My mother told me they used to feed this stuff to the pigs,’ Ah-dong said with a devilish grin. ‘But it’s really good for us to eat it now.’

  ‘Then what do we feed the pigs with?’ Yiu-hoi asked. The forward-thinker in the gang, he was concerned there would be no pork on public holidays.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Ah-dong said, ‘Chairman Mao will guide us.’

  We nodded in agreement, happy that we didn’t need to care about such things as food: we had our Great Leader to lean on.

  ‘And if things get worse . . .’ Ah-dong mumbled unexpectedly as we stared into the east. He said it with a solemn tone that was most unusual from him. ‘I’ll sell myself to child-eaters for one hundred yuan to feed my family,’ he declared.

  A chill rose like a glacial bath in the lotus pond. I trembled.

  In those days, there were no newspapers or radio broadcasts about what was happening in the PRC, let alone the rest of the world, just Party propaganda. However, as the famine grew worse, news of increasing hardship circulated among the adults in Shiqi from those who had travelled to other provinces on government business; they said the worst-affected places were inland villages and towns where natural disasters had wiped out the harvest. But the hushed news that many people had starved to death was too hard for us children to comprehend. There were also stories of people eating the flesh of those who’d died – and, later, of abducted young children. I shivered each time I heard those stories, and began to think of death again.

  Death was the man shot at Pig Head Hill, his body spurting blood in every direction, slumping, writhing and then not moving. Or it was those unhappy people who had jumped off tall buildings in Hong Kong, or leapt into wells or the Wonder River, or hanged themselves on the lychee trees at night. Death was also the many heroes and martyrs of the Long March and the Korean War who’d died for the revolution, and whose names would live on forever.

  But when I had visualised my own death in the predawn darkness, while sitting alone on the wall, it had involved a surreal sense of peace and rebirth. There, darkness was always followed by light; as winter is followed by spring, morning would come again, and the dragon boats return with the seasons, year after year.

  Ah-dong’s idea of selling himself to be eaten was a big shock to me. From that moment, my understanding of death changed completely. To be eaten meant an end, a disappearance, a noreturn, like the deaths of the frogs, fish, rats and sparrows we ate.

  ‘No, Ah-dong,’ I hastened to say to him on hearing his morbid declaration, ‘I wouldn’t do it unless someone paid my mother a thousand yuan.’ I had no i
dea how much that was: to me, the one-yuan bill was a large amount, enough for my family to carry on for a few more days while waiting for our living allowances from Hong Kong. A thousand yuan would last us a lot, lot longer and definitely ease Mama’s constant financial worries.

  Yiu-hoi agreed, but with despair on his face. We then looked at one another and said nothing for a long while. When the dinner bell rang, we jumped off the levee wall and headed for our street’s dining room.

  My bowl was full of fluffy, tasteless thrice-cooked rice mixed with slimy algae, and some soggy brown cabbage with a hint of soy. There was a small piece of fish fried in black oil that always burned my throat, so to soothe it I gulped down a few big mouthfuls of rice.

  Weng screwed up her face and complained that it was awful.

  ‘Eat up,’ Ying told her. ‘It will make you grow, and stop your hunger pangs.’ Then she added: ‘You wouldn’t want to eat dead people’s flesh, would you?’

  Shutting my eyes and trying not to smell it, I concentrated on shoving what was left in my bowl into my eager mouth with my chopsticks. I kept wondering just how quickly the algae protein would make me grow bigger and stronger.

  *

  In the weeks that followed, we spent a lot of time debating the nutritional value of green algae. We measured the width of our arms every day, and tried to forget our screams of pain when we strained hard to defecate, sometimes bleeding as we excreted the algae in black lumps into the toilet over the fishpond. Our faeces sank like rocks, and the fish didn’t rush for them like they used to.

  The Street Committee Member diligently assessed the algae crop to make sure it would provide enough sustenance. ‘Precious Ones,’ she sang out to us one day, ‘I want you boys to pee into each pond every day to help the algae grow faster.’

  ‘What?’ we replied.

  ‘Yes, a wee a day in each pond by each of you will make the plants multiply quickly and grow faster. Kwong Street will produce the best crop in the whole of Shiqi. Virgin boys’ pee is the best.’ The woman’s tired eyes were vague, her jaundiced face glowing greener by the pond. Her voice had lost the authority it once commanded.

  Ah-dong jumped off the wall and took the lead. ‘Come on, boys, let’s see whose wee shoots the farthest.’

  We all stood up.

  ‘One. Two. Three. Go!’ When Ah-dong gave the order, a dozen boys pissed into the pond.

  When I told Weng and Ying what we’d done, they refused to eat their dinner.

  ‘I’d rather be eating grass roots,’ said Ying. ‘At least they don’t smell like your pee.’

  She was talking about the kikuyu grass with its long white roots, which the boys and I had already been eating as a snack; it was sweet and easy to chew, as were the tiny, sour, turnip-like roots of the clovers. My family was fortunate: with the money sent and food brought from Hong Kong, we didn’t have to eat grass roots to survive – not yet. But many townspeople did, and the roots were getting scarce.

  ‘Suppose we’re lucky,’ Ying said later at home, after retelling some stories she’d heard of children being eaten in provinces not far away.

  My legs trembled when I heard those stories, and they nauseated me. No wonder Mama was worried about us going to and from school, especially little Weng, who at eight looked more like a five-year-old. Her big round eyes now appeared even bigger on her shrinking face.

  *

  One evening not long after Baba’s release, Ah-dong’s mother announced that the commune dining hall would be closed for good. ‘We’re going back to the old system of rations and vouchers for rice, meat, oil and kerosene,’ she told us.

  After nearly three years of eating with the people in our street every day, Mama felt uneasy about taking on the cooking and budgeting again, and dreaded lining up in those long queues to buy food. She also worried about how the rations of fourteen kilograms of rice a month for each adult (half of that for each child), thirty millilitres of black cooking oil (the lowest grade of oil, which Baba called leftovers), and 250 grams of meat per person would see us through the long month. One consolation might be greater variety of vegetables, although everything was in short supply.

  Broadcasts from the street-corner loudspeakers blared from morning to night to inform us that this wasn’t starvation, just rationing to share the burden equally. The authorities continued to blame the food shortages on natural disasters and the theft of grain by sparrows, mice, locusts and rats, as well as the Russian debts.

  Baba made no comment about any of this. Instead, he obtained permission from the District Head to fish in waterways further away from home, after sharing his Red Flag cigarettes with the good comrade.

  *

  Whenever we were desperate for food, Ping and Grandmother Young would take turns to come home with their quota of provisions. Sometimes they would travel together, especially during longer school vacations. Mama and Aunt Wai-hung always waited at the bus stop for their arrival, frightened that they would be robbed on their way to us. Weng, Ying and I would join our mother and aunt after finishing school. What scared us most was the recent story of two bicycle couriers who’d killed their passengers from Macau for the food they carried; when the murderers were caught, they were promptly taken to Pig Head Hill.

  Although the town’s small fleet of buses had grown, the operators found it hard to transport the increasing number of people from Hong Kong and Macau who brought food for their starving relatives. The buses ran late into the night, and on several occasions Ping and Grandmother Young didn’t arrive until after midnight. I would wait with Mama, Weng and Ying at the bus station until they turned up, then we’d head home together through the dark and narrow streets of Shiqi, feeling more secure as a crowd.

  The District Head continued to pay a visit each time Ping or Grandmother Young came home. He was thankful for each tin of sweetened condensed milk, and the Camel cigarettes. Our tin of condensed milk lasted three or four days with careful rationing and diluting. Mama insisted that we drink it inside our room, but I often snuck my cupful out to the levee wall where Ah-dong waited. We’d share it and feel better together. Other times, it would be Yiu-wei, Yiu-hoi or Ah-ki’s turn.

  Even with extra food, we were always hungry. We were small and thin like the others in Shiqi. Only our bellies grew bigger, until we all looked like Ah-dong. Mama tried various herbal remedies to clear our infestations; nothing helped. Whenever Ping and Grandmother brought food, the tinges of green and yellow in our sallow complexions would disappear for a few days, but it didn’t take long for them to reappear.

  *

  By late 1960, people had begun dying in the streets of Shiqi, and the situation got much worse over the following months. It terrified me to watch sanitation workers collecting the corpses of the sick and homeless from the streets in the early mornings. A few days later, newcomers would occupy the places of the dead, and a few days later their bodies would be collected.

  It was even worse in winter, when Shiqi trembled in darkness. The dim streetlights flickered in the chilly north wind. When it howled, the town rattled. In the dark people tripped over bodies and let out screams. We all kept our eyes wide open as we walked holding hands. Ah-dong’s mother was worried when even the Party members’ rations were cut, even though they were still better off than the rest of us.

  As the winter deepened, at school we shouted our slogans with less conviction, and political studies lost their meaning. We were still studying the hardship and endeavour of the Long March, hoping to find inspiration, but it failed to drive away our hunger and lift our spirits. I was petrified by the thought that Ah-dong might offer to sell himself for a hundred yuan.

  The dam-building slowed down in winter, but Mama was still working at the nursery, and on weekday evenings she did volunteer work, making string from hemp and palm fibres. She soaked the dried material in water for days until it was soft, then she removed the hard skin and peeled the fibres into long, fine pieces. Holding three at a time, she twisted them together to fo
rm one long string that she pressed and rolled on her thigh. As the string grew in length it was collected in a straw tray, and when dry it was reeled into a big ball. She delivered the string to the commune hall, where it was spun into small ropes by other workers. The skin of my mother’s thigh turned brown, the colour of the raw fibres. It was callused and dry, and would crack and bleed in winter. She changed to rolling the strings on the other thigh until it, too, cracked and bled. By then the other thigh had healed. She kept on making string, and never complained. The lonely shadow of her thin figure under the kerosene lamp moved back and forth on the wall late into the night. As well, she still managed occasional Tiger Mouth Pond building duties but said most people were too weak and lethargic to continue.

  ‘I’m not well tonight, no appetite,’ I remember Mama often said to Ying. ‘Divide the food among yourselves. Don’t waste any, not even one grain.’ She then went to bed without making string.

  It took little time for us to gobble up every grain of rice in her bowl. But it took a long time for us to realise that she didn’t eat so she could feed her starving children.

  CHAPTER 14

  On the eve of Chinese New Year in early 1961, an army truck full of festivity supplies struck the manure tub Baba was wheeling home. The impact smashed the tub into splinters and threw him onto the narrow gravel road. He sustained a serious injury to his right hip and had to be carried home in a cart by his fellow dam-building volunteers. A huge bruise covered his buttocks and spread down his right thigh to below his knee. He was in agony and unable to move, let alone bear any weight. Mama called for the town’s herbalist, who had a reputation for treating fractures, and under his direction she boiled herbs and made poultices. We kids helped by collecting wild herbs from the countryside, as well as from neighbours and friends.