Hunger Trilogy

Wang Ruowang, Kyna Rubin, Ira Kasoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317468349
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This autobiographical novella was written in 1980 by one of China's leading dissidents, who was released from jail in late October 1990 again after being imprisoned as a pro-democracy activist in the wake of the Tiananmen incident of spring 1989. Wang recounts three episodes of extreme hardship in his life: incarceration in a Guomindang jail during the 1930s for his communist activism, on the run from Japanese troops during the 1940s in a bleak part of Shandong Province, and imprisonment as a "rightist" in Shanghai during the 1960s cultural revolution. The central theme of the three stories is extreme deprivation and "Hunger".

Part 1 Hunger Trilogy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315703602-1

I don’t know who it was that invented the religious-like ceremony called “eating a meal to recall bitterness.” They say it’s conducted to teach you not to forget class bitterness. On a certain day, at the same time, members of entire organizations or military companies eat steamed rolls made of chaff and carrot leaves. If no carrot leaves are available, sweet potato seedlings are used. Everyone has to eat one or two, even people with ulcers. They say eating a few of these rolls gives you a proletarian consciousness and prevents you from becoming revisionist. You’re not allowed to knit your brow when you eat, you have to look like you’re consciously accepting reform. But if you really have to make a face it’s okay, because you can make it part of the game by saying, “I’m thinking about the suffering of the past and the happiness of the present. It makes me sad to think how I was oppressed under the old society.”

As for me, when I swallow these rolls I have quite a different reaction. My past suffering was not from eating coarse food, but from the inability to scrounge up even anything coarse to eat, for I’ve encountered extraordinary hunger, the kind of hunger that makes you wish for death.

And now I want to describe to you the three times I experienced this sort of hunger. I’m not telling you this to strengthen any sort of proletarian consciousness, but to express a hope. Twice is bad enough, three times is too much; I only hope not to have to face starvation a fourth time.

I

A youth of just sixteen was dragged like a criminal into an interrogation room. They made him sit on a big, hard chair. Leather straps on both arms bound him, lest he try to harm the judge.

Accompanied by a clerk, the judge sat on the bench. Looking down from his lofty position, he read the court “verdict”:

Punishing severely in accordance with the laws against threatening social order during a time of emergency, but taking into account the young age of the offender, this court sentences the offender to ten years imprisonment, sentence to begin this year of 1934, in the month of …, day of …

To sentence a sixteen-year-old boy to ten years in prison while claiming to be lenient and kind infuriated me. Since the straps weren’t binding me because they couldn’t be fastened tightly across my small frame, I felt like leaping out of the chair and bashing that ignorant, cruel judge, and tearing the damned “verdict” into shreds. But I managed to control myself, and without a word let them lead me out toward the unknown prison.

The prison was very big, with eight cell blocks, one of which still stands today—it was the prison for juvenile offenders at Caohejing. I was put into a small cell six feet long by three feet wide. Once inside, I heard the iron door shut behind me with a clang. It was very dark. There were four wooden beds, and in the darkness I could make out three or four figures, thin as ghosts, sizing me up. For the longest time no one spoke. The total silence made my heart sink; I was terrified. Realizing I’d have to spend ten years in this godforsaken place, that I had before me an almost endless string of dark, empty days, my legs grew rubbery and I involuntarily began to sob.

A soft, kind voice then said in my ear, “Why are you crying? What’s your name?” Without taking the time to dry my tears, I lifted my head. He was an adult, with a pointed nose, thick lips, and sparkling eyes. In this tiny world, pitch dark and seemingly without hope, it felt warm and comforting to hear a human voice. I looked at him as if he’d just saved my life. “My name is Wang Shouhua.”

“Don’t cry. Are you a c.y.? A c.y. is a revolutionary, so why are you crying?”*

“I got ten years. And I still don’t even know what I did wrong!”

“Just ten years. When you get out of here you’ll be three years younger than I am now. When you get out you’ll still be a young man, you’ll still have time to do something with your life.”

* Author’s note: c.y. stands for Communist Youth League.

I stopped crying then. Later I learned that this twenty-nine-year-old prisoner was Xiao Wenguang, a worker in a Shanghai printing factory in charge of labor union work for the party underground.

In the darkness I heard another man speaking, very softly, in a hoarse voice. Only in a place like this, as quiet as a grave, could you have heard him. “All of us here, whether we’ve been given ten, eight, or twenty years, are all the same. Some day our Red Army will fight its way to Shanghai. What’s more, this prison is in the suburbs and the Guomindang won’t be able to hold it. As soon as our Red Army gets here and opens the gates, it’ll be like the Bastille gates being thrown open by the flood of the French Revolution in 1789—in one day, all the prisoners were freed, even those sentenced to death.”

He spoke with such faith and confidence that I was completely entranced by the beautiful picture he painted. I felt that my imprisonment was only temporary, that it couldn’t last too long. I didn’t cry anymore, and I recovered my youthful vigor. In that tiny place I began to practice martial arts every day, and I also started to study Japanese. My teacher was Xu Yushu, the man who had talked about the Bastille. He had studied in Japan and spoke fluent Japanese. He said that teaching me Japanese was good for him, too, because he could review the vocabulary he’d otherwise forget.

The biggest problem was the food. They gave us two meals a day. These consisted of boiled rice served in a big, rusty iron pot, on top of which was a small, shallow pot of vegetables. The rice we got was of three types. One kind tasted like it had been burned in a fire. It turned out that a rice warehouse nearby had caught on fire, and after the fire was put out the prison authorities had been able to get the rice for just the price of hauling it away, so they had it brought over to feed us. The second kind was rice that had gone bad. This was old rice that was partially eaten away by maggots, or the dregs swept out of the granaries. When you ate it the foul stench made you lose your appetite. There were lots of cooked maggots in this rice. New inmates were very particular about what they ate, and even used their chopsticks to extract the maggots. One cellmate, Old Zhang, had probably studied nutrition. “When rice maggots are steamed or boiled,” he offered, “you can eat them. They’re a source of protein, so you don’t need to pick them out. Good or bad, they should be treated like a kind of meat.” I watched him swallow the maggots without batting an eye, and decided that he made sense. So I began to eat the maggots, too. This fellow, Zhang Yun-qing, was a short, sturdily built student from Sichuan.

The third kind of rice tasted of kerosene. The grains were snow-white and large, and, if not for the kerosene taste, would have been high quality. According to our “nutritionist” Zhang Yunqing, this rice was probably imported from Burma or Thailand and had been contaminated by kerosene on the ship bringing it over. The kerosene didn’t affect the nutritional value of the rice, so this kind was much better than the other two, since small amounts of kerosene aren’t harmful. I just had to hold my nose when I ate it. The funny thing was that our expert, who said we should eat it, couldn’t get it down himself. Not without regret, he told us, “Rationally, I know I should eat it, but I just can’t. As soon as I smell it I feel like vomiting, and if I throw up everything in my stomach I’ll be harming my body more than I would by not eating the rice. So I can’t eat it. It’s just like a child who won’t eat meat. Even if you put the best cut in front of him he won’t touch it. There’s nothing you can do, because if you force him to eat it he’ll throw up. He’s stricter in his diet than a Muslim, even.”

As for the vegetables in the little pot, they were pretty pitiful. In the winter, for several months in a row, we would get four or five slices of turnip. Chewing those turnips was sometimes like chewing cotton balls, the sole difference being that you could get a bit of a salty taste out of them. In summer for weeks on end we would eat winter melon [a bland vegetable with high water content and little nutritional value]. On rare occasions we would get sweet potato—that was like a first-class banquet for us. My deepest impression is of the time we ate sprouted beans. For prisoners, getting to eat sprouted beans was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. According to our “nutritionist,” these beans had several kinds of vitamins—the shell contained vitamin C, for instance. We would roll each bean around in our mouths several times before swallowing, and eat it skin and all. For days after we would discuss this delicacy and recall it longingly. Since Old Zhang couldn’t eat the kerosene rice, he depended on crackers or cakes sent by his family. In the Guomindang prisons, you were allowed to receive all kinds of food from your family. If you didn’t have relatives in Shanghai to bring you anything, you could buy things once a month if you had money saved in the prison “bank,” things like peanuts, salted turnips, cookies, and cakes.

Losing your freedom was of course hard to take, but getting food that wasn’t even fit for pigs made it worse. The call “time to eat” hardly inspired your appetite here. We ate only because we had to, because we knew we’d be finished if we didn’t. So all we could do was force ourselves to swallow the garbage they fed us.

It had been just over a year since I was thrown into this black prison. The beginning of my second year here was when I grew up. Darkness, hunger, and sickness worked on me continuously, tortured me, and changed the appearance of what had been an innocent young boy. I could see my ribs clearly; I could see the curling blood vessels standing out beneath my pale white skin. My gums often bled. I became so thin I didn’t even recognize myself.

Xu Yushu didn’t approve of my martial arts.

“You’re young, you should do a little exercise,” he said, “but I don’t think you should practice martial arts. We get so little to eat that there just isn’t enough nourishment for strenuous exertion.”

So I stopped my exercises and poured all my energy into learning Japanese. One day Teacher Xu came to the words for “go out the door” and “go in the door.” I froze. Mr. Xu didn’t know what was going on. “What’s wrong?”

“Those words are useless to me. I won’t need them for at least ten years.”

He was silent, his eyes moistened with tears.

At dusk one day in late fall, before I’d fallen asleep, I heard the sound of men running around outside the wall. I’d never heard any sound like it before. I leaped out of bed and woke up Xu Yushu, asleep at my feet.

“The Red Army is here!” I shouted. “Listen! It must be the Red Army come to save us!”

My cellmates were all awakened by my shouts. Old Xiao and Old Zhang pressed their ears against the wall and listened carefully to the activity outside. Only Xu Yushu stayed where he was. “The Red Army won’t come here,” he stated impassively. “They’ve left Jiangxi and gone far, far away [on their Long March to Yan’an].” He was surely a mysterious man. How did he know that the Red Army had gone far away?

Xiao Wenguang, pressed up against the wall listening, said, “It sounds like they’re chasing an escaped prisoner.”

“That prisoner is really something!” I exclaimed.

“I’m afraid he won’t be able to escape,” replied Old Zhang.

“If the Red Army doesn’t come soon, I’d also like to try …,” I cried.

Xiao Wenguang fixed his gaze on me. “You’re out of your mind.”

All along I had been relying on what Xu Yushu had said when I first entered this place. Those words had supported me, given me hope. In this miserable little cage I had managed to keep my spirits up, and although I wasn’t happy, I had at least managed to avoid worrying. But in that one instant, my hopes were shattered. It was as if the spring inside me which had supplied me with power suddenly snapped. I became completely numb and dejected. I was assailed with all sorts of concerns; I’d practically become an old man overnight. Teacher Xu quickly noticed my change of mood, but said nothing about it. However, one day during my Japanese lesson, he taught me the word for “open the door.” I repeated the word eagerly several times, and then asked, “Didn’t you say the Red Army was even farther away from here now?”

With a slight smile, he answered, “As long as the Red Army hasn’t left China, the day to ‘open the door’ will come. And I believe that that day is getting closer all the time.”

I didn’t need to question him further about the basis of his optimistic prediction. Whatever came out of his mouth was gospel to me. His words were my lifeblood. Since he restored my hope, I believed him even more unquestioningly. I’ve never forgotten the Japanese word for “open the door,” for that word welded back together the spring that had broken inside me.

II

Xu Yushu fell ill, and his legs became swollen. The unanimous diagnosis was beriberi. It was our understanding that if the swelling in the legs gradually spread to the rest of the body, death would quickly follow. The prison medical officer examined him but said nothing. He just left two packets of medicine behind. When we opened them and examined their contents, they turned out to be just chaff and wheat bran. Mr. Xu swallowed this strange, worthless medicine and said, “There’s sugar syrup in it. It’s got a sweet taste. It’s just what I need. The medical officer has also diagnosed it as beriberi.”

“The food’s been so bad recently, I bet a lot of people will get beriberi,” said Old Zhang. “If they don’t improve what we eat and only give us chaff and wheat bran for medicine, no one will be able to get over the beriberi.”

Everyone began to examine his own legs. Xiao Wenguang pressed his fingers against the backs of his calves and discovered that this left impressions. I tried it too, pressing hard on my calf muscles. Fortunately, the muscles returned to normal right away. “You’re lucky you’re still young,” said Xiao Wenguang. “You can still resist it for a while.”

The cell was suddenly filled with the fear of death. We felt the threat of imminent disaster and grew very uneasy, then despondent. I didn’t even want to study Japanese anymore, even though the teacher taught me an hour a day as usual. But when I saw that the soles of his feet were inflamed, I couldn’t bear to bother him anymore. Unable to stop myself, I grabbed his legs and began to weep. He, on the other hand, calmly encouraged me. “I’m taking medicine. I know this is due to a lack of vitamin B. It’ll slowly get better.”

Once a week we were allowed to go out for air. We used this time to exchange information with the other political prisoners. Because of Xu Yushu’s illness he couldn’t go with us. While we were lined up, the other inmates came over and asked with great concern, “Why hasn’t Old Xu come out?”

“He’s got beriberi and his legs are so swollen you can almost see through them.”

“One of our group has it, too.”

When we returned to the cell, the four of us told Xu Yushu what we’d learned from the others and conveyed their expressions of concern. Teacher Xu thought it over for a while. “We’ve got to do something. We have to fight for our lives. We can’t wait around to die. The abysmal quality of food is the critical problem.”

On June 23, 1935, out of the blue, came a miracle. One afternoon, pieces of soy sauce–braised pork, one for each of us, appeared in the vegetable pot.

When he slid the food into the cell, the guard shouted, “You can thank the new warden Mr. Shao for this favor.” We didn’t care if the new warden was Zhao, Cao, or whoever. All we cared about was that there was meat, like manna from heaven. When we picked up the little metal pot it felt as if it had gotten much heavier. I hope the reader won’t laugh at us—the way we ate the meat wasn’t very pretty to look at. I tore my piece in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Introduction: The Growth of a Nation and an Intellectual
• Hunger Trilogy
• About the Translator