by Weijian Shan
It was soon learned that sparrows and other birds were actually “good” birds, not pests, because they do not eat only grain but also crop-eating insects such as locusts. When the birds were killed off, the insects lost their natural enemies and their population exploded, causing damage to crops.
When presented with reports to that effect by researchers from China’s Academy of Sciences, Mao ordered that sparrows be struck off the list of the Four Pests and replaced with bedbugs instead.
At least in Beijing, the population of birds never fully recovered. When I was small, swarms of swallows visited the city every spring. They flew everywhere. Historic buildings such as the Imperial Palace had to be protected with wire mesh to prevent swallows from building nests under their eaves. Today, swallows are rarely seen in Beijing. Neither are bats. Beijing used to see numerous bats in the summer, flying around at dusk and into the night. There were also many dragonflies that flew around in small clouds when it was about to rain. Swallows, bats, and dragonflies have all disappeared from Beijing. I think flies and mosquitoes have largely disappeared as well, but nobody misses them.
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In 1957, the Soviet Union became the first nation to successfully launch a satellite into orbit. China celebrated this achievement by its socialist brothers and henceforth labeled every major achievement as having “launched a satellite.” The Great Leap Forward produced numerous “satellites” in the form of record-breaking feats of production. The numbers stretched credulity. A mu of land, about the size of three tennis courts, typically produced at most 400 kilograms (~880 lbs) of grain. But some places were reporting 5,000 kilograms (~11,000 lbs) per mu or more. It appeared that the productivity of the masses had been unleashed on an unimaginable scale. All the provinces, counties, and villages reported record harvests and agricultural output. These reports poured into Beijing, leading Mao to worry about too much food. “What do we do if there is too much grain?” he wondered aloud.
Mao’s confidence was boosted. He said, “Now it seems it will not need to take 15 years to surpass Britain and 20 years to catch up with America.” He declared in meetings with senior leaders that it looked as if China would transition into the true communist society that Marx had envisioned much sooner than thought, and even ahead of the Soviet Union. But Mao wanted to be humble: “Even if we entered communism sooner than the Soviet Union, we shouldn’t announce it,” lest China should embarrass the USSR, the big brother in the camp of socialist countries.
Since food was thought to be plentiful, communes in the countryside throughout China set up mass dining halls where farmers and their families ate for free. Farmers who had previously only been able to eat what they could grow now consumed with abandon. China doubled its grain exports. During a visit by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Mao asked him if the Soviet Union had had experience in dealing with a huge food surplus. Khrushchev answered that his country had never had such a problem.
It turned out that almost all these claims to have “launched a satellite” were made up or vastly exaggerated. Instead of a huge surplus, there was a food shortage in China. Officials at different levels falsified their numbers to show the success of the Great Leap Forward and to please their superiors. Since peasants were required to sell a proportion of their harvest to the government at proscribed prices, which was a form of taxation, this falsified reporting led to overcollection and overexporting of grain. Local officials sometimes resorted to coercion, forcing peasants to sell their grain even if there was not enough left to feed their families. In extreme cases, they were forced to sell the seeds held back for the next growing season.
At the time, the severe food shortage was not obvious to a child like myself. Although I did not experience hunger, I knew there was not enough food at home. I could see it in the patterns of our daily lives. My mother was always the last to eat. Although I did not realize it, she was famished. I could see my mother’s face and legs gradually turn puffy and her skin translucent. She showed me that if she sank the tip of her finger into the flesh of her leg, the dent would stay there for a long time, as if her flesh was made of dough. Now I know she was suffering from edema, an inflammation and swelling sometimes associated with severe malnutrition. She never complained of hunger, however, not even once. So out of curiosity, I would push the tip of my finger into her flesh to see the dent, the likes of which I could not create on myself.
I did help my mother to get more food, however, always sensing it was needed. There were a few elm trees in our compound. We learned that elm seeds could be eaten. I picked up the seeds shaken down by bigger children and brought them home. My mother would mix them with flour and cook them. I probably got a bite or two, but I do not remember really eating them. I also went around to find edible wild plants in every corner to collect them and bring them home. I am sure that those elm seeds and wild plants helped my mother, although I did not fully understand or quite appreciate it at the time. I also remember when her relatives from her home village in Shandong asked someone to bring her a bag of dried turnip strips. Every little bit of food helped.
One day, my father came home with a pair of small gray-colored rabbits. I loved them. We built an enclosure against the wall where the covered walkway ended and kept the rabbits there. My father and I went out to all the corners of the compound where wild grass grew and brought the grass back to feed the rabbits. From then on, every day I helped my father pull and collect grass, hay, and other vegetation to feed the rabbits.
Soon the rabbits were grown. Before long, the female gave birth to a litter. When the litter was grown, my father would slaughter one rabbit on a Sunday and my mother would cook it for us. So we had meat to eat from time to time during the Great Famine. My father loathed slaughtering animals as he had a tender heart. He had no choice. But he refused to eat rabbit meat and never shared in the feast.
I don’t know how other families in Beijing coped, but I knew many friends later told me their parents suffered from edema as well. If food was in such short supply in the nation’s capital, I can only imagine how bad it became in the rest of the country.
When senior leaders finally learned the truth about the Great Famine, most were reluctant to share the news with Mao for fear of appearing critical of his policies. The only one to speak out was Peng Dehuai, the defense minister, who had commanded the Chinese troops during the Korean War. He told Mao the truth, in a long letter of more than 10,000 characters. He criticized the Great Leap Forward as “more losses than gains,” although he was careful to only blame overly zealous local government officials. Mao, who had heard some troubling reports through his own channels, was already considering changing course. But he was furious with Peng’s criticism. He fired Peng from his position, along with those senior government officials sympathetic to Peng’s views, and doubled down on his radical policies. Peng was first allowed a low-level job in a province in southwest China, but in the next political campaign, which took place about seven years later, he was severely beaten by mobs and eventually died in prison.
The famine continued unabated, then got worse. Before 1958 was out, there were already widespread food shortages in vast swaths of China’s countryside. Millions of people would die of starvation in the next few years. Reliable studies estimate that 20 million to 36 million people, 3 to 5 percent of the Chinese population, died during between 1958 and 1962.
As a child, I was oblivious to most of this. My parents must have cut down on their own meals to make sure there was enough for us children. But there was not enough to go around. Once my mother pulled me aside and snuck a boiled egg into my hands, telling me to eat it immediately without letting others know.
* * *
The children in our compound often played together. I don’t remember toys of any kind but there were sticks, pig knuckles that we could roll like dice and play games with, and cigarette boxes that opened up and folded into triangular shapes. We chased one another around in the compound, playing hide and seek and war games with little s
ticks, pretending they were guns or swords. I remember rolling around in a pile of “rock cotton,” which felt like cotton and had shiny fibers, near a building site. Now I know it was a pile of asbestos, a commonly used construction material at that time. Maybe I have tough lungs, or maybe I was lucky. In any case, I am not aware of any harmful health effects to me from playing in asbestos.
My parents were both born to poor peasant families in Shandong Province, on the east coast of China. My father received some basic education, probably no more than elementary school. Still, he was proficient in Chinese language and literature. He was an avid reader of Chinese classics and history books from different Chinese dynasties. He wrote well, and his calligraphy was excellent.
Shandong was a dirt-poor province. In the Old China, it was frequently struck by famine, and each outbreak launched a mass migration of people from Shandong into the less populated northeast of China in search of food and work. Many people went all the way into Korea, about 400 kilometers away by sea. When I first visited South Korea in 1987, I was surprised to hear restaurant owners speak the same dialect of Chinese as my parents. My father left Shandong during one of these mass migrations in the late 1930s or early 1940s; I do not know how old he was at the time. But the war had come to China’s northeast by that time, and my father joined the Communist anti-Japanese forces in 1944, one year before Japan’s surrender.
My father worked in the Customs Administration, a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, as a deputy division chief.
My father had no hobbies that I know of, other than reading Chinese classics, such as the official histories of the 24 dynasties. I think I owe my interest in reading to him. I still have some of his history books on my shelf.
He read us some books when we were small, which I enjoyed immensely. But that didn’t happen often. He was a chain smoker. He often lit a new cigarette with the butt of the one he had just smoked. When he read us stories, he would smoke continuously. I often fell asleep engulfed in the thick smoke from his cigarettes as he sat next to me.
He was a man of few words. Once as a teenager, while telling him something I had experienced, he asked me if anyone had told me I was verbose. From then on, I have tried not to waste words, although I have not always been successful at it. I always had a strong desire to please him and to make him feel proud of me. I could sense that he was pleased with every little achievement I made, although I don’t recall any personal praise from him that he shared with me.
My mother also grew up in a poor village in Shandong. She never told us why she left home, although I think she ran away to escape an arranged marriage. In 1947, at a young age, she joined the Communist forces, which were active in the areas surrounding her home. My mother was about 10 years younger than my father; she told us he might have understated his age by a couple of years when he asked her to marry him. She also worked in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, as a secretary.
My mother was the gentlest woman I have ever known. She was kind and literally would not harm an insect—and would not let me, either. She had a strong sense of right and wrong, which influenced me greatly and made a lasting impression on those around her. She always worked hard, both at work and at home. At every meal, she would eat very slowly, using her chopsticks to put food into our bowls and waiting for her children and my father to stop eating before she finished up what was left on the table. I learned to wash clothes and to cook at a young age to help her because I felt bad watching her always work so hard.
Like my father, my mother probably received the equivalent of an elementary school education. But she writes well, and her handwriting is unusually beautiful. At that time the weekend consisted of only Sunday, and on that day she would handwash the clothes of the entire family, often in cold water, summer or winter. She also cooked for the family. So she did not have time to take us children on outings. I remember only once in our childhood, when I was about nine, she took my little brother and me to Beijing’s Beihai Park on a Sunday and we had a picture taken of the three of us in front of a lake.
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Because of the size of our family we were given an extra room, for a grand total of two. Both of our two rooms faced south, so sunlight came in through the glass especially in wintertime. There was one bare 25-watt bulb in each room and a reading lamp on the desk in the larger room.
My parents, my brother, and I shared the bigger room. The other room was half the size and was partitioned with a curtain. My paternal grandfather, who had moved in with us from his home village in Shandong, slept behind the curtain. In front of it was the family dining table, surrounded by a few wooden stools and a wooden food storage cabinet about 4 feet tall, 2 feet wide, and 1 foot deep. This room would also hold my older sister’s bed after she joined us in 1960 from my mother’s home village in Shandong.
There was no kitchen. My mother cut vegetables and prepared food on the dining table and then took everything out to the covered exterior walkway to be cooked on the small coal stove that each family had outside its door. Cooking outdoors in winter was unpleasant, so you wanted to get it done as soon as possible. The top of the stove could fit one cooking pan or pot. Waiting in that freezing walkway for the pot to boil felt like watching grass grow—a slow, painful ordeal. If you ducked back inside for warmth, as I sometimes did when I learned to cook, the rice might burn or the soup might boil over, not only spoiling the family dinner, but also possibly extinguishing the fire, either of which would be quite disastrous.
The food cabinet and the dining table were always infested with roaches, too many to kill. I imagine that since we applied roach poison everywhere, on the table and in the food cabinet, we probably consumed a fair amount of it ourselves. In retrospect, the roaches probably were less harmful than the poisons we inadvertently absorbed. But what did we know at the time, and what else could we do?
Our small coal stove burned round coal cakes honeycombed with small, circular holes; we called these briquettes “beehive coal.” Two or three coal cakes were stacked in the stove with the holes aligned so that air could pass through. When a cake was about to burn out, a new coal cake would be placed on top, again with holes perfectly aligned, so the fire would continue to burn.
China started a rationing system for rice, wheat flour, edible oil, and cloth around the time I was born. Each person was issued coupons every month; these entitled the bearer to purchase (with money) a fixed amount of the item listed on the coupon. Sometimes meat was rationed as well, but few could afford buy much of it anyway. Nobody could buy rice, wheat flour, or cotton clothes without coupons, even if he or she had the money.
We grew up not knowing there was such a thing as a refrigerator. We had to buy fresh vegetables every few days, as there was no place to keep them cool. Fresh meat is impossible to keep at room temperature for long, but it can be kept for a few days if cooked. My mother would store the cooked meat in a jar kept in the food cabinet to be taken out a little at a time, to put into the wok and stir-fried together with some vegetables. Sometimes, especially in summer, meat would go bad and change flavor if kept too long. But I don’t remember ever throwing any meat away.
There was no running water inside homes. About a dozen families shared one outdoor water spigot where residents fetched water for all their needs. Winter in Beijing can be harsh, with temperatures frequently dropping below freezing. The exposed water pipe connecting the spigot had to be wrapped with thick layers of straw rope to keep it from freezing. Otherwise the pipe would burst. To fetch water in wintertime, we had to carry a kettle of hot water to pour on the spigot to unfreeze it before water would come out.
The same dozen or so families also shared an outside, one-hole public outhouse. In winter, the call of nature had to be resisted until it became more unbearable than the punishing cold in the toilet. When the weather was too rough, children were allowed the privilege of using a chamber pot indoors.
Without running water at home, we fetched water from the public spigot, boiled
it on the stove, and washed ourselves using a washbasin filled with a mixture of hot and cold water. My parents bathed my brother and me at home when we were small. When we grew older, we would go with them to a public bath.
I would be amiss not to mention the history of our neighborhood, which is unique and interesting even for an old city like Beijing, although growing up there, I was oblivious of its history. The narrow lane in front of our compound used to be named Rue Hart, after Sir Robert Hart, a British diplomat who had served the Chinese imperial government of the Qing dynasty as head of its customs service for an incredible half century, from about 1861 until his death in 1911. The sign for Rue Hart is still visible today, engraved into a wall on the northwest corner of the lane.
It was no accident we lived there. My father worked for the customs administration and the old building where our home was used to be part of Old China’s customs administration, where Sir Robert Hart probably had worked. In the nineteenth century, during Hart’s time, the neighborhood became known as the Quarter of Foreign Legations, where the first foreign embassies were located. This was the place besieged by the Boxers during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), which led to the invasion of Beijing by the joint forces of eight foreign powers.
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China’s Great Famine of 1959–1962 claimed millions of lives, more than any war in memory. In the summer of 1962, Liu Shaoqi, China’s president (Mao was the chairman of the Communist Party), said to Mao, in a rare moment of fluster: “So many were starved to death; history will record you and me [as being responsible]. Man eating man, it will be recorded in the annals of history.” His disagreements with Mao would eventually prove to be his undoing, leading to his downfall and tragic death about seven years later.
Chapter 2
School Cut Short
Reports of widespread famine and death finally filtered through to China’s top leadership, and the Great Leap Forward was brought to a halt around the end of 1960. It was the year when I reached school age. The severe food shortages the Great Leap Forward created continued until after 1962. The failure and futility of Mao’s radical policies dealt a blow to his reputation within the Communist Party; some senior colleagues began to question Mao’s “mistakes,” which he himself ultimately acknowledged as well. But there was never a serious challenge to his supreme authority. In January 1962, the Chinese leadership held a meeting in Beijing attended by more than 7,000 government officials from around the country. The Meeting of 7,000, as it became known, lasted for more than a month, as the party leadership reflected on their policy failures and the attendees “vented their anger,” in the words of Mao, over the man-made disaster of the Great Leap Forward. After the meeting, Mao, who was chairman of the Communist Party but otherwise held no official government position, took a step back from running the country. He left the job to a trio of his senior comrades: Liu Shaoqi, China’s president, Zhou Enlai, the premier, and Deng Xiaoping, the general secretary of the Communist Party. The three adopted moderate policies beginning in 1961 to normalize the economic affairs of the country. After a couple of years, the food shortage gradually eased.