Remembering 1942

by Liu Zhenyun

  The culmination of these conditions has come this year. That there would be a serious grain shortage was known to the blindest government official in the early spring after the failure of the wheat crop. As early as July, refugees estimated at 1,000 a day were leaving the province. But the grain collection program remained unchanged. In many districts the entire crop was insufficient to meet the demands of the collectors. There were gestures of agrarian protest: all weak, scattered and ineffectual. Apparently, in a few places, troops were used against the people.1

  Famine victims, already reduced to eating elm bark and dry leaves, were forced to turn over the last of their seeds to the tax collectors. The farmers, so weak they could barely walk, also had to provide feed for the army’s horses, grain that was more nutritious than what they stuffed into their mouths.

  Why cite a dispatch by Service and not by someone else? He was not Chinese and, not being part of the complex situation, he could be more objective. Yet what he reported, that the famine victims actually had their taxes increased, was not the most serious. Worse was that officials took advantage of the victims and profited at their expense. According to an eyewitness account by Theodore White, some army commanders made fortunes selling surplus provisions to the famine victims. Frenzied merchants from Xi’an and Zhengzhou, petty government functionaries, army officers, and landlords who still had grain snapped up land passed down through generations at criminally low prices. A concentration and a loss of land took place simultaneously, the intensity matching the impact of hunger.

  When the Generalissimo, petty functionaries, and landlords ruled over us, they controlled our fate, so how could we trust them?

  In the end, large numbers of victims left their land and formed a westward exodus. That included the families of my second and third great aunt, along with many residents of Yanjin County. They had never once laid eyes on the Generalissimo, but the younger men stood at attention when they heard his name, while in his Huangshan residence, the Generalissimo’s every gesture controlled and determined their fate. He was wondering: Where is China heading? And where is the world heading? The victims were thinking: Where can we flee to?

  4

  To this day, Uncle Huazhua rues the fact that he ran away after being conscripted into the army. Why hadn’t he simply stuck it out?

  “Who took you?” I asked.

  “The Nationalist Army.”

  “I know it was the Nationalist Army, but which unit?”

  “Our squad leader was Li Gousheng, the platoon leader was Ruan Zhidong,” he said.

  “Who were their superiors?” I persisted.

  “I don’t know.”

  Later when I looked it up, I learned that the Nationalist army stationed in the Luoyang area was under the command of General Hu Zongnan.

  “What did you do after you were press ganged?”

  “We were taken to Zhongtiaoshan and sent to the front line, where Japanese bombers killed the deputy squad leader and two soldiers on my first day there. I was so scared I took off that night, a stupid thing to do, now that I think of it.”

  “You ought to feel bad about it. You ran away at a moment of great national crisis, when the country faced a formidable enemy and your comrades sacrificed their lives. That was shameful.”

  He glared at me. “I don’t feel bad about that.”

  Taken back, I asked, “Then what?”

  “If I hadn’t run away, I could have gone to Taiwan and would be a Taiwanese compatriot, a Taibao, now. A guy in Tong Village, Wang Mingqin, whose nickname was Stubborn Mule, was taken two years after me and he went to Taiwan. Last year he came back as a Taibao, with his second wife. He was wearing a big gold watch and even has gold crowns on his teeth. The county chief sent a car to pick him up. A big deal, wouldn’t you say? I’ve got no one to blame but myself. I was too young and couldn’t see the big picture. I was only fifteen and survival was all I knew.”

  Finally seeing what he meant, I tried to console him, “You’re right to regret it now, but you were also right to run away back then. Just think. It was 1943, two years before the war was over, which was followed by five years of civil war. Who could say that you wouldn’t have been killed like your comrades in one of the many battles? Of course, you could have become a Taibao like Stubborn Mule if you’d survived, but you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.”

  He gave my comments some thought. “You have a point there. Bullets have no eyes. My fate. I wasn’t born to be a Taibao.”

  “You didn’t become a Taibao, but you didn’t do too badly either. You were a party secretary and have had a pretty good life.”

  That perked him up. “You’re right. I was in that position for twenty-four years.” Then his mood changed abruptly. He sighed. “But ten party secretaries can’t hold a candle to one Taibao. And now that I’ve stepped down, I’m a nobody. The county chief doesn’t know who I am.”

  “So what? Stubborn Mule knows the county chief, and he’s still a stubborn mule. But let’s not talk about him, Uncle. Tell me how Second Great Aunt and Third Great Aunt fled the famine with their families. You were with them, so you must have had lots of personal experiences.”

  Uncle Huazhua turned indifferent once we changed the subject, giving me a simple, dry narration.

  “We fled, that’s it,” he said, rubbing his hands.

  “How? How did you do it?”

  “My Pa pushed a wheelbarrow filled with pots, pans, bowls, and other utensils. My second uncle carried children in baskets. We begged for food along the way, but mostly we ate bark and wild grass. I was press ganged when we got to Luoyang.”

  “That’s all?” I complained. “Don’t you remember anything from the journey?”

  “I remember I was freezing at night when we slept by the road.” He blinked. “I woke up from the cold but didn’t make a sound when I saw my parents still fast asleep.”

  “How did you get press ganged?”

  “There was a charity kitchen set up by the Catholic church in Luoyang. I went to get some congee and got caught on the way back.”

  “Did your parents know?”

  “How could they?” He shook his head. “They thought I was kidnapped. I didn’t see them again for years.”

  “How did they manage after you were taken?”

  “A few years later my Ma told me that they hopped a train to Shaanxi and my Pa nearly got crushed by it.”

  “What about Second Great Aunt and her family?”

  “They did the same thing, but the train left the station before they were able to get the youngest girl, your aunt, onto the train. They never found her.”

  I nodded. “Did a lot of people die along the way?”

  “Lots of them! There were corpses everywhere and graves too. People were killed when they tried to hop the train.”

  “Did anyone in our family die of hunger?”

  “Of course! Your second great uncle and third aunt. They starved on the road.”

  “Can’t you give me more details?”

  Visibly impatient, he gave me an angry glare. “They’re all dead. What kind of details do you want?” With that, he limped away. Feeling awkward, I suddenly sensed how ill-intentioned my friend was when he sent me back to 1942. I was picking at my relatives’ scabs, which had healed for fifty years, opening up bloody wounds. The thick scabs had turned into helmets by time and dust, as difficult to remove as moving a mountain. It was a windless day; I crouched down by wheat stalks warmed by the sun, struggling to speak with a deaf, mute, virtually incoherent old man with a runny nose. His name was Guo Youyun, who, according to political congress member, Mr. Han, had suffered greater losses than anyone else in the exodus of 1943—his wife, his mother, and three children. Five years later he returned from Shaanxi alone to start a new family. The look of the place he had rebuilt behind the stacks and lived in the past four decades showed that he was more capable than most, for it was a two-story building, uncommon in my hometown at the time, a mixture of Western and C
hinese styles. But the contrast between his advanced age and the new house suggested that it was the work of his son, who was now serving as our interpreter. The forty-year-old man, who wore his hair parted in the middle and a watch featuring Gorbachev’s face, was not particularly welcoming at first, though his attitude changed when he heard that the deputy police chief and I were childhood classmates. His attitude changed again, this time to impatience, after learning that my arrival had nothing to do with him, and that I wanted only for his father to return with me to the past, fifty years earlier, when he himself was still in the clouds awaiting his arrival on earth. With missing teeth, the old man was hard to understand, making his interpreter son even more impatient and giving me fragmented and uninteresting information about the past. Once again I was reminded of the difficulty of salvaging for the past among the living. But here is more or less what happened to Guo Youyun during his flight: His mother fell ill along the way, so he sold his younger daughter to take care of his mother, which led to a fight with his wife. For her it was not merely a matter of selling off the girl, but that she did not want to sell her own flesh and blood to save a mother-in-law she loathed. The mother died by the Yellow River despite the sale of the girl, and he buried her in a cave, since he could not afford a coffin. When they reached Luoyang, his older daughter contracted smallpox and died in a charity hospital. They were trying to catch a train to Tongguan when his son fell and was crushed beneath a wheel. He and his wife, the only two survivors, reached Shaanxi, where he herded sheep for the locals; his wife, fed up with the tough life, ran away with a human trafficker, leaving him all alone. Sniffling in front of the haystack, he spread his hands and said, “Why did I flee? So everyone could have a fighting chance to live. Who’d have thought that I would be the only one left after all that? What was the point? If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have left. At least we would all be together till the very end, not dying along the road like that.”

  His son did a fine job translating this portion, which sounded as if the old man had been caught up in a vicious cycle. What puzzled me was why he was in tattered clothes, as if still fleeing for his life when he owned a two-story house. He was probably too frugal or he felt that nothing in his life had ever belonged to him. Apparently, this family, with all its material abundance, was not a happy one. It would be impossible to sort out their family relationships, so I turned to his son and said, “It was hard on him, the flight and all.”

  “He was worthless,” he said. “I wouldn’t have done it the way he did.”

  Imagine my surprise. “How would you have done it?”

  “I wouldn’t have gone to Shaanxi.”

  “Where would you have gone?”

  “I’d definitely have gone to Guandong, a better place than Shaanxi.”

  I nodded. Guandong was more prosperous and offered an easier life. But my search of hometown histories showed that my kinsmen were never in the habit of fleeing to Guandong, something those from Shandong and Hebei did. Whenever disaster hit, people from my hometown always headed west, not east, even though the area to the west was as poor as the place they were leaving. Obviously, the situation was different in 1942 and 1943; the Japanese had taken Northeast China, which meant they would become a conquered people if they had gone that way. I reminded the son of this fact. He waved me off, flashing his Gorbachev watch, and made a shocking statement.

  “When you’re talking about survival, who cares who owns the place? So you head west to avoid being a conquered people and starve to death. What would you choose, being conquered or starving? Avoiding the Japanese meant that no one would give a damn about you.”

  I smiled silently, for I couldn’t answer his questions. A miscalculation by the Generalissimo was the fundamental reason he had to flee to Taiwan in 1949. If I had been there in 1942, would I have turned to the Generalissimo, who did not worry or care one bit about me, or would I head for a Japanese occupied area, where I’d have a chance to live?

  After saying good-bye to Guo Youyun and his son, I went to see an old woman, Mrs. Cai, in Shili Village. It turned out to be an even worse interview, for I nearly suffered a beating from her son before I had a chance to state the purpose of my visit. Mrs. Cai was seventy years old, making her twenty fifty years before. One night on her westward flight with her parents and two younger brothers, their clothes, money, food, and all their personal belongings were stolen while they slept. They could only wail when they discovered the theft. With no hope of making it to their destination, her parents sold her to save her brothers. At first she’d thought she’d been sold to a family, but then the trafficker took her away and sold her to a brothel, where she spent the next five years as a prostitute. It was not until 1948, during the civil war, that she managed to escape from the brothel and return home. Like Guo Youyun, she had a new family, and the unspeakable five years were a deeply buried secret, until some neighbor women brought it up again during a fight. But in the late 1980s, the uniqueness of her experience during the famine regained its significance as best-selling writers, seizing on the special importance of her life over those five years, came to interview her, with the express intent of turning her brothel experience into an autobiographical best-seller with a title like My Life as a Prostitute, which would guarantee its popularity. At first, the family was excited over the interest from so many interviewers, for they realized that their mother’s experience was actually valuable and she deserved to be interviewed by well-dressed writers; they even felt honored. Yet as time passed, her children sensed that the writers did not really care about them, and were intent on making money out of their mother’s sordid past. Suddenly, her children, all common peasants, felt they had been cheated and insulted and began giving the interviewers the cold shoulder. They even gave their mother, who was still smugly and happily reliving her past, a serious tongue-lashing, forcing her to clam up about her experiences. She recanted everything she’d told the writers, who were understandably put in an awkward position after they had written about her. My Life as a Prostitute thus suffered a premature death. Several years had passed by the time I got to their place, but her son thought I was yet another writer here to profit from his mother’s sad past by resurrecting My Life as a Prostitute. As a result, I failed to speak with the old lady and barely escaped her son’s attack; I have never been a courageous person. Besides, it was unseemly of me to pick at people’s scabs, particularly an unsightly one on an old lady, just so I could write an article. I went back to tell my former elementary school classmate, the deputy chief of police. To my surprise, he did not side with me and, instead, criticized my approach. Swishing the belt in his hand, he said,

  “You should have talked to me first.”

  “Why? You knew about her?”

  “Not really, but I could bring her in for questioning, and that should answer your questions.”

  I flailed my arms in astonishment.

  “No, please don’t do that. I’d rather not interview her. Besides, she hasn’t committed any crime, so you can’t just bring her in for questioning.”

  He glared at me. “She was a prostitute and I’m in charge of cracking down on prostitution. So I have every right to bring her in.”

  “That was fifty years ago.” I flailed my arms again. “If she was be brought in, it would have been the job of the police in the Nationalist government, not you, and certainly not after five decades.”

  “Fifty years or not, it’s my jurisdiction.” He refused to relent. “You wait and see. I’ll bring her in.”

  I changed the subject to stop him; it took a long while to calm him down. When I took leave, I reminded myself of our days in school together.

  We now must turn to Theodore White’s article in Time magazine to continue the narrative of the flight. By now it was clear to me that he would be the protagonist of my essay, for the simple reason that by then no one had cared about the famine, not the leader nor the government whose officials were happily fattening their own pockets by selling relie
f grain. A great number of people died in 1942, and those who survived treat the disaster with indifference fifty years on. Only one person, a Time magazine reporter, a non-Chinese, was concerned about the three million who were dying on land ravished by famine. My face burned from embarrassment when I thought about how we Chinese had no concern for our own and left it to someone from outside to worry about the suffering masses. To be sure, he set out not to show sympathy for the starving Chinese but, based on his reporter’s instinct, to find something to write about during the great famine. It was during his search for a news topic that he came face to face with the deplorable situation, which shocked him into speaking out for the victims out of a sense of sympathy and righteousness common among ordinary people. That later led to his confrontation with Chiang Kai-shek. It should come as no surprise to anyone that an American could get to see the Generalissimo so easily, while few Chinese could do that, not even his ministers, who would surely require an appointment prior to the meeting. The refugees could not depend on officials who had traditionally been considered the “parents” of the commoners, so their only hope was a foreign correspondent with little power, particularly toward the end, when he was able to bring some relief, a fact that dumbfounded me five decades after the event.

  Theodore White related his trip in February 1943 to Henan, along with Harrison Forman, in his In Search of History. I mentioned at the beginning that they had enjoyed one of the best meals ever when they got to Zhengzhou. They made the trip by flying to Baoji from Chongqing, then transferring to a railroad handcar at Tongguan and arriving in Luoyang after a day-long journey, going in the opposite direction of the fleeing refugees. Switching to horses after entering Henan province, they rode to Zhengzhou, where they would then return to Chongqing by postal train. The route meant they could not have taken in much along the way. They wrote mainly bits and pieces of what they saw and heard; the views they expressed were thus highly personal. Since China was so different from America, his personal understanding was likely different from the actual implications of facts. But we can disregard the differences and focus on the details, on what he saw, for what appeared before his eyes along the way had to be true. Based on these factual accounts, we can experience the flight of 1943. Following is the result of my best attempt to sort out his fragmentary witness accounts: