Catherine Porter reads from Tombstone by Yang Jisheng at the 2009 Human Rights Book Fair.

Yang Jisheng is a senior reporter from Xinhua News Agency and vice director of the Chinese magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu. Yang spent a number of years researching the famine of the 1960s in China by reviewing the official archives and visiting the main famine-stricken areas. Drawing upon extensive facts and figures from his research, this book provides a historical account of the largest Chinese famine in a century.

Introduction to Tombstone: A Record of the Great Chinese Famine of the 1960s

I originally planned to call this book Pathway to Heaven, but I later changed the title to Tombstone. The title carries four meanings: first, it is the memorial for my father who died of starvation in 1959; second, it is a monument to the 36 million Chinese people who starved to death at that time; third, it is an epitaph for the system that created the great famine; and fourth, when I was halfway through the writing of this book, a physical exam at Beijing’s Xuanwu Hospital revealed an abnormality: I was alpha-fetoprotein positive, suggesting liver cancer. I then increased my writing pace, determined to finish the book, so that it could become my own tombstone as well. Fortunately, further examination ruled out any abnormality. Still, since the writing of the book entailed a huge political risk, if I were to land in trouble because of it, that, too, would amount to sacrificing my life for an idea, and the book would, naturally, become my own tombstone. Of course, the first three were the primary meanings I had in mind.

Tombstones are solidified memories. Humanity’s memories are the stepping stones that carry states and nations forward, the markers that guide humanity’s forward march. We must remember not only the good, but also the evil; not only the bright, but the dark as well. Those who hold power in a totalitarian system flaunt their own virtues while concealing the faults; they whitewash their mistakes and forcibly erase people’s memories of man-made disasters, darkness, and evil. As a result, the Chinese people habitually suffer from historical amnesia, but it is an amnesia forcibly created by those in power. And so I have erected this tombstone to make people remember the human disasters, the darkness, and the evil, so that we may steer well clear of such horrors from now on.

（1）

In late April, 1959, I was just spending the period allotted for extracurricular activities to make “May Fourth” Youth Day wall posters for my school’s Communist Youth League Committee, when my childhood friend Zhang Zhibo (nicknamed Chezi) came from Wanli to Xishui No. 1 Middle School in a great hurry looking for me, to tell me, “Your father is starving, you’ve got to hurry back, and it would be best if you could find some rice to take with you.” He added: “He didn’t have any strength to go cut bark from the trees, but he couldn’t stand the hunger, so he wanted to go to Jiangjiayan to buy some salt to put in his drinking water, but he suddenly collapsed halfway there. Some people from Wanli carried him back.”

I immediately put the work at hand down and asked Teacher Zhao Chunlie, who was both the League Party Secretary and my class headmaster, for leave. Then I went to the canteen office to stop my meals for three days, took out three catties of rice, and raced home—to the Lower Shuihu Bay. When I got to Wanli, I found that everything had changed: there was no bark on the elms (folks in Xishui called them oil trees) that stood in front of the village gate, they were stripped bare and their roots were dug up, leaving nothing but a messy dirt pit. The pond was dry. The neighbors said they had let the water out in order to get at the freshwater mussels. The freshwater mussels had an unpleasant fishy odor; people never ate them before. There were no dogs barking, no chickens running about. Even the little children, rambunctious in the past, now stayed indoors. Wanli was a deathly silence.

When I walked through the front door of our house, I found nothing but the bare walls. Not a grain of rice, not a scrap of anything to eat, not even any water in the water vat. When immobilized by hunger, who would find the strength to draw water!

My father was propped up in bed, his sunken eyes lifeless. His face, with all the flesh gone, was slack with thick wrinkles. He tried to reach out his hand to greet me but couldn’t lift it; he could only move it slightly. His hand looked very much like the one I saw on the human skeleton sample in our biology dissection class, its withered skin unable to conceal the indentations between the protruding bones. When I saw that hand, I was stunned and saddened, realizing the horror and cruelty described by that common phrase, ‘skinny as a bag of bones’! He mumbled falteringly, in a very low voice, telling me to leave quickly, to hurry back to school.

How did father get to be like this? Two months earlier, he had been just fine. (Actually, his legs were already swollen from edema, but I didn’t know then that it was from hunger.) Father was in charge of the water buffalo for the production brigade. The water buffalo was sweet-tempered, and under father’s meticulous care, it was strong and clean. Although it couldn’t talk, its gaze could express intimacy, distress, longing, or anger. It could communicate with father by the look in its eyes. I understood some of its expressions too. Every time I came back from school I would ride it up the hill and slip away.

Two months earlier, father had asked someone to get me back from school. The production brigade had secretly killed the water buffalo and we were given one catty of beef. Father knew life at school was hard and he wanted me to come home and have some beef. As soon as I came into the room, I could smell the tantalizing aroma of the meat. Father would not eat it. He said that he had been too close to the buffalo, who understood human nature. He could not eat it. Actually, he was just looking for an excuse so that I would have it all to myself. I dug in voraciously while he watched from the side, his eyes filled with kindness. I was full of remorse for not having understood it then. If he had eaten that catty of beef, he wouldn’t have starved to this degree!

I gave father’s hand a squeeze and hurriedly picked up the water bucket and the carrying pole to fill the water vat. I then swung the hoe over my shoulder and, carrying a basket, headed for the field where we had planted peanuts the year before to dig up some peanut shoots. (The peanuts that we missed when we dug for them last year had sprouted in the spring into tender shoots much thicker than bean sprouts. They were supposedly poisonous, and were not to be eaten, but even they had been pretty much picked clean.) I dug and dug, my heart filled with remorse and self-reproach. Why hadn’t I come home sooner to dig for wild vegetables? Why hadn’t I taken leave from school earlier and brought some rice home?

Remorse and self-reproach served no purpose at all. I cooked a porridge from the rice I’d brought home and carried it over to the bed. Father was no longer able to swallow. Three days later, he bid farewell to this world. ...

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