The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (16 page)

In the week that followed, the county conducted a thorough investigation and revealed a terrible scandal involving cannibalism at the Fifth Production Division. That division encompassed 82 families, with a population of 491. Between December 1959 and November 1960, peasants had killed and eaten 48 female children under the age of seven, which represented 90 percent of the female children in that age group. About 80 percent of the families were involved in cannibalism.

Wang Jiefang was an accountant at the Fifth Production Division. He was the first one to witness cannibalism. During the investigation, he told us that starvation occurred at his village in December 1959 when the communal kitchen had run out of food and began to serve wild vegetable soup or plain hot water. With food running out, villagers began to search for other alternative means. They wandered all over the mountain, eating anything they could get—leaves, roots of grass, wild vegetables, mushrooms, and worms. Many people accidentally swallowed some poisonous plants and died. As people became more and more desperate, they turned to their fellow human beings.

It was a different story for village officials. They had embezzled the grain and secretly cooked and ate the food several times a week at the communal kitchen after midnight. When confronted by the guilt-ridden security chief who was invited to the midnight meals, the village chief said, Ordinary villagers can collapse from hunger, but not the Party officials. If anything happens to us, the revolution would lose its backbone. After stuffing themselves with embezzled food, those hypocritical officials would patrol the village, making sure that nobody was violating the policies and no smoke came out of individual home chimneys.

Wang and another village security guard were on duty on a clear moonlit night. While patrolling the village, they noticed wisps of smoke coming out of Mo Erwa's house. Wang was quite surprised because Mo Erwa was quite an honest peasant who had never done anything illegal before. He and his wife had seven kids. Two of them had already died of starvation. So Wang and the guard decided to find out if Mo Erwa had stolen food from somewhere.

Mo Erwa's house had both a big front yard and a backyard, fenced in by tall dry cornstalks. So Wang and the security guard crept along and hid behind the fence. They saw Mo Erwa's wife sitting at the front porch. Apparently, she was on the lookout for patrolling officials. Wang and the guards walked stealthily around to the back, where there was a door leading to the kitchen. Wang said he could see a small kerosene light glowing feebly in the dark. So he and the guard kicked the back door open and burst in. Wang raised his flashlight and yelled, Don't move. Mo Erwa and his kids were scared. They blew off the kerosene light and began running around in the dark, like rats. In the process, someone kicked over a big boiling pot on the ground. Then the whole room steamed up and smelled of greasy meat. Wang yelled again: Don't move. Otherwise I'm going to shoot. His threat worked. When Mo Erwa and the kids calmed down, Wang struck a match and re-lit the kerosene light. He realized that Mo Erwa had dug a hole in the kitchen floor and was using it as a makeshift stove. The pot lay upside down and chunks of meat lay scattered on the floor. Wang asked: Where did you get the meat from? Mo Erwa answered calmly: We just boiled our three-year-old daughter. The guard didn't believe what he had just heard. He picked up one piece from the floor and examined it under the flashlight. Before the guard had a chance to find out, Mo Erwa snatched it from the guard and stuffed it into his mouth. Then all the kids followed his example and dashed down to the floor to grab the remaining morsels. Despite Wang's yells and threats, the family devoured all the meat within minutes. Wang and the guard finally subdued Mo Erwa, tied his hands behind his back, and then dragged him to the village chief's office.

The next day, the village chief sent several guys over to investigate. They found a small bag of bones and the little girl's skull, which had been buried in the backyard. The village chief was so disgusted by the atrocity he ordered two militiamen to lash Mo Erwa fifty times. Mo Erwa screamed and his whole family knelt outside the interrogation room, appealing for mercy. According to Mo Erwa, the family didn't have anything to feed the little girl. Lack of food had stunted her growth. So they just killed her. The village chief interrupted Mo Erwa by saying: Do you know that killing and eating your daughter is a capital crime? Mo Erwa argued back: She was going to die of starvation anyway. It was better for us to sacrifice her to save the rest of the family. We just hope she would reincarnate into something else in the next life. It's too hard to be a human being.

After the lashing, the village chief convened a meeting with several other officials. They decided to keep it quiet for fear that the incident could cost them their jobs. So two days later, Mo Erwa was released, but his story soon spread fast among the villagers. They took it as a sign of approval from the government and more families began to follow suit. Since boys were traditionally favored over girls, young girls were targeted. Some families ruthlessly murdered and ate their own daughters. Others would exchange their children with neighbors. Since a child could only last them for a couple of days, some, including Mo Erwa, began to kidnap children from other villages. Booby traps, which were used for wolves, were employed to capture kids.

By the time we found out, the practice had spread to other villages.

LIAO:
Did you report the results of the investigation to the provincial government?

ZHENG:
I wrote a lengthy report and hand-delivered it to the county chief. I was hoping that the government could take legal measures to stop the killing of children and halt the spread of cannibalism in the region. I also recommended that the county chief bring those cases to the attention of the provincial government and ask for the badly needed food subsidies. But the chief sighed after reading my report: What can the provincial government do? The central government has already delivered food subsidies, thirty-five kilograms of rice and corn per family for the whole year. The whole country is experiencing hardship. He was right. The newspapers carried photos of Chairman Mao wearing patched jackets and pants. He had cultivated a small garden in front of his house to grow vegetables. Liu Shaoqi, the president at that time, went to the Beijing suburbs to pick wild berries to supplement his food ration.

LIAO:
Don't you think that was just for show? Chairman Mao and other senior leaders should be held responsible for the famine.

ZHENG:
I don't blame Chairman Mao. Local officials, such as Li Jinquan, the Party secretary of the Southwest Regional Bureau, should take full responsibility for the disasters in our province. He hid the truth from the Central Party Committee. He forced peasants to turn over all their grain to the central government, despite the fact that people were starving to death. He told the central government that Sichuan Province had wonderful climate conditions and an oversupply of grain. He even offered to help out other provinces while people in his region were dying of starvation.

At Dongyang Commune, and in all the rural areas of Sichuan, peasants ate a type of white clay called Guanyin Mud. I tried it once. The stuff tasted sweet and metallic. The clay was considered precious because it helped soothe the sense of extreme hunger. Some ate too much and the mud got stuck inside the intestines. Then hunger turned into painful cramps. I constantly saw people writhing on the ground with severe stomach pain from the clay. The most effective laxatives were raw vegetable oil or castor oil, which cleared out the mud but also killed people with uncontrolled diarrhea.

In those years, the lives of ordinary people were worthless. Those in power had access to food. They didn't have to eat white clay or kill their daughters. But poor families had to resort to extreme means to survive.

LIAO:
How did you finally stop the practice of cannibalism in the region?

ZHENG:
Three months after our investigation, Mo Erwa was caught again. He had kidnapped and killed two boys from a nearby village with booby traps. This time, the county had to take action. The local militiamen arrested Mo Erwa and put him on trial. He was sentenced to death. The county held a public execution with the hope of intimidating villagers and preventing more cases of cannibalism. Before the local militiaman shot him, Mo Erwa screamed loudly: I'm innocent. I was hungry. His cries brought tears to the eyes of the local militiamen. They couldn't pull the trigger. Eventually, the county had to get the police to finish the job.

LIAO:
What happened later on?

ZHENG:
In the spring of 1961, there was still no relief from the famine. I went back again to Dongyang Commune as head of a four-man work team. I wasn't doing too well either. My legs were all swollen. I was literally wobbling all day long. We ate lots of corn soup with wild vegetables and grass. I was quite young at that time and pulled through. Also, I could indulge myself with a couple of nice hearty meals each time I returned to the county government to attend my monthly meetings. There was enough food for officials at the county cafeteria.

LIAO:
People in the city were much better off than those in the rural areas.

ZHENG:
Urban residents were guaranteed a monthly ration. The government called on urban residents to donate food and money to peasants in the rural areas. But it was too little to make a dent. In my region, a second wave of cannibalism began. Luckily, none of the cases involved killing children. People simply cut flesh off those who had died of starvation.

LIAO:
Did you arrest more people to stop the practice?

ZHENG:
Legally, it fell into a gray area because those people didn't kill anyone. It was hard to prosecute. Leaving moral and ethical issues out, we had to admit that eating human flesh was a better alternative than eating white clay. It was easy to digest, even though we were told by medical personnel that one could catch all sorts of disease from consuming a dead person's flesh. People were desperate and didn't care what diseases they could catch. When a relative died, the flesh would be cut off for the living.

When that occurred, we really didn't have any legal justifications to arrest people. We simply turned a blind eye. Well, there were many villagers who resisted eating human flesh. One time, I went to visit several families in a big courtyard. Four villagers were lying on top of wooden doors taken from their houses. They were lying on their stomachs, with their legs spread apart. Several others were pouring tung oil into their rear ends to loosen them up. One guy explained to me that initially, they had tried to force people to drink the tung oil, but it smelled and tasted really bad. Many had thrown up, and it was hard to get it into the intestines. So they decided to do it from the other end. I recommended that they use vegetable oil, which was less poisonous. Those folks looked at me strangely and said: Do you know that we have never seen any vegetable oil for over two years? It's true that tung oil is tough on the intestines. But as long as we can get the clay out of our system, a little damage to the intestines is worth it. I couldn't stay and watch the operation. Before I walked out, one guy opened his eyes and said to me: Tell the government that we have never touched human flesh. We would rather die than commit a crime like that.

I didn't know how to answer him. Looking back, you have to admit that Chinese peasants are the most kind and obedient. They never thought of rebelling against those who had brought them so much suffering. I bet the idea had never occurred to them.

LIAO:
Even if they had had the idea, they wouldn't have gotten far. The Party controlled the guns. Chairman Mao wasn't afraid of people rebelling against him. He could crush them like bugs.

ZHENG:
The Party was worried about peasant rebellion. That was the reason they sent the work team to the rural areas. We were like the firefighters, trying to put out fires of discontent among peasants.

LIAO:
Did you suceed?

ZHENG:
We did. Aside from handling cases of cannibalism, our main job was to ease the Party's extreme policies and help peasants survive. There was a popular saying among officials at that time: “No matter whether it was a white cat or a black cat, if it catches the mouse, it is a good cat.” We would do whatever it took to save lives. The communal cafeteria was disbanded. Villagers were allowed to get their cooking utensils back. Brick stoves were rebuilt at each individual home so that peasants could cook their own meals. In the old days, the government subsidies were distributed to the commune, and commune officials would normally embezzle some and redistribute the rest to each individual production division. Then the production division would take some and then allocate the subsidies to each village communal kitchen. By the time the subsidized food landed in the bowl of each villager, there was only a tiny amount left. We streamlined the process by distributing the emergency food aid directly to the villagers. The daily ration was half a kilo per person. Members of the work team stood by the warehouse and made sure nobody was stealing the food aid. We also allocated a tiny plot of land for each family so they could grow some vegetables and crops for their own keep. Of course, that
ziliudi,
or “land for self-keep” system, came under fire during the Cultural Revolution as a capitalistic practice.

LIAO:
Well, the “capitalist” policies did save lives during the famine, didn't it?

ZHENG:
Yes. The situation gradually improved. In the summer of 1962, starvation pretty much stopped. Prior to 1962, we were under a lot of pressure to find food for peasants. We thought about food day and night and came up with many creative ways. For example, we gathered all the dry corn, wheat, and rice stalks, ground them into powder, and boiled them for a long time to extract starch. Then we used the starch to make pancakes. They tasted pretty good. We also sent people to collect urine. We then poured the urine into a big container and mixed it with garbage. After a week, there would be a layer of green algae floating on top of the mess. We scraped the thin layer out, added some water and sugar, and drank it. It didn't taste bad at all.