This is a journalistic piece I wrote in 2015 as a junior at Cornell University. There are stories that demand to be told. For me, this is one of them.
Born Into China’s Great Leap Forward
Mao Zedong, the chairman of China from 1949 to 1976, had a vision of modernizing the nation. In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward, a five year plan with the intention of transforming China into an agricultural and industrial superpower that would surpass the West. Provinces were merged into communes consisting of about five thousand families each that were tasked with growing food or creating steel in “backyard furnaces.” Within the first year, ten million people starved to death. Mao himself declared the Great Leap Forward a failure. By conservative measures, 30 million people perished in all, but the death toll is believed to be closer to 50 million. My father, [redacted], was born during the Great Leap Forward. He lived through its aftermath. Its influence can still be seen in the way he approaches his life with paranoia, prepared for the worst at all times.
Dracunculiasis is spread only through the ingestion of water contaminated with water fleas infected with guinea worm larvae, a monotone voice says. It can take up to a year before a person realizes he has been infected.
My father sits across from me at the dining room table, the planes of his face lit by the glow of his laptop screen. His eyes are fixed intently on the video. The room is otherwise dark even though it is midday, the drapes always drawn to keep passing pedestrians from looking in. All the lights are off except for a weak fluorescent bulb in the kitchen that bathes the dining room in a dull blue. Dishes of pork with bitter melon and steamed flounder grow cold on the dining room table. Sharp clinking sounds emanate from the kitchen, where my mother is drying the dishes.
The first noticeable symptom is a burning sensation, usually in one of the extremities, as the fully-matured worm forms a blister by which to exit the human body, the voice continues. Every night, from the time my father comes home from work at eight in the evening until two in the morning when he retires to bed, he is glued to his laptop screen. He watches survival videos: how to build a self-sufficient shelter, how to treat festering wounds with minimal first aid, how to fashion traps and fishing rods solely out of materials found in the wild. We live in a two story house in Queens, New York. I am home from Cornell University for Thanksgiving break. On this Thanksgiving morning, I coax my father to tell me about his life before he immigrated to the States. He hesitates at first because he is wary of the veracity of journalism, my tentative piece included, but I am his daughter, and if anything, his childhood taught him the value of family. He turns off his laptop. He is willing to speak.
My father was born on October 15, 1958, two years into the Great Leap Forward, China’s government-imposed famine. As the only son of [redacted] and [redacted], he was born into a working family that farmed the rice paddies along the Xin Village of the Guangdong Province, and was expected to one day head the family. The Guangdong Province had already been organized into a commune by 1958. Here, I translate my father’s recollection of communes from Chinese to English:
“Individual-owned properties were relinquished and became collectively owned by the commune. About 30,000 communes were formed. They were tasked with growing food—mainly rice—and melting whatever steel materials they could find in ‘backyard furnaces’ that produced only low-quality steel unfit for the construction purposes for which it was originally intended. Most of the steel was then used to make farming tools that quickly fell apart.”
Until the age of two, my father participated in communal meals. The villagers of the Xin Village would gather at the center of town to eat together from a large cauldron of watery rice porridge called congee. Most of the time, the congee was bland. There was never any meat. Sometimes, slivers of taro or lotus root were added for taste. Despite the simplicity of the food, no one was starving yet. A year later, however, food would be scarce. When my father thinks of his childhood, the first thing he remembers is hunger:
“During the Great Leap Forward, communes competed against each other… Many communes fabricated high numbers for the volume of rice that they produced… The government taxed based on [these reported numbers], so very little food was left for the people to eat.”
Xin Village was no exception. There was no choice. Those who argued against the fabricated figures or attempted to report the true figures were accused of being untrue to Mao’s new government and punished. My grandfather taught my father how to peel the bark off trees when my father was three. The villagers had resorted to eating the gummy layer underneath the bark. My father tells me that it is called cambium, and that one chews on it to keep his mouth occupied. “It takes your mind off the hunger for a while,” he says, and that it was preferable to leather or the tough soles of farming sandals that some villagers ate. He recalls that the trees occasionally bled a sticky, bitter resin when he harvested cambium, and when that happened, he would bring his mouth right to the trunk. Nothing was wasted. In the Xin Village, all the trees were bark-less. Even the roots were dug up and stripped bare.
My father never wanted to be a farmer despite being born into a farming family. He wanted to be a truck driver. He remembers the trucks that would come by the province every month to transport the rice that the village grew to the government, and feeling envious of whoever was behind that wheel. He wanted to be the truck driver who travelled, who had the power to leave:
“Where would you have gone?” I ask.
“You can’t drive to America.”
“At that time, I was so hungry I would have tried.”
Although my father is in America now, he lives like he is in China in the 1950’s. In the summer of 2003, New York City experienced a massive blackout. For two days, the city was blanketed by darkness and silence. There was no air conditioning or running water. The food in our refrigerator spoiled. For two days, my parents, my sister, and I subsisted on canned tuna and chickpeas heated over our gas stove. We drank bottled water. We could not shower. The day after the city regained power, I came home from summer school to a new, bright red plastic container wedged under the dining room table. It must have been able to hold at least fifty gallons. A hose rested on the ground beside the container, snaking its way to the bathroom, where the other end was still attached to the faucet. “We don’t know when the next blackout will happen,” my father had said. “What will we do without water then?” From then on, we maintained this large container of water. Although we changed the water frequently, it would quickly go stagnant and fester. For ten years our family lived with water bugs, some of them the size of a silver dollar.
My father believes, that at any given time, there can and will be a shortage of anything, or that things will go terribly awry. He talks about it often. Murphy’s Law was one of the first things he taught my sister and I before we were old enough to go to school: If something can go wrong, it will. It makes sense. In Mao’s China, people died of hunger, worked to death, or were executed for political dissent. He tells me that the Xin Village was one of the fortunate ones. In some cases, entire communes perished. Xin Village only lost one in twenty. When I ask my father if our family lost anyone to starvation, he answers with what I understand to be anguish disguised as ironic, dark humor. In Chinese, “The Great Famine” is called “sānnián zìrán zāihài,” which translates to “three years of natural disasters.” My father will not accept that translation. Someone is to blame for the very unnatural mass deaths. He blames the government. Sustenance was purchased with government-issued tickets: A kilo of rice or a cut of meat was paid for by those little, scarce slips of paper that were allocated depending on the number of family members in a household. My father’s household comprised only himself and his parents at the time. His younger sister, [redacted], was not born until six years later. Oftentimes, his parents feigned stomach issues or indigestion so that my father, who was a growing child, could eat.
Towards the worst of the famine, many villagers displayed signs of edema. The workforce declined because the people were too ill to work. Villagers no longer buried family members that died. Instead, they left the corpses in bed, and draped sheets and clothing over them to pass them off as sick or sleeping. That way, the families could still collect the rations. In some cases, the decomposing corpses attracted rodents, that, if captured, were also devoured. My father knows this because a man in a neighboring household became so weak that he was eventually incapable of swallowing the congee offered to him. He perished soon after. Emaciated mothers nursed their infants until their nipples blistered and the milk ran dry. At night, there were no longer the sounds of barking dogs that were so ubiquitous before the famine. The wails of hungry infants became common. Even now, my father cannot stand to hear infants cry.
“You are lucky,” my father says, cutting his anecdote short. It was a phrase that I grew up hearing often: for example, after meals or when I complained about homework. After learning about my father’s childhood, it takes on new meaning. By now, it is early evening, and I know by the way my father turns on his laptop again that he is done with talking. His story, in many ways, is incomplete, but this the most he ever has and perhaps ever will speak about his childhood in China. He is in America now—a fact that he emphasizes—and has no plans to revisit China. He resumes his video from this morning. I know that, as always, he will not sleep until he finishes it. If something can go wrong, it will. This is the best way he knows to keep his family safe.
The worm is slowly extracted from the human body over the course of several hours. This must be done carefully to keep the worm from breaking. Otherwise, the carcass remains inside the body, where it will putrefy and cause tissue necrosis.
As I write down the last of my notes from our conversation, my father pauses the video. And, strangely enough, he thanks me for listening.
Chung, Chuihua J., and Bernard Chang. Great Leap Forward. Köln: Taschen, 2001. Print.
Hu, Angang. The Political and Economic History of China, 1949-1976. The Great Leap Forward: 1957-1965. Singapore: Enrich Professional, 2013. Print.
