Remembering 1942

by Liu Zhenyun

  ∆ Once the relief work was finally under way, the villagers continued to die, on the road, in the mountains, by train stations, in their own mud huts, or in deserted fields.

  Of course not all the officials were so hard-hearted as to exploit the people as they died. Some found their conscience to do good for the people or to have a commemorative stele built for them. I’ve always believed that, as ordinary people, we don’t care about officials’ motivation, so long as they serve the people. They could be doing something for career advancement and promotion, or to show someone they loved what they are made of. We don’t care, as long as it helps us. Following the lead of the foreigners and their examples, the compassionate General Tang Enbo came forward and opened an orphanage to take in those overflowing from the Western orphanages. It was a good deed. General Tang was a good man. But what kind of orphanage was it? This was what Theodore White wrote:

  “In my recollection, ‘It stank worse than anything else I have ever smelled. Even the escorting officer could not stand the odor and, holding his handkerchief to his nose, asked to be excused. These were abandoned babies. They were inserted four to a crib. Those who could not fit in cribs were simply laid on the straw. I forget what they were fed. But they smelled of baby vomit and baby shit, and when they were dead, they were cleared out.’”

  That is why we say that General Tang was a good man; he was the best among all the government officials and generals, for it was still better to have an orphanage like that than not have any at all.

  Donations were collected and charity performances were put on, but the money was turned over to the government to distribute to the victims. In 1942, the November issues of the Republican Daily were filled with reports of performances, concerts, sales of calligraphy and paintings, all for charitable purposes. County secretary Han from my hometown hosted one performance himself. I’m convinced that the donors and performers were sincere and compassionate, and they shed sympathetic tears for us. But the problem was, the proceeds could not be distributed directly to the victims; instead they were turned over, in an organized manner, to the government, which then distributed them to the people, also in an organized manner. The money traveled through one government office after another—from the provincial level to the county, then to the township, before reaching the villages—a worrisome number of offices. How could we be sure that the relief funds from donations and charity performances would safely reach us, with so many rounds of exploitation and fees after they left the government’s hand?

  But let’s not dwell on that. The government is like our parents; when they skimp on our share, we accept it silently, like swallowing bloody teeth when they knock them out. The problem was made worse, though, when some of those unique characters with special talents spoke up at a moment like this, but not for the victims—what good would that have done them? Aligning themselves with the government, they studied ways to deal with the famine, as in a story published in the Henan Republican Daily on February 14, 1943:

  “Liu Daoji, a staff member in the finance section, has invented and produced famine food; a person need only eat the complex formula once a week or the simple formula one once a day.”

  Fifty years later, any Chinese who reads this brief report will find it impossible to believe. Obviously, not only was the government unreliable, but even a staff member, one of us, the working poor, could not be depended upon. It would have been fine if the invention had been real; the government would have welcomed it, as it would not have needed to undertake relief effort and we the people would have welcomed it with open arms, for it meant that no one would ever die of hunger again. It would have been a panacea not only to the Republican government, for people continued to starve to death in the decades that followed the famine. The Chinese would enjoy everlasting peaceful and a bountiful existence if there had been a man-made food that kept a person full for seven days. But we have yet to see that formula, proof that it merely served a propaganda purpose to calm the populace; not a single life was saved by it. Mr. Liu Daoji might have been a kindhearted, compassionate man with great patience and circumspection; or he could simply have been hoping for a promotion. Whatever his personal motivation, his formula was useless. We continued to die day after day, on the road, in the field, and by train stations.

  This was the relief effort under the guidance of Mr. Chiang Kai-shek in 1943, which can be summed up in one word: it was a “farce.” It served only as propaganda, a show to the world and to the foreigners. The Generalissimo ordered the relief effort, but his heart was not in it; instead, he was thinking about the world and the national affairs, as well as the delicate balance among various political powers, which was the crux of the farce. It was a circus act with many actors, but the victims bore the results. It reminded me of a phrase by Mao Zedong—“I wonder who will take charge of the people’s livelihood in this vast world,” which could be modified to question who would care about whether we live or die.

  How did the dying victims feel about all this? Zhang Gaofeng, the reporter for Ta Kung Pao, had this to say:

  “The people of Henan are brave souls who boast at their dying moment that premature death brings early reincarnation.”

  What grand sounding words! Who dare says that the Chinese have no religion? Who dare says that the Chinese are like loose sand with no sense of unity? When even the Buddha was confronted by such a situation, I believe, he could only say something like that. Why did the Generalissimo convert to Christianity? What has Christianity done for him? It helped him find a wife; that was all. But he got a major political boost from Buddhist teaching that has bored deeply into the Chinese soul.

  To be sure, not all the thirty million Henan residents died of hunger. In fact, only three million of them, one tenth, starved to death. Three million fled the area, with more than twenty million remaining. What were those who stayed put hoping for, when the government and their own compatriots ignored them? They pinned their hopes on the land after the drought, the only thing they could depend on, even though it was burdened with heavy, countless taxes and exploitation. Records show that Henan had a heavy snowfall in the early spring of 1943 and rain in the seventh month. Good signs. We were hoping, under the care of the old man in the sky, for a good harvest in the summer and fall. Everything would be fine if we had something to fill our stomachs; we could put up with a government filled with darkness, ugliness, filth, and exploitation. On this point, we believed that the Nationalist government back then actually shared our hope that heaven would bring the disaster to an end with clement weather to give us a bumper crop. If not, where would the government be when every one of its citizens died of hunger? Who would provide warm houses and delicious food for the leaders and officials of the governments so that they could use their brain power to come up with more systematic means to deal with the people? Who would they rule when the people were all gone? But the old man was not kind enough to concern itself with the wishes of the government and the twenty million people. Another disaster hit in 1943; the drought was followed by a scourge of locusts, worsening the people’s suffering.

  7

  The locusts came in the fall of 1943. My friend, the editor of A Hundred Years of Disasters, had a different plan for a portrayal of the locust scourge, so my current story will not go into the details. There have been other, more impressive, locust attacks in Chinese history, a tale being written by another friend of mine, someone I deeply respect. But that does not mean I cannot mention it, since we are writing about locusts from different time periods. His occurred in Shandong in 1927 and mine in Henan in 1943; the plagues were similar but with different locusts. My grannie told me that those in 1943 were big ones, some green (young locusts, I think), some yellow (their elders), coming in swarms so large they darkened the sky, almost like the bombers during the Pacific War or Normandy landing. Their buzzing was heard miles away as they dove down to blanket crops that were denuded within an hour. In the spring of 1943, gusts of strong wind blew away the kern
els of wheat on the stalks, followed by the plague of locusts in the fall. You can imagine how tough the peasants, life was like. The locusts came and people died off. My parents told me that the locusts, instead of eating sweet potatoes, peanuts, and cowpeas, feasted on peas, corn, and sorghum. To keep from dying, the surviving victims fought the locusts. We could not do anything about the government, whose exploitation and oppression were carried out by an insane mechanism, aided by weapons. But with locusts, we could fight face to face, without suspicion of revolt or riot. And that was the difference between a government and locusts. How did we fight? There were three ways. One, waving a bamboo pole tied with bedsheets to chase them away, which was a method that hurt others to benefit only yourself. When the locusts were chased away, they simply went to someone else’s field; beside, they would come back the next day anyway. Two, digging wide trenches between fields to stop them from advancing. After finishing off someone’s crop, the locusts would have to pass the trenches before reaching the next field; the peasants used pestles to smash them into pulp or burned them, a cruel but more effective method. I think as many locusts were smashed as the peasants who starved to death. Three, praying. My grannie went to burn incense at the shrine set up by Niu Jinbao’s aunt, hoping that the locusts would spare her employer’s crop. Records show that nothing they did had any effect; there were simply too many locusts for the sheets, trenches, and deities. Most of the crops went into the bellies of the locusts and the victims of drought in 1942 suffered a similar fate in 1943.

  The tyrant of Nature damaged the lifeline of the peasants of Henan: the drought scorched their wheat, the locusts denuded their sorghum, and hail destroyed their buckwheat. They lost hope when the fall sprouts dried up, pushing them onto the path of death. At the time, hunger afflicted nine of ten Henan residents.

  If the situation had persisted, I think that every man, woman, and child in Henan would have starved to death, not an outcome we and our government would have liked to see. Luckily, that did not happen and many survived to bring the next generations of Henanese into the world. Fifty years later, Henan regained its status as the second most populous province in China. How were they saved? Did the government adopt effective measures? No. Did the locusts fly off? No. Then why? The answer is, the Japanese came. In 1943 the Japanese advanced into Henan and saved the lives of many villagers. They committed atrocities in China, slaughtering tens of thousands of Chinese; they were our mortal enemies. And yet from the winter of 1943 to the spring of 1944, it was these bloodthirsty invaders who saved many people by giving away their military rations to sustain and nourish the Chinese in Henan. Of course they harbored evil intentions as they shared the food; it was a strategic move and a political plot to bribe the people, occupy our country, seize our territory, and rape our women. But they saved our lives. On the other hand, was our government completely innocent of any strategic intention or political plot when dealing with its own people? They did nothing to help us. Under these circumstances, whoever gives you milk is your mother, as the saying goes. By eating the Japanese food, we became traitors, but was this country of ours worth our loyalty? What was there to keep us from betraying it? The government taxed us nearly to death in order to fight the Japanese and the Communists, as well as support the Allies, the battles in Southeast Asia, and Stilwell. So we supported the Japanese army, helping them invade our land. Countless villagers from Henan, including my relatives, served as guides for the Japanese, supported the front and carried stretchers; some even joined their army to disarm the Chinese. Five decades later, it was impossible to root out the traitors because there were so many of them; we are all descendants of traitors. My reading showed that, during the weeks of fighting in Henan, about fifty thousand Chinese soldiers were disarmed by their own people. Here is the record:

  “In the Spring of 1944, the Japanese army launched a major offense in Henan to prepare for another, larger scale battle. The nominal commander in the Henan battlefield was Jiang Dingwen, an eagle-eyed man whose stock in trade in Henan was threatening the administrative officials under his jurisdiction. Once he devastated the governor or Henan, scaring him into a scheme to take the little bit of grain from the peasants.

  Deploying sixty thousand soldiers to attack Henan, the Japanese began its offense in mid April and met with little resistance from the Chinese. Morale was low in the Chinese army, which consisted of sickly peasants who had suffered greatly during the famine, after years of a lethargic lifestyle. The army seized the peasants’ cattle for transportation purpose to fill a need in the front line but also to serve the army officers’ private gain. With wheat as a main staple crop, the Henan peasants relied on their cattle for subsistence; their lives would be unbearable without their farm animals.

  The peasants had been biding their time. For months, they lived in extreme hardship from the famine and the inhumane extortion from their own army; now they refused to take it any longer. Arming themselves with hunting rifles, hatchets, and rakes, they disarmed soldiers one by one at first, but eventually were able to disarm a whole regiment. An estimate showed that, over a few weeks in Henan, about fifty thousand Chinese soldiers were disarmed by their own people. Under such conditions, it would have been a miracle if the Chinese army had survived for three months. With villages engaged in armed uprisings, the Chinese army was no match for the Japanese, who, in only three weeks, seized the southbound corridor and defeated China’s three hundred thousand soldiers.

  How did they do that with a scant sixty thousand troops? By sharing their rations with the Chinese peasants, the masses, who in turn helped them achieve their goal. From late 1943 to early 1944, we assisted the Japanese invaders. Were we traitors? Were we Chinese? When Theodore White interviewed a Chinese officer before the battle, White condemned the Chinese army for its relentless taxation, to which the officer responded, “The land still belongs to China even if the people are dead, but Japan will take over China if the soldiers starve to death.” I think the response mirrored the Generalissimo’s mentality. Yet, when the issue was laid out before the dying victims of famine, it became a question of becoming a Chinese ghost or a living traitor. We chose the latter.

  This is my conclusion from going back to 1942.

  1 John S. Service, “The Famine in Honan [Henan] Province,” in Joseph W. Esherick, ed., Lost Chance in China: The World War II Despatches of John S. Service, (New York: Random House, 1974), 13–14.

  2 This and subsequent citations are from Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (New York: HarperCollins, 1978).

  Postscript

  As I looked back on 1942 and 1943, what piqued my interest, besides the famine, were trivial matters occurring during the time. And the most interesting ones were two divorce announcements in the Henan Republican Daily, which showed that the famine might have been the dominant theme among the people back then, but normalcy continued to exist, marked by a myriad of complex emotional entanglement and daily lives. We must not generalize from isolated events; a fallen leaf does not usher in autumn and a blind man cannot “see” an elephant by touching it. We cannot simply focus on the famine and ignore the complete picture of a human existence. Viewed from this angle, we might have been overly critical of the Generalissimo. Moreover, from the two announcements we can see how much progress has been made in our society. Here are the complete texts:

  Urgent Announcement

  My marriage to the woman from the Feng family has been marred by discord and we cannot grow old together. We have agreed to a divorce. From today on, we are each free to marry whomever we want.

  Zhang Yinping and his wife, Ms. Feng.

  Announcement

  On the sixth day of the twelfth lunar month, when I delivered goods to Loyang, my wife, Liu Hua, from Xuchang, ran away, taking her clothes, bedding, and other personal effects. She has not been heard from for several days. If anything happens to her from now on, I will not be responsible, as I am hereby severing all ties with her. I make this important
announcement to alert friends and family.

  Tian Guangyan, of No. 5, Zhongzheng West Street, Huaimiao Village for Yanshi.