Credit Simon Pemberton


I am a descendant of these victims. But I know nothing of this great famine until 1990 at age 32 when a friend embarks on writing a history of disasters in China. He asks me to go back with him to the Henan of 1942 to help him write this story, and this is when I first learn of the magnitude of the tragedy.

My friend tells me that a drought killed three million people in 1942. I could not fathom this number. He gives me a frame of reference, explaining that the Nazis killed more than one million Jews at Auschwitz.

Overwhelmed, I return to my home province determined to travel back to that awful period, determined to salvage three million souls from the sands of time.

Soon I make a strange discovery: The surviving famine victims and their descendants have relegated all their memories of 1942 to oblivion. This is the reason I know nothing about this tragic period.

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My grandmother lived through the famine. When I ask her about 1942 she responds: “1942? What about it?” I tell her it was the year many people died of starvation. “People died of starvation all the time,” she replies. “What’s so special about that year?”

Apart from this collective amnesia, I encounter other perplexities: What was the government doing in 1942 while three million people starved in Henan? Could it possibly have missed these millions of deaths?

I bid farewell to my forgetful friends and travel back to that fateful year, alone. What I found was much richer than I had imagined.

In 1942, Japan was occupying half of China, and Henan Province was surrounded by Japanese troops. China was a weak country. As drought ravaged Henan, the government lacked the resources to provide disaster relief. Turn a catastrophe into an advantage, the Chinese leaders must have thought: Why not drop the burden of disaster relief into the lap of the Japanese invaders?

The Chinese government stealthily retreated from Henan, but the Japanese saw through the plot and kept their troops at the province’s border, choosing not to occupy all of Henan. The province became a no man’s land between the Chinese government and the Japanese invaders. In this void three million Chinese died of famine.

As I learned firsthand, a tragedy that occurs in a place that is abandoned by its government — and its enemies — is easily forgotten. So how, in 1990, could I find clues to the disaster?

For this we can thank the American journalist Theodore White of Time magazine. In 1943, White traveled to Henan with a fellow journalist, Harrison Forman of The Times of London . On their journey they met an American named Thomas Megan, bishop of the Loyang Catholic Mission. Megan accompanied them around Henan. What they saw was horrific.

They saw people starving to death. They witnessed dogs devouring corpses. They found evidence of cannibalism.

Upon returning to Chungking, the wartime capital of China, White related all that he had witnessed to the leader of the Chinese government, Chiang Kai-shek, and recounted the calamity in an article for Time . This forced the government to provide relief to the victims. But corrupt officials at all levels embezzled the funds and death from starvation continued.

White provides detailed accounts of what he saw in Henan in his 1946 book Thunder Out of China and in his 1978 book In Search of History: A Personal Adventure .

My true flashpoint of inspiration to write a novel about the 1942 famine came when I heard survivors describe the state of mind of my three million fellow citizens as they faced starvation. But that only came after I presented them with facts about the plight of those who perished.

I am certain that Europeans or Americans would have been outraged in similar circumstances. “Why should I die?” they would have demanded. ‘’Who is responsible for starving me to death?”

But my fellow Henanese did not seem to display much anger about what was happening to them. As they staggered to their deaths, one of the most significant things they left behind was an all-too-revealing joke:

Old Mr. Zhang is about to die on the road while fleeing the famine. His last thoughts are not directed at the Chinese government, or the Japanese invaders, or anyone else in whole world; he is only thinking about his old friend, Mr. Li, who had died three days earlier.

“I outlived Old Li by three days,” Mr. Zhang mutters, “I’ve done well.”

In troubled times, when the fields are strewn with corpses of the starved, cannibalism is not thought of as being particularly immoral. So, as Mr. Zhang succumbs to starvation, along comes Mr. Wang, who pulls down Mr. Zhang’s pants and proceeds to cut off some flesh from his leg. The pain reawakens Mr. Zhang.

“I’m still all right,” he protests. Mr. Wang scrutinizes Mr. Zhang closely, then says, “No you’re not.” Mr. Zhang ponders that for a moment. Concluding that he really isn’t all right, Mr. Zhang hits the ground with a thud, stone dead.

Why do we Chinese have such a black sense of humor? And why are we so forgetful? The answer my grandmother gave when I asked about 1942 provides a clue: There are innumerable instances of starvation and cannibalism throughout Chinese history, and when a people are constantly confronted with death through starvation, how else can they deal with it other than by forgetting?

After enduring so many hardships over the centuries, the Chinese have learned that reacting to a harsh reality with a serious attitude makes that harsh reality as hard as steel. Humor and a large helping of amnesia are the secrets to facing tragedy.

I wrote my novella in 1990, some 22 years ago. After 18 years of preparation and navigation through countless bureaucratic obstacles, the Chinese director Feng Xiaogang has now completed filming the movie 1942 , adapted from my book. In the movie Adrien Brody portrays Theodore White and Tim Robbins is Bishop Megan. And 70 years later, following the footsteps of White and Megan, the two actors have come to China.

Adrien Brody starred in The Thin Red Line and The Pianist , both of which are set in 1942. After reliving 1942 three times in different parts of the world, Brody must have sensed the differences among Americans, Europeans and the Chinese. Americans and Europeans say: Remember! Chinese say: Forget!

When Tim Robbins came to China to shoot the film, he told me and Feng Xiaogang that the humanity he saw in the script was the reason he chose to play the Catholic bishop. He said the film revealed the darkest side of human nature — and the warmest. I imagine when Tim talked of the warmest side of human nature he was referring to the priests who set up soup kitchens, and the Catholic priest who tried to move a dying man to the refugee compound. Tim was also perhaps thinking of the sad self-deprecation and sense of humor Chinese people display in their last moments of life.

The novella Remembering 1942 and the film 1942 are dedicated to commemorating what was forgotten.

A former journalist, Liu is one of China’s best-known novelists. His book “A Word is Worth Ten Thousand Words” won the 2011 Mao Dun Literature Prize, China’s most prestigious literary award, and his novella “Remembering 1942” has been made into a new film starring Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins. This article was translated from the Chinese by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz.

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