President Liu asked some questions, but the peasants just smiled and mumbled. From their point of view it was better to offend the president than the local bosses. The president would be leaving for Peking in a few minutes, but the commune bosses would be with them for the rest of their lives.

Shortly afterward another senior leader also came to Chengdu Marshal Zhu De accompanied by one of Mao's private secretaries. Zhu De was from Sichuan and had been the commander of the Red Army, and military architect of the Communists' victory. Since 1949 he had kept a low profile. He visited several communes near Chengdu, and afterward, as he strolled by the Silk River looking at the pavilions, bamboo groves, and willow embraced teahouses along the riverbank, he waxed emotional: " Sichuan is indeed a heavenly place… He spoke the words in the style of a line of poetry. Mao's secretary added the matching line, in the traditional poets' fashion: "Pity that damning gales of lie telling and false communism are destroying it!" My mother was with them, and thought to herself: I agree wholeheartedly.

Suspicious of his colleagues, and still angry about being attacked at Lushan, Mao obstinately stuck to his crazy economic policies. Although he was not unaware of the disasters they had been causing, and was discreetly allowing some of the most impracticable ones to be revised, his 'face' would not allow him to give up completely. Meanwhile, as the sixties began, a great famine spread across the whole of China.

In Chengdu, the monthly food ration for each adult was reduced to 19 pounds of rice, 3.5 ounces of cooking off, and 3- 5 ounces of meat, when there was any.

Scarcely anything else was available, not even cabbage.

Many people were afflicted by edema, a condition in which fluid accumulates under the skin because of malnutrition.

The patient turns yellow and swells up. The most popular remedy was eating chlorella, which was supposed to be rich in protein. Chlorella fed on human urine, so people stopped going to the toilet and peed into spittoons instead, then dropped the chlorella seeds in; they grew into something looking like green fish roe in a couple of days, and were scooped out of the urine, washed, and cooked with rice. They were truly disgusting to eat, but did reduce the swelling.

Like everybody else, my father was entitled only to a limited food ration. But as a senior official he had some privileges. In our compound there were two canteens, a small one for departmental directors and their wives and children, and a big one for everyone else, which included my grandmother, my aunt Jun-ying, and the maid. Most of the time we collected our food at the canteens and took it home to eat. There was more food in the canteens than on the streets. The provincial government had its own farm, and there were also 'presents' from county governments. These valuable supplies were divided between the canteens, and the small one got preferential treatment.

As Party officials, my parents also had special food coupons. I used to go with my grandmother to a special store outside the compound to buy food with them. My mother's coupons were blue. She was entitled to five eggs, almost an ounce of soybeans, and the same amount of sugar per month. My father's coupons were yellow. He was entitled to twice as much as my mother because of his higher rank.

My family pooled the food from the canteens and the other sources and ate together. The adults always gave the children more, so I did not go hungry. But the adults all suffered from malnutrition, and my grandmother developed slight edema. She grew chlorella at home, and I was aware that the adults were eating it, although they would not tell me what it was for. Once I tried a little, and immediately spat it out as it tasted revolting. I never had it again.

I had little idea that famine was raging all around me.

One day on my way to school, as I was eating a small steamed roll, someone rushed up and snatched it from my hands. As I was recovering from the shock, I caught a glimpse of a very thin, dark back in shorts and bare feet running down the mud alley with his hand to his mouth, devouring the roll. When I told my parents what had happened, my father's eyes were terribly sad. He stroked my head and said, "You are lucky. Other children like you are starving."

I often had to visit the hospital for my teeth at that time.

Whenever I went there I had an attack of nausea at the horrible sight of dozens of people with shiny, almost transparent swollen limbs, as big as barrels. The patients were carried to the hospital on flat carts, there were so many of them. When I asked my dentist what was wrong with them, she said with a sigh, "Edema." I asked her what that meant, and she mumbled something which I vaguely linked with food.

These people with edema were mostly peasants. Starvation was much worse in the countryside because there were no guaranteed rations. Government policy was to provide food for the cities first, and commune officials were having to seize gram from the peasants by force. In many areas, peasants who tried to hide food were arrested, or beaten and tortured. Commune officials who were reluctant to take food from the hungry peasants were themselves dismissed, and some were physically maltreated. As a result, the peasants who had actually grown the food died in the millions all over China.

I learned later that several of my relatives from Sichuan to Manchuria had died in this famine. Among them was my father's retarded brother. His mother had died in 1958, and when the famine struck he was unable to cope as he would not listen to anyone else's advice. Rations were allotted on a monthly basis, and he ate his within days, leaving nothing for the rest of the month. He soon starved to death. My grandmother's sister, Lan, and her husband, "Loyalty' Pei-o, who had been sent to the inhospitable countryside in the far north of Manchuria because of his old connection with Kuomintang intelligence, both died too. As food began to run out, the village authorities allocated supplies according to their own, unwritten priorities.

Pei-o's outcast status meant that he and his wife were among the first to be denied food. Their children survived because their parents gave their food to them. The father of Yu-lin's wife also died. At the end, he had eaten the stuffing in his pillow and the braids of garlic plants.

One night, when I was about eight, a tiny, very old looking woman, her face a mass of wrinkles, walked into our house. She looked so thin and feeble it seemed a puff of wind would blow her down. She dropped to the ground in front of my mother and banged her forehead on the floor, calling her 'the savior of my daughter." She was our maid's mother.

"If it wasn't for you," she said, 'my daughter would not survive… I did not grasp the full meaning of this until a month later, when a letter came for our maid.

It said that her mother had died soon after visiting our house, where she had passed on the news that her husband and her younger son were dead. I will never forget the heart-rending sobs of our maid as she stood on the terrace, leaning against a wooden pillar and stifling her moans in her handkerchief. My grandmother sat cross-legged on her bed, weeping as well. I hid myself in a corner outside my grandmother's mosquito net. I could hear my grandmother saying to herself: "The Communists are good, but all these people are dead… Years later, I heard that our maid's other brother and her sister-in-law died soon after this.

Landlords' families were placed at the bottom of the list for food in a starving commune.

In,989 an official who had been working in famine relief told me that he believed that the total number of people who had died in Sichuan was seven million. This would be 10 percent of the entire population of a rich province. An accepted estimate for the death toll for the whole country is around thirty million.