HONG KONG - Yuan-tsung Chen, a writer, leaned forward in an oversized velvet chair to tell the story of the man so hungry he ate himself.
In another time, that story had seemed incredible to him.
"I thought it was an exaggeration," he said.
Author Yuan-tsung Chen flips through a photo album of photos of her husband, Jack Chen, at their home in Hong Kong, on June 22, 2022. (Anthony Kwan/The New York Times)china nyt
But living in a village during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's calamitous attempt to catapult China into communist abundance in the late 1950s, changed his view of what extreme hunger could lead people to do.
"It wasn't anyone's exaggeration, it was as true as real life, but no one was saying it," Chen said, recalling the despair and hunger caused by Mao's experiment.
Historians estimate that up to
45 million people died
over the course of five years.
Now sitting in a restaurant in one of Hong Kong's most opulent hotels, Chen, 93, says she has a warning for the world.
Having lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in recent Chinese history, Chen questions the Communist Party's
sanitized version
of its past and fears it has allowed it to continue making mistakes with global consequences.
Her voice dropped, barely audible amid the hubbub of cutlery and diners in the restaurant:
Riot police officers clash with protesters in Hong Kong on Oct. 1, 2019. (Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times)
"When things are done in the spirit of Mao, it scares me," he said, referring to China's top leader, Xi Jinping.
According to her, her books are intended to add "flesh and blood" to the party's official narrative and help readers empathize with the Chinese people, who have suffered under an authoritarian system.
However, their efforts have raised questions about the importance of each other's voices in telling China's history.
Chen is one of the dwindling group of people alive who endured
Mao's worst excesses.
He says he wants to set the record straight.
Author Yuan-tsung Chen at her home in Hong Kong on June 22, 2022. (Anthony Kwan/The New York Times)
But her critics, mostly men, have cast doubt on the details of her recollection and accused her of being a
storyteller.
She willingly accepts the interrogation.
Her recent memoir, "The Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao's Court," was published last year.
The book is the culmination of decades of writing and rewriting his personal story.
He hopes it will help draw attention to places like Hong Kong, his adopted home, where Chinese history is being
rewritten
once again, this time under Xi.
"I know the past pretty well and I see
something coming
," he says.
Events in Hong Kong have prompted Chen to publish his recent memoirs.
Among them were the 2015 kidnappings of several booksellers selling salacious stories about China's top leader and the massive pro-democracy protests of 2019.
The rewriting of middle school and high school textbooks in mainland China and Hong Kong sharpened his resolve.
Under Xi, China carried out a sweeping crackdown on Hong Kong that included an all-encompassing national security law that took effect in 2020.
Since then, the city has fallen under a blanket of silence that Chen says he recognizes.
"My current situation is eerily similar to the one I found myself
in more than 60 years ago
."
Chen was a privileged child growing up in metropolitan Shanghai in the 1930s.
He came of age in the early days of the People's Republic of China, after Mao and the Communist Party seized power in 1949.
In 1958 she married Jack Chen, a communist journalist who came from an important Chinese-Trinidadian family and had connections with high-ranking party officials such as Zhou Enlai.
Chen worked as a clerk at the Beijing Central Film Office, but she yearned to write.
The writing ended up being what shook her from her guarded optimism for the party and led her into a nearly two-decade fight to get out of China.
In 1955, shortly after Chen entered the Central Film Office, Hu Feng, a well-known Chinese Marxist writer, was arrested for writing a report arguing that literature should allow for
greater expressiveness.
His words triggered a purge that swept through Chen's circle of friends and colleagues, some of whom were accused of being part
of Hu's "
counterrevolutionary clique ".
Then, unexpectedly, Mao began to accept criticism of the party, urging
"a hundred flowers
" to bloom, a phrase meant to encourage people to speak out and criticize the party's shortcomings.
Chen felt inspired and began to write.
But before he could finish, Mao began rounding up critics who had dared to speak, accusing them of producing " poisonous
weeds
" instead of "fragrant flowers."
Critics were executed or sent to labor camps for re-education.
Petrified by the possibility that her manuscript revealed "poisonous" thoughts, Chen struck a match.
"I scattered the manuscript like it was ashes," he said.
The act would come back to haunt her.
By burning the first draft of his own story, Chen participated in what Orville Schell, a Chinese academic, has called the destruction of historical memory.
Some scholars have questioned whether Chen's accounts are reliable or whether he has exaggerated his access to party officials such as Zhou Yang, who, he recounted in his memoirs, asked his advice on how to deal with Hu's case.
"This is one of the dangers of the destruction of historical memory by the Chinese Communist Party," said Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society's Center on US-China Relations.
Like others, Chen said, she had to write her memoirs "in a way stripped of all her resources
except her memory
."
Many of the scenes in Chen's memories come from books she and her husband wrote years ago, as well as from earlier manuscripts.
Recently, in his small but sunny apartment on the southern part of Hong Kong Island, he stood before books and old manuscripts stacked on a dining table.
She was holding yellowed copies of her husband's books, such as "A Year in Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution" and "Inside the Cultural Revolution," about the period of political turmoil in which Mao, fearing his revolution tainted by compromise, she unleashed the young Red Guards to persecute officials, academics, and others.
She also turned to manuscripts she wrote when she and her husband settled at Cornell University after fleeing China for good in 1971.
"Cold Wind" narrates his family's experience during the Cultural Revolution.
"Dragon Village," Chen's first book, was the basis for the Great Leap Forward chapters in his memoirs.
"That's why I said it didn't depend on my memory, and I have my own notes because after I got out I took notes," he said, holding up a brown envelope with one of his manuscripts.
"The Dragon Village" was published in 1980.
Although it is a work of fiction, it is based on his experiences living in a village in 1960, during the
Great Leap Forward.
Fearing suspicion during the anti-Hu purge, Chen volunteered to go to the countryside to help with land reform.
There he discovered that Mao's previous experiment with collectivization had been a disaster.
Crops had been destroyed and wooded areas replaced with tree stumps.
The land, he wrote, was like "a dilapidated graveyard where human remains had been dug up and exposed."
It became clear to him that any success in land reform was an illusion when he met emaciated villagers with stories of relatives who had starved to death.
However, instead of reporting the actual numbers of depleted crops, she and other villagers created a Potemkin wheat field for Party officials in order to maintain the
mirage
of a bumper harvest.
Scenes like these from "The Secret Listener," her latest book, sometimes feel like a movie script, with detailed dialogue between the characters, a method she says she used to make the story more engaging.
In the late 1960s, the fury of the vigilante youths of the Red Guard led Chen and her husband to send their young son to live with his grandmother in Shanghai.
At one point, Chen's husband was punished for being elite, given a new job cleaning toilets, and banished to a slum.
He died in 1995, two decades after the family fled.
In the harrowing end of her memoir, Chen describes how she went to increasingly desperate measures to get the exit visa she and her husband needed to leave China, their lives threatened as they became embroiled in escalating political fighting.
One by one, the people from the government who could guarantee their escape fell into the hands of radical officials.
Chen Yi was an official who had been tasked with helping the couple escape.
One day, Chen looked up and saw giant billboards with his name on them:
"Break Chen Yi's head off and boil him in oil!"
In the end, she and her husband were granted visas thanks to her husband's friendship with Zhou Enlai.
The visas were granted on the condition that Jack Chen promote communism abroad.
Today, Chen's voice has been drowned out by party historians who gloss over events like the Great Leap Forward and dismiss estimates of tens of millions of deaths as "
historical nihilism
" aimed at undermining the party.
"They say that history is on their side, and that means they are right," Chen said of the Communist Party of China.
But, he added, "if you know the past and the way things were done then, you can better understand what's happening now."
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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