Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [136]
AT THE END of December, Brigade Leader Lai cuts our grain ration to one-quarter jin per person. That’s barely four ounces of starch—about half a bowl of rice porridge a day when we’re still working like animals, deep-plowing the bitterly cold fields.
“There’s plenty of grain,” he assures us, “but you people have an ideological problem.”
No, the real reason is that he delivered too much of our small harvest to the government. Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest. Now even Brigade Leader Lai understands that doubling the grain harvest in a single year can be achieved only on paper. But to keep his promise, our rice, wheat, millet, and sorghum have been shipped to national silos so people in cities can be fed, leaving the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune with almost nothing. Our meals in the canteen have strange ingredients—cornstalks, corn roots, dried sweet potato leaves, and wild grasses cooked into soup, or dried pea powder, sawdust, acorns, elm bark, and pumice stone ground into flour to make into heavy cakes cooked on a griddle. Those labeled black elements—like Kumei, Ta-ming, and Yong—are allowed even less than the scant allotment of food. My mother and aunt don’t seem to understand what’s happening here. They continue to send packages with goodies for the children instead of real food. (My aunt’s letters arrive just fine, but entire paragraphs in my mother’s letters are completely blacked out.) Cookies and candies are more than other people have, so I suppose we’re fortunate. Still, not a day goes by when I don’t remember how cavalier I was about the special food coupons I was entitled to as an Overseas Chinese. What I wouldn’t do for those now.
We stop shrinking and losing weight. We develop what everyone calls the swelling disease as our arms, legs, necks, and faces swell from edema caused by a lack of protein. Our new diet is terrible going in and worse coming out. Some of us are constipated; others have diarrhea. This isn’t so bad for the babies and smallest children who can’t make it to the nightstool. The slats in the floor are wide enough for the diarrhea to slip through. But things are more awkward for those of us who are older. This is a two-room house and we use a nightstool. Naturally, what leaves our bodies is as much of a concern for Brigade Leader Lai as what goes into them. Our house is not the only one with intestinal problems, so now he sends his men on cleanliness inspections.
“Are you still brushing your teeth and washing your hands? Are you emptying and cleaning your nightstool every morning? What is this mess in the corner? Why do you have flies when it’s winter?”
Things are happening very quickly. The members of the commune are moving from hunger to starving and from starving to death. Few die from a lack of food, however. Instead, they drop dead from heart attacks, get fevers and colds that bring on pneumonia, receive small cuts that become infected and lead to blood poisoning, or they eat the wrong thing and then lose all their water through diarrhea. Baby girls are the first to die, followed by young girls and grandmothers. Sons, fathers, and grandfathers don’t die. An old saying reminds us that there are thirty-six virtues, but to be without a son negates them all. That means all food must go to males first.
“Otherwise who will take care of the family?” Tao asks.
I want to say, “I was raised to believe that women and children should be saved first. My father was Chinese, but even he believed that.” But I know better than to argue with my husband, and I don’t want to talk about my father Sam. His sacrifice makes my hunger feel meager.
Some of our neighbors try to sell their daughters, but no one wants to buy girls. Other families—ours included