Survivors of Chinese Famine Visit Rivers Hunger Seminar

It’s not every day that students are able to get an intimate account of what life during a famine is like. Earlier this month, four natives of China who survived the Great Chinese Famine came to Laura Brewer’s senior seminar on hunger to share their stirring stories with the class.

The Great Chinese Famine took place from 1958 to 1961, and resulted in the deaths of upwards of 40 million people. For many years the Chinese government covered up the event and attributed the many deaths to floods and droughts, officially calling the event “Three Years of Natural Disasters.”

Speaking through translators, the four visitors revealed an eclectic variety of backgrounds, coming from both urban and rural upbringings and going through vastly different stages of their lives at the time of the famine. One man was a government official under Mao Zedong, while two others were college students.

Mr. Du, who was a student in Tianjin, spoke passionately of his experiences going with little or no food for days at a time, and also entertained Brewer’s class with a song that he used to sing with his countrymen when he was working in construction during the rebuilding efforts. Du fondly recalled the hopeful lyrics of the tune: “the water is big, but our willpower is bigger, and hundreds of thousands of us go against the flood and we will go forward.”

He also spoke about the tight grip of Mao’s government and the extent to which Chinese citizens were coerced into silence. “No one dared speak out or band together against [Mao],” he said. “They had a saying that you must ‘tie your belt’ and get through this big hunger.”

Brewer said she was inspired to bring in the special guests in order to teach the class the importance of alternative ways of learning, like oral history. Students transcribed the day’s conversations and reflected on them in later classes.

“They did research in professional journals beforehand, and several were able to use the Mandarin that they have been learning at Rivers,” Brewer said. “Students seemed really enthusiastic and excited for the opportunity to be first-hand historians and collectors of knowledge.”