MCLC: NPR on Tombstone

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: NPR on Tombstone
***********************************************************

Source: NPR (11/10/12):
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/10/164732497/a-grim-chronicle-of-chinas-great-fa
mine

"A people who have forgotten their history have no direction. My book
faces up to the darkness to avoid darkness."
A Grim Chronicle Of China's Great Famine
by Louisa Lim 

It's not often that a book comes out that rewrites a country's history.
But that's the case with Tombstone, which was written by a retired Chinese
reporter who spent 10 years secretly collecting official evidence about
the country's devastating great famine. The famine, which began in the
late 1950s, resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese.

For Yang Jisheng, now 72, the famine hit home while he was away. He was
18, busy preparing a newspaper for his boarding school's Communist Youth
League, when a childhood friend burst into the room and said: "Your father
is starving to death."

Yang rushed home to find a ghost town — no dogs, no chickens, even the elm
tree outside his house was stripped of bark, which had been eaten.

Yang Jisheng, 72, spent a decade working undercover, secretly amassing
official proof of China's great famine. "When you are writing history, you
can't be too emotional. You need to be calm and objective," he says. "But
I was angry the whole time. I'm still angry."

The teenager took rice for Yang Xiushen, the man he called his father, but
who was really his uncle. But the elder Yang was no longer able to swallow
and died three days later.

"I didn't think my father's death was the country's fault. I thought it
was my fault. If I hadn't gone to school, but had helped him dig up his
crops, he wouldn't have died," Yang remembers. "My vision was very
limited. I didn't have the information."

Unbearable Hunger, Inhuman Behavior

It was April 1959, a year after China launched its Great Leap Forward, a
political movement forcing the population to drop everything and make
steel in backyard furnaces so China could catch up with the U.S. and
Britain. The country's entire population ate in collective kitchens, pots
and pans were confiscated, and farm work was stopped.

Provinces reported record grain hauls — exaggerating their figures and
resulting in huge procurement targets, leaving nothing for peasants to
eat. Millions starved to death.

As an adult, Yang used his credentials as a reporter for the state Xinhua
news agency to cajole and beg his way into provincial archives. He started
gathering information on the famine in the mid-90s, and began the project
in earnest in 1998.

He worked undercover for a decade at immense personal risk, pretending to
research official grain and rural policies, in order to put together the
first detailed account of the great famine from Chinese government sources.

From his research, Yang estimates that 36 million died during the famine.
Most deaths were caused by starvation, but the figure also includes
killing during ideological campaigns. Some Western scholars have put the
toll as high as 45 million.

Unbearable hunger made people behave in inhuman ways. Even government
records reported cases where people ate human flesh from dead bodies.

"Documents report several thousand cases where people ate other people,"
Yang says. "Parents ate their own kids. Kids ate their own parents. And we
couldn't have imagined there was still grain in the warehouses. At the
worst time, the government was still exporting grain."

At the epicenter of the famine, Xinyang in China's central Henan province,
the post office confiscated 1,200 letters sent begging for help. The level
of energy expended on covering up what was happening is chilling.One
passage in the book reads: "When the Guangshan County post office
discovered an anonymous letter to Beijing disclosing starvation deaths,
the public security bureau began hunting down the writer. One of the post
office's counter staff recalled that a pockmarked woman had mailed the
letter. The local public security bureau rounded up and interrogated every
pockmarked woman without identifying the culprit. It was subsequently
determined that the writer worked in Zhengzhou and had written the letter
upon returning to her home village and seeing people starving to death."

Those who tried to leave the area were sent to labor camps. Ideological
campaigns continued; in one district of Henan alone, 1,000 people were
beaten to death for political problems.

Book Honors Unsung Heroes

At first, Yang says, he struggled to put all of this on paper.

"At first when I was writing this book, it was difficult. But then I
became numb. When you are writing history, you can't be too emotional. You
need to be calm and objective," he says. "But I was angry the whole time.
I'm still angry."

The result is Tombstone, a monumental history of famine, which was
released in Chinese four years ago and has recently been published in
English.

Stacy Mosher, the co-translator of the English version, says it's "an
extremely important book.""What Mr. Yang has done is ground-breaking and
will live forever as he hoped," she says.

Mosher says the book honors both the dead and the unsung heroes.

"There were certain officials who within their own local parameters were
able to save lives because they were able to ignore the central
government's directives. They had the moxie, they had the guts, and they
saved lives," Mosher says. "That is the lesson to take home: A system can
be diabolical, it can be lethal, but the individual can make a difference."

The English version is less than half the length of the original two
Chinese volumes. But Mosher says the significance of the Chinese version
is that it allows Chinese readers to find out exactly what happened in
their own provinces.

"For that reason, the Chinese version is absolutely essential for its
Chinese audience," she says.

Banned In China 

The book is banned in China, where histories blame the famine on natural
disasters, the withdrawal of Soviet experts and policy mistakes. Yang says
the first two reasons are just excuses that don't hold any water.

Counterfeit versions of his book are in circulation, as are photocopies
and electronic versions. Yang says he doesn't care about copyright. He
just wants Chinese to know their own history.

"Our history is all fabricated. It's been covered up. If a country can't
face its own history, then it has no future," he says. "And if a regime
destroys history systematically, that's a terrifying regime."

As China prepares to unveil its new leaders
<http://www.npr.org/2012/11/08/164689441/highly-scripted-china-moves-toward
-new-leaders>, Yang — a lifelong Communist Party member — hopes they'll
push for change. He chose the title Tombstone as a memorial to his father
and other famine victims.

For years, he feared the book might be his own tombstone. Now he hopes it
will be a tombstone for a political system that caused mass deaths.

"Now China has reached a crossroads, and to find which direction to
travel, it needs to view through the prism of history," he says. "A people
who have forgotten their history have no direction. My book faces up to
the darkness to avoid darkness."