Day 3

I originally intended to title this book The Road to Paradise, but eventually changed it to Tombstone. I had four reasons for choosing this title: the first is to erect a tombstone for my father, who died of starvation in 1959; the second is to erect a tombstone for the thirty-six million Chinese who died of starvation; and the third is to erect a tombstone for the system that brought about the Great Famine.
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At the end of April 1959, I was spending my after-school hours assembling a May Fourth Youth Day wall newspaper for my school’s Communist Youth League. My childhood friend Zhang Zhibai suddenly arrived from our home village of Wanli and told me, “Your father is starving to death! Hurry back, and take some rice if you can.” He said, “Your father doesn’t even have the strength to strip bark from the trees—he’s starved beyond helping himself. He was headed to Jiangjiayan to buy salt to make saltwater, but he collapsed on the way, and some people from Wanli carried him home.”

I dropped what I was doing and requested leave from our league secretary and head teacher. Then I collected a three-day meal ration of 1.5 kilos of rice from the school canteen and rushed home. Upon reaching Wanli, I found things radically changed. The elm tree in front of our house had been reduced to a barkless trunk, and even its roots had been dug up and stripped, leaving only a ragged hole in the earth. The pond was dry; neighbors said it had been drained to dredge for rank-tasting mollusks that had never been eaten in the past. There was no sound of dogs barking, no chickens running about; even the children who used to scamper through the lanes remained at home. Wanli was like a ghost town.

Upon entering our home, I found utter destitution; there was not a grain of rice, nothing edible whatsoever, and not even water in the vat. Immobilized by starvation, how would my father have had the strength to fetch water?
My father was half-reclined on his bed, his eyes sunken and lifeless, his face gaunt, the skin creased and flaccid. He tried to extend his hand to greet me, but couldn’t lift it, just moving it a little. That hand reminded me of the human skeleton in my anatomy class; although it was covered with a layer of withered skin, nothing concealed the protrusions and hollows of the bone structure. I was shocked with the realization that the term skin and bones referred to something so horrible and cruel.
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Three days later he departed this world.

With the help of other villagers, I hastily buried him. While he was still alive I had hardly taken notice of him, but now that he lay at rest in the earth, instances from the past vividly replayed themselves in my mind.
My father’s name was Yang Xiushen; he was also known by the names Yufu and Hongyuan. He was born on the sixth day of the sixth month of the lunar calendar in the year 1889. He was in fact my uncle and foster father, raising me from the time I was three months old. He and my foster mother had treated me better than if I had been their own son, and the extraordinary love they showed me was known throughout our home village. I later learned from fellow villagers that even in the worst weather my father would carry me through every lane and path seeking milk, so that I had wet nurses scattered throughout the area. One time I became ill and fell into a coma, and my father knelt and prayed unceasingly before the ancestral shrine until I regained consciousness. Once, I developed an abscess on my head, and my mother sucked the pus out of it with her own lips until it was cured. Although they were extremely poor, they used every means to ensure that I obtained schooling. They had extremely strict expectations regarding my conduct.

~~Tombstone- The Great Chinese famine 1958-1962 -by- Yang Jisheng