The American-based writer Yi Wa (1965—), whose official name is Song Lin, was born in a poor farming family in Liuqiao Township, Fuping County, Shaanxi Province. During the 1958-1962 Great Famine in China, five members of her family starved to death. Yi Wa's mother was a beggar from Gansu Province's Tianshui County. Unable to survive during the Great Famine, she fled to Fuping, Shaanxi, where she married and gave birth to Yi Wa.
After growing up, Yi Wa moved to the United States with her husband in 1993. For a long time, she did not understand her mother's tragic history or the severity of the famine that occurred before her birth. Because her elders avoided talking about past events, Yi Wa only learned about the details of the Great Famine years later, gradually uncovering her mother's painful family history and realizing that five members of her family had died in the famine.
According to her editor, Yang Jisheng's monumental work
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 played a key role in this process. Using the opportunity of visiting relatives in China, Yi Wa gradually coaxed her mother into revealing the painful stories of the past. In 2011, she forced her mother and uncle to visit their ancestral home in Gansu for the first time. There, she met many relatives who had survived the famine; almost every family had lost members. Yi Wa began writing one story after another about the painful experiences of these people. Every time she returned to China, she spent significant time investigating and gathering evidence, ultimately writing Searching for the Survivors of the Great Famine.
In
an interview with Hong Kong’s Open Magazine, Yi Wa described what more could be done in research on the Great Famine:
"The Great Famine happened fifty years ago, but very few people know about it, and many are either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge it. Some people still sing, 'The sun is the reddest, Chairman Mao is the closest.' 'The Party, oh, dear mother.' I believe this country, this party, and the intellectuals of this country owe an apology to the millions of souls who died, to the people who endured that disaster, and to the hundreds of millions of farmers who suffered in China.
Their suffering is our collective suffering. Humanity should not be divided by class or hierarchy. We should be united as brothers and sisters. This famine was the deadliest disaster in human history, with no war, no natural disasters, and no plagues, but it caused the most deaths. It is a tragedy that fills me with deep sorrow and anger. It is an unforgivable crime against humanity, a heinous crime.
My hopes and prayers are many: I hope to see a monument to the Great Famine erected in Tiananmen Square. I hope that Beijing, the provinces, cities, and counties will have museums dedicated to the Great Famine, especially in the most affected regions. I hope for a memorial day for the Great Famine. I hope someone will design a symbol to commemorate the Great Famine. I hope more righteous people will urgently investigate, research, and write books, with the possibility of publishing them openly in China.
Let our future generations never forget history, and learn from it. Of course, my greatest hope is that one day, the main perpetrators of this massacre and famine— the Communist Party— will admit their crimes and kneel before the Chinese farmers to apologize and repent. I also hope that those who starved to death during the famine, and those who endured hunger, will receive moral, emotional, and economic compensation."
