In 1965 Xianhui Yang
(楊顯惠), aged 19 and full of revolutionary spirit, was working in China’s northwest (his native region), planting trees and digging irrigation systems near the Gobi Desert. He was one of the youth Mao Zedong (毛澤東) had ordered into the countryside to experience the lives of the ordinary rural people.
One day someone mentioned the tragic deaths that had taken place a decade earlier at a re-education camp called Jiabiangou (夾邊溝). At first Yang couldn’t find out any more, but the idea that the Communist Party might commit brutal acts against its own people surprised and shocked him.
He remained in the region for 16 years and started to write short stories about the pioneering life of the young in Gansu Province. In 1988 he moved east and began living full-time as a professional writer. Then in 1997, with the relaxation of official attitudes to past errors by the Party, he decided to return west and try to find out more about what had happened at Jiabiangou.
The people imprisoned there had been victims of Mao’s “Anti-Rightist” campaign which began in 1957 and ended in 1960. They were often academics or professional people, but also those who had gone too far in following Mao’s apparent invitation to open criticism in the “Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom” campaign.
Over a period of five years, Yang interviewed former Rightists or their relatives. He then adapted the material he had garnered into a set of short stories. Many of these were published in China, most fully in Farewell to Jiabiangou (告別夾邊溝) in 2003, and they caused a sensation. Memoirs of life in forced-labor camps had appeared before, but these stories of Yang’s, based so closely on interviews, were considered to be in a class of their own.
Now 13 of these stories have appeared in English under the title Woman From Shanghai (上海女人—中國勞改場倖存者的故事). In the title story, a woman travels the long distance from Shanghai to Gansu to try to visit her imprisoned husband. On arriving, she finds out he’s dead, but the prisoners won’t let her see the body because most of the flesh has been eaten.
Starvation is at the heart of these stories. Their translator, Wen Huang, describes how, after Jiabiangou was closed in January 1961, a doctor was assigned to stay behind and rewrite the medical records. Various fictitious diseases were given as the causes of death, and the word “starvation” was never mentioned.
The historian of modern China Frank Dikotter is himself about to publish a book on the Great Famine. In response to Woman From Shanghai (which is marginal to the Famine itself) he told me that, unlike Yang, he’d managed to gain access to the Jiabiangou archives, and they showed that nothing in the book had been exaggerated.
I mentioned to him that, in a review in Taipei Times, I’d responded to one memoir of the Cultural Revolution era written by a former victim now living in the US by saying that maybe we’d had enough of that kind of book. Was there anyone left who still thought that this was an admirable period?
He replied that he agreed. Typical Red Guard memoirs were so full of themselves, he said, while even well-educated readers continued to ignore the earlier decade “when tens of millions of ordinary villagers died of starvation, lack of medical care or torture.”
Dikotter’s forthcoming book, Mao’s Great Famine: Biography of a Disaster, will be published in September by Bloomsbury. It uses, for the first time says Dikotter, extensive party archives to show that at least 45 million people died prematurely between 1958 and 1962. Deaths in re-education camps like the relatively small Jiabiangou are dealt with in a special chapter.
There are two reasons why Woman From Shanghai is an important publication. The first is that it throws light on an era that has been under-represented in memoirs cataloguing the horrors and absurdities of life under Mao. The second is that it is exceptionally well narrated and translated.
Its vividness derives from Yang allowing the interviewees to speak for themselves, even though some fictional elements have been introduced to make the narratives work as short stories in order to evade censorship — still a possibility, despite the era described being half a century ago. Some changes have also been made to render the collection easier to follow for American readers — terms like “sophomore” are used, for instance, and a degree of explanatory background information has been discretely added.
Even so, the sensational nature of the original material remains. In one story the gross effects of gorging on looted and then boiled potatoes after years of near-starvation are all too explicitly described. In another the effects of eating indigestible weeds are shown — they don’t just pass through the system but remain as a hard ball in the gut and have to be extracted by hook or by crook — often literally. Cannibalism occurs, and even as late as 1987 local farmers appealed to the government to bury the bones of former inmates that were strewn over the area.
When peoples’ self-interests peacefully intersect, you’re bound to conclude, one way or another life usually goes on. But when theories are imposed, such as that those who think for themselves are enemies of the state, or that people like the prisoners described here can feed themselves if only they’ll work hard enough in the near-desert where they’re incarcerated, catastrophes are all but inevitable. Also important is the bureaucratic psychology in totalitarian states. Decisions are postponed until the approval of superiors can be gained, but as this too isn’t forthcoming for the same reason, nothing is done, with sometimes disastrous results.
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