Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [147]
A week ago, Brigade Leader Lai made a new announcement over the loudspeaker. “Meals will no longer be served in the canteen. The masses may now pick up food from the canteen and take it back to their homes. You said you missed eating at home. Now you can be with your families again.”
What he meant was he didn’t want to hear people talk about food, which has become more dangerous than discussing politics. He also didn’t want to see any more people collapse from hunger, die right on the canteen floor, or—even more distressing—watch relatives weep over the dead. Now we send one family member to pick up our daily grain ration of a quarter of a jin of rice or some other starch—less than a fourth of what’s needed for survival—at the leadership hall and bring it home, without everyone having to expend extra energy walking to the canteen, so we can die with our families without others having to witness another death scene.
This isn’t like last year, when a few elders and babies died. A lot of people are dying. Two weeks ago, we received word that my father-in-law died from a fever after working in freezing water on an irrigation project a long distance from here. Brigade Leader Lai doesn’t want anyone to know how many of their neighbors have perished, so we couldn’t tack yellow paper outside the house to announce my father-in-law’s death. We were forbidden to mourn him in public. We weren’t allowed to make offerings to help him on his way to the afterworld. So, buried far from home, he is consigned to becoming a hungry ghost, forever wandering and lost. And we can seek no solace in Buddhism or Daoism for fear of being labeled reactionaries.
Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots, and search for wild grass. We’ll eat anything, and we have. But you can’t eat a leather belt like it’s a crisp cucumber. You soak it, boil it, and chew on it for days. Once we tried eating Kwan Yin soil—named after the Goddess of Mercy. You take dirt, mix in dried grass, boil it, and then eat it. You can imagine how it tasted, and none of us ate very much. That turned out to be a good thing, because a family up the hill ate it three days in a row. The mud hardened in their stomachs and they died painfully.
I know I should be crippled from the horrors I’ve witnessed, but I’m too hungry for emotions. My hunger is all I can feel or think about. It’s like a snake slithering through my brain, down to my stomach, out to my fingers, then down my legs and back up to my brain. It never stops.
I reach the villa and go straight to the kitchen, knowing I’ll find Kumei there. We speak in clipped sentences to save energy.
“Yong died,” she announces.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“Hide her. Hope she isn’t found.”
“But the brigade leader lives here.”
“He moved out of the villa a few days ago. He’s gone to the leadership hall.” This is more than I’ve heard Kumei say in ages, and I can see the toll it takes. “He says he needs to protect what’s left of the commune’s grain supply.”
I think he had a different reason. The villa has twenty-nine bedrooms, but the leadership hall gives him total privacy. People will do anything for food. Many women in the commune have walked or crawled to the villa to prostitute themselves to the brigade leader in exchange for a single bun. Now they’ll go to the leadership hall, where Brigade Leader Lai won’t have to worry about anyone watching him. It’s a long way, and I wonder how many women will die either going