At a time when I needed nourishment the most, it happened that the majority of the Chinese people were on the brink of starvation. I often tell my friends that had it not been due to hunger, I should have absolutely been smarter than I am now. But of course that depends. The thing is, as I could not get myself fully fed right since I was born, my earliest memories had always to do with food.
Back then there were around a dozen people in my family. Each meal occasioned me of having a good cry. My uncle (my father’s younger brother)’s daughter was only four months older than I and we were both about four or five years old. For each meal Grandma gave me and this elder sister a piece of mouldy dried sweet potato each. And I had always believed that Grandma was partial and had given her a bigger piece. So I snatched it out of my elder sister’s hand, and threw back mine to her. Then I always realized that my piece had been actually bigger so I robbed that piece back from her again.
After suffering two or three rounds of robbery, my elder sister would burst into tears. And my aunt visibly pulled a long face. Of course I had had tears streaming off my face ever since the start of the meal. Mom now would look out of sort and sigh. Grandma was naturally always on the side of my elder sister, and started listing out my wrongs and sins. My aunt’s criticism of me, when it was her turn come, was more unpleasant to hear. Mom would apologize profusely to both Aunt and Grandma, laying blame on the fact that I had a big belly and that giving birth to such a big-bellied son was the last thing she should have done in this world.
Upon eating dried sweet potatoes, we had next only balls of wild herbs to turn to. Those were dark prickly nasty things. It was hard to send them down the throat but we had to eat them. So I struggled with the balls, weeping, swallowing the ugly things with my tears unwittingly mingled into them. On what nutrition did people of my generation manage to grow up? I don’t know. But back then, how I dreamed of having as many dried sweet potato as I liked for a meal!
The spring of 1960 was, I am afraid, the darkest spring in the entire human history. Whatever that could be eaten off, be it roots of grass, tree barks, and grass grown on the rooftops, was eaten. There were people dying almost daily in the village. They all died of starvation. In the beginning the dead bodies were stil buried, and their relatives wept and sobbed all the way to report their misfortunes to the Earthly Temple at the margin of the village, and to cancel off the deceased’s names by the Lord of the Land. Gradually corpses were left unattended, and no one bothered to sob and howl their ways to the Temple. In the end some people felt compelled to drag those corpses beyond the border of the village, where lots of wild dogs, with their eyes blood-shot after having eating off so many people, waited doggedly. As soon as the corpses were laid down, the dogs would plunge on them, and gulp them down. I used to wonder what the dramas were referring to when they said that the poor were buried with coffins of skin and fur. Now I perfectly understand what the term means.
Later on I read of books that recounted cannibalism that happened in those days. I believed that such acts of barbarity could only be of a rather haphazardly and infrequent occurrence. Legend goes Ma Si of my village did cut off meat from his deseased wife’s legs and eat it off like barbecue. But there was no evidence of that, because he himself died quickly after his wife did.
Grain, grain, grain, where are thou? Who could have eaten all the grain? The villagers were such insensible and lazy people that they would rather die of famine than venture out of the village for some opportunity. They clung to their homes strenuously. Later news came that there was a sort of whitish clay that was edible in Nan Wa, so many people made their ways to that hilly place and carried home the flour-like clay and, ate. The clay couldn’t be digested and many people died of bulging and stiffened bellies. So nobody thought of eating the clay any more.
Then I found myself going to school. It was a winter and the school had a truck of coal brought into the campus. Glittering. It must be top-notch coal. A classmate inflicted of tuberculosis told us that the coal tasted wonderfully, and the more you chew it, the tastier it became, he said. So we went to the coal heap and tried it out. Indeed the more we chew it, the more savoury it did become. In class, the teacher busied herself writing on the blackboard and we chewed tiny bits of coal. The classroom filled with crunchy and crackling noises. The teacher asked what we were eating and we replied coal in a chorus. The teacher asked how coal could be eaten. We opened our blackened mouths wide and said: “Teacher, coal is yummy, coal is the most delicious thing in the world. It’s amazing, why don’t you try?”
The teacher, a Ms Yu, had suffered hunger enough herself, had a sallow face, and hair seemed to have grown out of her face, which we reasoned that hunger had reduced her to be a male! She stammered and asked: “How could coal be eaten? How can coal be eaten?” A boy student, fawningly, all too readily handed her a piece of glittering coal, and said: “Teacher, have a try. If it doesn’t taste nice, you can spit it out.” Teacher Yu took it and bit off a little, started chewing it gingerly. She frowned, uncertain how it should taste like, but soon started eating with bigger bites. She exclaimed brightly: “Oh yes, that’s great indeed!” The experience until recently still sounded like a fancy, and even now I deliberate that it cannot be true, yet doubtless it was for real.
Last year on my return to the village I met Grandpa Wang, who once served at the guard house of the school. I mentioned to him the coal-eating saga. He said: “That was true, how could it be fake? Your dung, given a few patting, turned into coal cakes, and burned off briskly in the stoves.” I recalled then that at the worst time of starvation, the government sent in some relief grain, in the form of soybean cakes, and dispatched at the rate of half a jin (250 grams) per person. Grandma gave me a piece of soybean cake the size of an apricot kernel. I put it into my mouth, and chewed upon it. It was so delicious that I did not want to swallow it down right away. But it disappeared quickly like being melted.
The grandpa in the Sun’s, our neighbour to the west, ate off two jins (one kilo) of soybean cakes on his way back home. Upon reaching his home the old man felt thirsty and fell to drinking cold water. It happened that the soybean cakes swelled in the water he had drunk and eventually burst open his stomach, killing him. More than a decade after that incident, Mom said that people in those days had paper-thin stomach and intestines, which had not the least fat in them. Adults were swollen and bloated. We children walked, carrying bellies the size of big water-pots, bellies that were almost transparent and one could see the dark intestines throbbing and twisting inside. We all had ferocious appetites. A child of five or six years of age could drink off eight bowls of porridge mixed with wild herbs. The bowls were made of crude porcelain, the size of the bowl used by Ms Zhao Yiman, the revolutionary martyr.
Life turned for the better gradually and we basically could have half a year’s supply of husks and vegetables and half a year’s grain. My uncle (my dad’s younger brother) worked in the Supply and Marketing Operative (simply put, a store that sells almost everything villagers needed), used his privileges to buy home a sack of cotton-seed cakes, and put the cakes in a big pottery jar in the yard. I got out of bed to pee in the night, and I couldn’t forget about the cotton-seed cakes, sneaked off with one, covered my head up with the quilt and ate it. The taste was wondrous and marvellous!
Even the livestock of our village were dying of hunger, and were stewed in a gigantic wok in the table-yard of the brigade. Throngs of children ran over at the smell, twirled around the stove. A bigger boy, named Transportation, started off a chorus among the kids and we sang:
Hey I say Liu Biao, what a big head you have got,
Your Dad is 15 and 16 is your Mom,
You’ve never had a full fill of your belly all your life,
But now you have bones of cows and sheep to scratch your teeth upon.
The head of the brigade, carrying a club, shooed us off, but instantly we sneaked over again at the beckon of the smell. In the eyes of the brigade leader, we were probably more detestable than flies.
Seeing the man leaving for the loo, we dashed upon the steaming wok like hungry wolves. My Second Elder Brother grabbed a horse foot, and held it up on his two arms home like a treasure. Lighting up the fire, we had the hair on the foot licked off by the fire, then smashed it asunder with a knife, and had it stewed in our wok. Once it was done, we drank the soup right away. The aroma of the soup was absolutely brilliant and I keep thinking of it even now, a few decades later.
During the Cultural Revolution, I still had to go hungry from time to time. So I sought out mycocecidium, a grayish spongy growth on the canes of corns in the fields. Tearing it off the canes, boiling it in water, then spraying some salt on it, and dipping it into garlic mash, it was a delicacy that to this day I still rate as second to none in the gourmet world.
I later heard that frogs’ meat was even tastier than mutton. However, Mom thought frogs were dirty and forbid us to catch frogs.
Life was finally getting better and we could eat dried sweet potatoes to the full. That was already in the later years of the Cultural Revolution. Once, we were allocated more than 290 yuan when all the villagers’ labour was tallied at the year end. That was an astronomical sum at that time. I remember that my Aunt No. 6 beat her daughter’s head bloody, because she had lost ten cents on a shopping spree in a market fair. We got so much money that Dad made bold to purchase five jins, maybe more, of pork at the village butcher, to give us a treat. He cut the meat into giant chunks and stewed them. Everyone got a bowl of meat. I finished off one big bowl of fatty meat in one breath, but still felt unsatisfied. Mom let out a sigh and passed off the remainder in her bowl to me. That also finished quickly, I still wanted more, even though my stomach felt like bursting. Fatty oil gushed up, along with some bits of meat, toward my throat. My throat felt like being pricked and pierced by little knives. That was how eating meat was like.
I was well-known in my village for being gluttonous. So long as there was something nice to eat at home, no matter where it was stored up, I could always find my way to it. Often in the course of eating, I simply lost self control and ate it all irregardless of the consequence. What was beating and scolding after one had thoroughly satisfied his stomach! My grandma and grandpa lived in my aunt’s home and I was tasked to send over some nice meals now and then. I had never failed to lift off the lid to eat a little of the food on the way. Because of this my mom had received no lack of complaints from them. For this I feel guilty even today. Why had I been so greedy? That could not have been entirely because I was hungry, but it must have something to do with my nature and character. A boy greedy for food is surely one who is poorly endowed in self-restraint and perseverance. It must be.
During the mid-1970s, I worked on an irrigation project. The brigade made big steamed buns from the grain off the fields benefiting from the irrigation project. That was half a jin each. I ate four of them for one meal, but someone ate six.
In 1976, I joined the army and parted ways with hunger once and for all. The day I was dispatched to the army, I saw a steamer of small snow white buns brought in. I ate eight buns, yet still felt I had some space in my stomach. I felt embarrassed to have more. The head cook reported to his superior: “Alas, we now have a big-belly guy.” The superior replied nonchalantly: “It will be all right. He won’t be eating like that after a month.” Quite true. A month later, for the same buns, I could eat only two. As for now, one is enough.
Although I am no longer hungry these years, and have accumulated quite some fat and oil in my stomach, yet once seated at a banquet, I always felt irresistibly drawn to the food, rampaging through the table as if for fear I would not have enough, paying no regard to how others would view me. After eating at my heart’s content, I did feel troubled in mind. Why couldn’t I have eaten in a calm and leisurely manner? Why couldn’t I have eaten a bit less so that I could have been seen of having a high birth, and having the requisite elegant table manners, because in a civilized society, eating voluminously is a sign of poor upbringing. Many people attacked me for having an excessive appetite. They said I charged toward food like a dauntless soldier did in the battlefield. They said I was burying my head into food. I felt deeply ashamed of these remarks and suffered enormously deep down, so I determined to eat a bit more restrained and gentlemanly next time. However, to my dismay, those gentlemen and ladies kept up their attack on me, for my eating too much, eating too fast, like a wolf.
This hurt my heart to the core. Upon the next banquet, I kept reminding myself that a gentleman should eat sparingly and slowly, never try to pluck up something in the face of others, never make noises in his mouth, lay his eyes on food with less ardour, hold his chopsticks by the upper stretches, and pluck up a mere strand of vegetable or bean sprout at one time only, like a bird or a butterfly does. Yet I still found myself under attack for eating too much and too fast. I became adamantly indignant! More so when I noticed that while I was taking great pains to be elegant, those lasses and ladies who have attacked me were actually eating like hippos, and they started presenting elegant manners only after having stuffed themselves full.
So ferocious a flame erupted in my chest! I decided that next time when I found myself at some banquet free of charge, say a plate of sea cucumber was brought upon the table, I would hold up the plate, sweep off half of the plate into my bowl, and gobble it all up with a vengeance. To that they commented that I was eating like a demon. So in a bout of utter wrath, I swept the remainder of the plate into my bowl, and shoved it hastily into my mouth. Yet this time, they beamed kindly, and remarked: “How lovely Mo Yan is!”
Now looking back on the more than three decades of my experiences with food, I conclude that I have hardly been of any difference from a pig or a dog, who groans, swirls in circles, in the hope of finding something edible and to fill up a bottomless hole. For the sake of eating, I have squandered too much of my wisdom. Now that the issue of eating is resolved, I find my brain is getting dull and blunt by-and-by.
(Translated by Sam Gao)
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