Remembering 1942

by Liu Zhenyun

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I feel bad, sir.”

  “What for? Because of Li Shangjin?”

  I shook my head.

  “Wang Di?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Chief?”

  More head shaking from me.

  “For the others in the squad?”

  I kept shaking my head.

  “Then what for?”

  “I got a letter from my father today.”

  “Something happened in the family?”

  I had to shake my head again.

  “Then what?” He fixed his eyes on me.

  “He told me Fatty is dead.”

  “What?” He jumped in disbelief. “How could that be?”

  I handed him the letter from my father.

  It had arrived that afternoon. After he was discharged, my father said, Fatty didn’t learn to be a bricklayer with him. Instead he stayed home to work the land. At some point he disappeared and, after three days, his family was so worried, a search was conducted. In the end they found him in a well northeast of the village, his body so bloated it looked like risen bread dough. He must have suffered a bout of epilepsy while drawing water.

  “His epilepsy acted up again.” He thumped the letter. “There was nothing anyone could do about it.”

  “I knew him well, sir.” I couldn’t hold back my tears. “It couldn’t have been his epilepsy.”

  “Then what?”

  “He was clearly a suicide.”

  “No!” He stared wide-eyed.

  We walked in silence for a long time until we were near the train station.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Didn’t my father say it was two weeks ago?”

  “Have you told anyone else in the squad?”

  I shook my head.

  It was dark by then, but the night sky of the Gobi Desert had an unusually bluish tint, as an enormous silvery moon appeared on the horizon.

  The train whistled its way into the station.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  So off we went, with our backpacks over our shoulders.

  Remembering 1942

  1

  In 1942, Henan province experienced a catastrophic famine.

  A friend I respected sent me off to 1942 with a plate of bean sprouts and two stewed pig’s feet. To be sure, this farewell dinner, had it been offered in 1942, would have been considered a gourmet meal, but at the same time, it might not have been all that impressive. In February 1943, when Theodore White, a reporter for Time magazine, and Harrison Forman, of the Times of London, went to investigate the Henan famine, where mothers cooked and ate their own babies, the provincial officials of my hometown hosted a banquet for the two foreign visitors with the following menu: thick soup with lotus seeds, spicy chicken, beef stewed with chestnuts, tofu, fish, fried spring rolls, hot steamed buns, rice, and two soups, plus three stuffed flatbreads sprinkled with sugar crystals. Even today, uncultured citizens like us can only read about such food in books or on the menus of fancy restaurants. White said it was one of the best meals he’d ever had; I say it was the one of best meals I’d ever read about. But then he added that he could not bring himself to finish it. In my view, the provincial officials of my hometown would never have been so shy. In a word, food was a big problem back home in 1942 and 1943, but it was likely an issue only for the common people. I imagine that in this ancient Eastern civilization, no government officials above the county level would, under any circumstance, ever suffer a food shortage any more than they would face a dearth of sexual gratification.

  For me there was another problem. As I traveled back to 1942 through a boring tunnel smelling of urine and mildew, I realized that my friend had greatly exaggerated the importance of the mission he gave me. After polishing off the bean sprouts and pig’s feet, he told me about 1942 in a tone befitting a commanding officer.

  From the summer of 1942 to the spring of 1943, the catastrophic drought ravaged the province, virtually wiping out both the summer and fall harvests. The drought was followed by a scourge of locusts that affected five million peasants, about twenty percent of the province’s population. The shortage of water and the hordes of locusts wrought havoc in a hundred and eleven counties.

  Impacted peasants ate grass roots and tree bark, and the fields were littered with the bodies of those who starved. The going rate for women dropped by ninety percent, while the price of a young man was reduced by two thirds. A vast area of the Central Plains was affected and more than three million starved.

  Three million dead. The somber look on his face sent chills through me, but I had to laugh when I actually returned to 1942. True, three million had died, but that was a trifling matter when examined in the historical context. As three million people were dying, this is what was happening at the time: Madame Chiang Kai-shek visited the United States, Gandhi waged a hunger strike, a bloody battle took place in Stalingrad, and Churchill caught a cold. In the global context of 1942, any one of these incidents was more important than the death of three million. Five decades later, we all know about Churchill, Gandhi, the charming Madame Chiang, and Stalingrad, but who is aware that three million people died in my home province from a drought? Back then, the Nationalist party, the Communist party, the Japanese army, the Americans, and the British were all embroiled in wars in Southeast Asia and inside China, including the border regions of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia. The commander-in-chief, Generalissimo Chiang, was faced with a delicate political quandary, a jumbled mess that would have forced anyone, not just him, to push the three millions aside to deal with other problems. The three million was their own problem. So the mission my friend gave me dealt with details, not the big picture, as negligible as a sesame seed, not as weighty as a watermelon. The world’s centers of action were the White House, 10 Downing Street, the Kremlin, Hitler’s underground bunker, Tokyo, and the Huangshan Residence in Chongqing, China. In these luxuriously decorated sites, a select few, who dressed in clean clothes, drank coffee, and enjoyed hot baths, would determine the fate of the majority of the world’s population. But these pivotal places and people were a long way from me, as I traveled, dirty and disheveled, back to a Hunanese disaster area littered with the bodies of those who had died of starvation. The explanation for this, the only explanation, is that I was destined to be the descendant, beginning in 1942, of those muddled, lowly disaster victims. The final problem: my friend had bought two pig’s feet to see me off, but was in such a hurry he forgot to remove the hooves, so I was rushed off onto my journey after eating still-hooved pig’s feet. You can see how reckless we were.

  2

  My maternal grandmother had no memory of the catastrophic drought of fifty years before.

  “Grannie, fifty years ago there was a drought, and many people starved,” I said to her.

  “People starved during lots of years. Which year are you talking about?”

  Grandma, who was ninety-two, had seen pretty much everything that happened to China during the twentieth century. An ordinary woman from the countryside, she worked for a landlord before 1949 and became a commune member after Liberation. She experienced ninety-two years of Chinese history. Without many thousands of common, dirty Chinese, the surging waves of revolution and counterrevolution would have been for naught, for they are the ones who, in the end, always suffer from disasters and pay for successes. But they have no role to play in history, for history is a stroll through magnificent halls. Which is why Grandma felt no shame in professing her forgetfulness. But the drought affected her countrymen, her own people, and it felt somehow wrong for her not to remember. She once saved my life, but that involved another disaster, one in 1960. A gentle woman, she was illiterate but possessed a great understanding of the world. I have always thought that China owes its development and confidence to these gentle, reasonable people, not to the lives of its sinister, cruel citizens. I take great comfort in the fact that, thanks to the care of a c
ountry doctor, she enjoyed good health and an infallible memory; in fact, she remembered the tiniest details from all our childhoods—my mother, my siblings, and me. I am convinced that she forgot 1942 not because of it wasn’t tragic, but because people died so often in her past. It is fruitless to reproach those in power over those ninety-two years, but any official who saw people starve in his district should feel greater shame than my Grandma if he, his clan, and his children did not suffer. Doesn’t being ruled by people like that bother and scare us? But her commonplace tone softened my agitation and anger, prompting me to laugh at myself. History focuses on the big picture; history is selective and easily forgotten. Who is in charge of the sieve with all its holes?

  In 1942, after the drought came locusts that blanketed the sky and blotted out the sun. This special sign spurred Grandma to recall the connection between locusts and deaths.

  “That one I know. So you were referring to the year of the locusts. Many people died that year, when locusts wiped out all the crops. Niu Jinbao’s aunt set up an altar, and I went there to burn incense.”

  “Did the locusts come after a major drought?”

  “Yes, there was a drought.” She nodded. “Without a drought there would have been no locusts.”

  “Did many people die?”

  “A few dozen, I think.”

  She was right. A few dozen in her village, or three million throughout the province. “What happened to those who didn’t die?”

  “Turned into refugees, of course. Your second great aunt was with one group and your third great aunt another group, and they all fled to Shanxi.”

  Neither great aunt is still alive. I can vaguely recall second great aunt’s death and her black-lacquered coffin. I was in my twenties when third great aunt died; she was blind, her hair was gray, and she was curled up on a straw mat in the kitchen like a dog. Her son, Uncle Huazhua to me, had been a village party secretary for twenty-four years, from 1948 to 1972, but he had not managed to get himself a decent house and had become a village laughingstock. Putting Second Great Aunt and Third Great Aunt aside, I said,

  “What about you, Grandma?”

  “I didn’t flee. The master was nice to me, so I worked the fields for him.”

  “Was the drought really bad?”

  “Of course it was. The land cracked like a child’s mouth and sizzled when you poured water on it.”

  She was right. After checking with her, I went to see Uncle Huazhua, who was, after all, the village party secretary, and recalled all the important things. The moment I brought up 1942, he said,

  “A serious drought that year.”

  “How bad?”

  Puffing on an Ashima cigarette I gave him, he said,

  “Not a single drop of rain in the spring and less than thirty percent of the wheat was harvested. Some people got nothing out of their fields. Most of the wheat seedlings didn’t survive, and even if they had, they couldn’t produce any wheat.”

  “Did people die of starvation?”

  “A few dozen did.”

  “But thirty percent of the harvest was saved, so how did they starve?”

  He glared at me. “They had to pay rent for the land, didn’t they? And grain for the army, and taxes. They couldn’t pay the taxes even if they sold the land, so if they had survived the famine, they’d have been beaten to death by yamen officials.”

  Now I understood. “How old were you?” I asked.

  He blinked and said, “Fifteen or sixteen.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t want to starve, so I fled to Shanxi with my ma.”

  I left him to seek out Uncle Fan Kejian, who, in 1942, was head of the richest family in the area. My grandma and grandpa worked for them; master and workers were very close. He became my Grandma’s adopted son when he was only a few months old. Grandma told me that his mother turned the boy over to her at mealtime and she carried him around on her hip. After 1949, their status changed; Grandma was labeled a poor peasant, while his father was shot during a counterrevolutionary suppression campaign. He himself was considered a landlord and was kept under public surveillance until 1978. His wife, Aunt Jin Yinhua complained to me that she hadn’t enjoyed a single good day after marrying him—only decades of suffering. Why had she done that? Well, they had married at the end of 1948. Over the years, my family maintained close ties with the Fan family. Uncle Fan greeted Grandma with “Ma” when they met. I witnessed with my own eyes how Grandma, like her master of the old days, generously handed a moon cake to the man who called her Ma, and he showed his gratitude with a smile.

  So Uncle Fan Kejian and I sat under a dead scholar tree (it had probably been alive in 1942) and recalled the year together. He didn’t know what 1942 was at first.

  “Nineteen forty-two? What year was that?”

  I was reminded that he was a privileged member of the ancien régime, so I should not have used the Western system, which has been in use only since 1949. So I said it was the thirty-first year of the Republic. To my surprise, the mention of the year really set him off.

  “Don’t talk to me about Republican year thirty-one. It was a terrible year.”

  “Why is that?”

  “One of our small buildings burned down.”

  “Why?” I was puzzled.

  “There was a drought that year, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “a terrible drought.”

  “Locusts came after the drought.”

  “That’s right, there were locusts.”

  “Many people died of hunger.”

  “Yes. They did.”

  He flicked the cigarette away.

  “Many people died, and those who didn’t stirred up trouble. Led by Wu De’an and armed with hay choppers and red-tasseled spears, they occupied one of our buildings. They killed the livestock, saying they were starting an uprising. At one point over a thousand people came to eat for free at our house.”

  I tried to defend the poor. “They had no choice. They were hungry.”

  “I know they were hungry and they had no choice, but they shouldn’t have pillaged people.”

  “Yes, that was wrong. What happened next?”

  He responded with an enigmatic smile. “Then a fire broke out. The sesame stalks were soaked in oil, so Wu De’an and his men were burned alive. The others fled.”

  “I see.”

  So that was what happened. A drought brought famine, causing people to die from hunger or turn to plundering and worse.

  After bidding him good-bye, I sat down with a CCP representative of the county consultative congress who had been county party secretary before 1949. A tall, declining old man, he had an uncontrollable shake of the head, due to Parkinson’s disease. Congress member or not, his clothes were old and tattered, the lapels covered with rice and oil stains. He lived in a compound with a courtyard, a tumbledown house with brittle yellow weeds growing on the roof. Before I had a chance to bring up 1942, he grumbled about his current situation, though I was not convinced he had a right to complain. His most powerful moment had been as party secretary before 1949, a position that differed from that of the current county party secretary, an official who served the interests of a county with hundreds of thousands of people. The county secretary of the old days was just a scribe, and back then the county population was only about two hundred thousand. He stopped complaining when I asked about 1942, and seemed to have returned to the days when he was young and powerful. His eyes lit up, even his head stopped shaking.

  “I was the youngest county secretary in all the counties in the area, only eighteen.”

  I nodded. “Old Mr. Han, I heard there was a severe drought in 1942.”

  He managed to keep his head still.

  “Yes,” he said. “There was a charity performance by Chang Xiangyu and I was in charge of that.”

  I nodded again as a sign of respect. In 1991, the south was ravaged by a flood, and I saw a charity performance on TV. To me it was no simple
matter to bring together all the performers, with their various backgrounds and talents. Imagine my surprise when I heard that he had organized one years before. He followed that revelation up with detailed descriptions of the successful performance and his spur-of-the-moment solutions to problems that cropped up in the process. He talked and laughed heartily.

  “How bad was the drought?” I asked after he finished.

  “Bad, of course. Why else would we have put on a performance?”

  Skirting the performance, I persisted:

  “I’ve heard that many people died of hunger. How many in our county?”

  His head began to shake, from left to right, in rhythmic, quick movements, before he finally said,

  “Twenty thousand or more, I think.”

  He couldn’t recall. More than twenty thousand hadn’t left much of an impression on a scribe. As I said good-bye to him and his charity performance, I heaved a sigh, shaking my head along with him.

  This is what I’ve discovered about the Henan drought. According to the provincial gazette, Yanjin was one of the counties that suffered the most, but my interviews were fragmentary, incomplete, and inaccurate. After fifty years, flawed memories and personal additions or deletions by people I interviewed eliminated the need to take them at face value. What I needed to pay attention to was a report by Zhang Gaofeng, a war correspondent sent to Henan by the Chongqing edition of the Ta Kung Pao. Written and published in 1942, it was far more credible than personal memories. “The Truth about the Henan Disaster” not only described the drought and famine, but also what the starving people ate, which convinced me that perusing old newspapers was much more rewarding than interviewing people about the old days. It maintained a distance between the calamity and me and allowed me to sympathize with the people who suffered, while I remained well fed and warm.

  The report was published on January 17, 1942.

  ∆ This reporter must first tell the reader that today in Henan tens of thousands of people maintain a pitiful existence with tree bark (they have eaten all the leaves) and weeds. No one mentions the glory of “Army First” any longer, and “starving people fill the land” is but an inadequately sad phrase used to describe the disaster in Henan by those who are well fed and warm.