How my father survived a communist labor camp and forged a new life.
It’s deep and dry and cracked—and self-inflicted. The mark is a remnant of his six years on a Communist labor farm in his youth, when one night he purposely took a scythe to his flesh to cause enough injury to be granted rest, despite not completing his daily quota.As a result, decades later, even two grains left behind in a rice bowl would lead to a lecture on how many years my dad spent hunched over in the rice field—and out would come the heel of proof.
The early famine years of the Great Leap Forward—in which at least 20 million people died, even by conservative estimates—led the government to institute food rationing. Rice, flour, meat, tofu, everything was rationed. How much you could eat depended on how much the government was willing to give you. My father's family was so poor at times, the only accompaniment they could afford to serve with their rice was salt. A family of seven, subsisting on rationed, salty rice.
As my grandfather's tuberculosis worsened, everything was sold to pay for his care. The dining table was traded for food, a cruel irony lost on no one. Their home became as thin as the people in it, as anything of value they could scrounge up went off to the pawn shops. In the summer, they sold their winter coats. My dad doesn't remember how they survived that winter.
"When the flame reaches green-bean-size,” he’d instruct my dad to poach an egg, “turn the heat down to the size of a soybean." He was an armchair general, directing operations from a bed-shaped command center, my father his tiny culinary soldier. Once, they somehow got their hands on a bread pan; to this day the taste ofAt the height of the Great Leap Forward in the 1960s, everyone was herded into public canteens.
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