The Scar in People's Heart
By Jian Shuo Wang on 2007-01-21 10:35 · ChinaYesterday, before Wendy’s parents went back home, we finally had some time to sit down together as a family and chat. It was a wonderful hour. We had the chance to know more about their experience in the old days, when they were young.
I don’t Know China Well
I admit (as I always do) that I don’t know China well. No matter how people claim, the history of this country is a mystery for many people, including me.
We chatted about the “three dark years” from 1959 to 1961, which is officially named “Three Years of Natural Disaster”. It is actually NOT. The three years is a blurred image for me. I know many people starved to death during the three years, but it is still hard to connect this piece of history with the person before me, and myself. It is not a far away history anyway.
Why and How
From 1959, before the Great Leap started, there came the order from Beijing. People in the whole country were not allowed to own any private property, and were not allowed to cook at home. Anyone who setup fire to cook would be sentenced as criminal. Everyone had to go to public dining rooms to have “free meal”.
It was not bad in the first year, since there was so many food that was more than people can eat. However, at the same time, people were almost not allowed to work in the field.
The second year, not surprisingly, there were not enough food left from the previous year. Since the order from the top were the same: No cooking at home, no private property (especially food), and no working, people started to starve.
During the three years, so many people did nothing, just wait to starve to death. I read about this in history books (of cause not the current official version), but I was still stocked when parents described some real stories. They emphasized this is not a story on TV or film, this was the real life. They saw it with their own eyes.
Their neighbours were found death. One with 5 persons - all found dead in their own home, quietly. The other family had 3 persons. The parents died, and lied on the bed. The child didn’t tell anyone, and went to dining room to collect three persons’ food. Although the food was still less than one normal meal for one child today, he ate them all, but it was too much for this child who barely didn’t eat for months, and die because eating too much. People found three bodies in their home long time later, two in bedroom and one in kitchen. In other families, after people died, the neighbours could do nothing because they were so weak to carry the bodies.
The lives of our parents, and their brothers were at the edge of death. Mom said she opened her eyes but was not able to see anything clearly. Even when bird flow by and drop shit onto ground, people would put it into their month…
Well. This was the real situation in the year 1959 to 1961 in the normal small village. Record shows overall, the weather for the whole country were good, and there were no natural disaster, but millions of people died. No one know the exact number.
It Changes Lives of a Generation
Before, when I talk about common sense, my example was: parents always keep food left from this meal to the next, and I only want fresh meal the next time. My parents’ common sense is “to save money”, and my common sense is “to get best experience”. I compared and claimed: there are two different common sense, and people seldom communicate about this, and this is the reason of conflict.
Now, I’d like to say, I was partially wrong. The common sense of parent generation was not “to save money”, it should be “to save food”. I deeply understand when a person witness his/her family member or friends starved and died just because there was nothing to eat, how uncomfortable he/she would be if he/she throw away food - for the rest of their lives.
It also explains about why the whole generation (above 60 in age) went along from the Culture Revolution have such a strong sense of “insecurity”. They save money, because they don’t know what may happen; they are very cautious to talk, because a political movement easily swipe their lives away. The more I learn about what they have experienced, the more I appreciate their decisions, and their behavior, and the more I understand about this country.
This is a scar in the heart of that generation. I saw it, but I didn’t realize why there is a scar before.
38 Comments
You BLOG will be banned/unplugged soon. Oh my CROW MOUTH!
The official [Chinese]estimated death toll in this period is about 15 million dead of starvation out of a total 40 million deaths. Many analysts have estimated that the number of "abnormal deaths" ranged from 10 millon to 100 million. Some western analysts such as Patricia Buckley Ebrey estimate that about 20-40 million people had died of starvation caused by bad government policy and natural disasters. J. Banister estimates this number is about 23 million. Li Chengrui, a former minister of the National Bureau of Statistics of China, estimated 22 million (1998). His estimation was based on Ansley J. Coale and Jiang Zhenghua's estimation of 17 million. Cao Shuji estimated 32.5 million. (Source: Wikipedia)
That's why property rights is so important.
By the way according to many, never any time in human history more people have starve to death than during the great leap forward.
And that to produce crappy useless steel, which was a way to fulfill the megalomania of a Chairman Mao.
I always wander how Chinese have been able to do such things... such as destroy your iron kitchen tools to do iron...
the goal of producing iron is to produce goods, not destroy goods to produce tools... how can you arrive in a state where everybody lack of basic common sense??
I am sure that these kind of stupid policies will have been impossible to implement in many countries, because the population will just have said: "fcuk off". Same story for culturral revolution.
Maybe 5000 years in wich you have been taught not to think but obey enable to obey even to the most stupid orders.
See you!
You had a posting about a really expensive hotel a little while back. How about some postings about lower priced, but still decent hotels in Shanghai?
so people only have a 70 year 'leasehold' in China? what if a person lives until he or she is 86 years old, where does that person live his final 16 years?
Movie:
http://www.amazon.com/Live-Yimou-Zhang/dp/0792899180
Your parents' story was sad. However, for many many more people, their youth or lives were completed wasted.
Taking my parents as example, when the culture revolution started, they just graduated from one of the top engineer schools and their careers just started to take off. Then came the political storm, for the next 10 years, they literally did not do much career wise, other than make some toys for me and one sofa for our home. (It was very popular to make your own sofa during that period of time if you work at factory.) I don't think my parents had never been forced to go to countryside or had no food to eat. However, from 25 to 35, their lives were wasted and in people's lives, how many 25 to 35 do you have? The saddest thing is that almost not only my parents had these experience, it happend amost to EVERYONE who lived in China during that period .
Often times, I was thinking if my parents were given the same opportunity which I have, their lifes would have been very different. The sad stories were not only live with the people who died but also left the marks to the people who live thru it.
Sorry, I really do not want to get your blog into any trouble, but I have to say "A country has to face her own history, otherwise the country can not make any progress (maybe economically but not humanistically)
It is avialable in most of the public libaries, and maybe even Block Buster in the US. To anyone who want to buy it in China, just find any DVD vendor on the street and ask for (Huo2 Zhe4 活着）.
The difference between different places is not in executing the orders from the central government. It is the central government that taxed the rural villages heavily and reallocated resources to the cities. I wonder where you think all the food in the city came from while people were starved to death in places where food was produced. In a top-down society, the evil always comes from above and blames always stay at the bottom. I see the same thing happening in today's China as well.
BTW, I was born and raised in China. Have lived in 5 different provinces for more than 30 years. Have lived in villages, small and big cites. Have traveled all over China. I don't know who you consider know China well and qualified to criticize.
It seems to me you are making more excuses to justify what was caused by the communist party in the 60's. It is easy for people to see who is actually responsible, why you don't want to conclude it? China has demanded decades for Japan to come to face it's history and learn from the grave mistake it made and the suffering it imposed on people of Asia in WW2. Isn't it time for the Chinese goverment to wake up and face it's own past too?
I completely agree with Ying Zhang, that we need to look at the history. Look at all the suffer, and pain in human history, to learn how to avoid it. We need to know better about the history of what Japanese did in China in 1930 to 1940s, and it is equally important or even more important to learn the history after that.
But (still) not in China.
Today, the man and the former red guard both close to '60 still live next to each other and two families are closely associated. The crippled man never blame the neighbour who beated him up none the former red guard shown any regret or remorse of the incident, nevertheless, both blame the 'circumstance' caused the consequence and mishap.
Forget the past, look at the future, otherwise you'll always have clip on the shoulder.
Stephen, we know eachother on this blog for a while, what are your relations to China ?
Do you have Jianshuo's phone no. ? Then we can make a connection, if Jianshuo agrees, and makes it :-)
I will send carsten's mobile phone and email to you, since it seems carsten agrees.
Let's be together.
This said, ppl who say there was no nature disaster is plain wrong; and say so just to support their own views of the Chinese government. There are nature disasters almost every year in China, and in those years it was unfortunately worth. No enough to kill tens of millions of ppl, it was an inability to respond them that caused that, but it was a major factor attributing to the famine.
In terms of the worst hit; it wasn't the village folks or the city folks. Villages were close enough to nature to barely live off wild things - roots and tree bark, and the gov. made sure that its major cities got its supplies, no matter how much it had to squeeze elsewhere. It was the towns, and small size cities that faired the worst.
I don't think we really have to worry about that. If you grew up abroad, then its quite easy to find a history book critical of China in those years - and these years. So knowing is purely based on your interest. If you lived in China, well there's no need telling ppl what they have themselves personally experienced, its in their bones. No need to make a course, when everyone has family with grueling storys like the ones you tell.
My grandfather, as a university professor was ridiculed, shaved, stripped, paraded, beaten to near death countless times during the cultural revolution, most fiercely by his closest students. By the end, these red guards had been spread all across China, some in the least inhabitable of places as pioneering young intellectuals. Their ex-professor had survived, and in a position to bring them home. My mom remembered a time when one of the nastiest of the lot, had come to face her father, kneeling, crying, apologising and asking for help. So my grandfather forgave this man who'd broken his jaw and made an habit of urinating on him. He then started finding and transfering these students back from villages in the middle of nowhere, helping them enroll in school again or find work.
A country is an embodiment of her people. Perhaps a government has not made peace, but the people who've lived and made history have certainly faced their past, be it good or ill. And if her people are able to forgive their enemies, their country for past trangressions and find love for them both, what is more humane than this?
So in the name of 'progress' do they not deserve our imitation more than our pity, critisizm, or self flagellation?
Apart from the details of the terrible tragedy The most interesting part for me was your recognition of different "common sense". Because everyone and every country has a different history and different experiences peoples views of the same situation can be very different.
The more we understand about peoples situation the more able we become to understand there decisions. Good or bad (People always make good decisions, only others or time revel them to be bad.)