Excerpt from World War Z by Max Brooks
...this was at the end of my copy of The Zombie Survival Guide...its inclusion does temper with the sense of realism the blank journal pages provide, but I'm intrigue and touched by the narrative of Dr.Kwang lingshu;
Their first priority was the meeting hall. The patients were carried out on stretchers, their limbs shackled, their mouths gaggled. Next, they went for the boy. He came out in a body bag. His mother was wailing as she and the rest of the village were rounded up for "examinations." Their names were taken, their blood drawn. One by one they were stripped and photographed. The last one to be exposed was a withered old woman. She had a thin, crooked body, a face with a thousand lines and tiny feet that had to have been bound when she was a girl. She was shaking her bony fist at the "Doctors." "This is your punishment!" she shouted. "This is revenge for Fengdu!"
She was referring to the City of Ghosts, whose temples and shrines were dedicated to the underworld. Like Old Dachang, it had been an unlucky obstacle to China's next Great Leap Forward. It had been evacuated, then demolished, then almost entirely drowned. I've never been a superstitious person and I've never allowed myself to be hooked on the opiate of the people. I'm a doctor, a scientist. I believe only in what I can see and touch. I've never seen Fengdu as anything but a cheap, kitschy tourist trap. Of course this ancient crone's words had no effect on me, but her tone, her anger...she had witnessed enough calamity in her years upon the earth: the warlords, the Japanese, the insane nightmare of the Cultural Revolution...she knew that another storm was coming, even if she didn't have the education to understand it.
- World War Z by Max Brooks [Warnings; Greater Chongqing, The United Federation of China]
Note: The Great Leap Forward itself was a nightmare, in fact, it was the consequences of the 'Great Leap Forward' that lead to the Cultural Revolution. Look it up at your library, or to start, a summary of Mao at the Rotten Library.
The error of the Great Leap Forward (Bush America, take note), was the deployment of administrative policies based on whimsies and not actual research. Mao, not learning from the Chinese fable about the farmer who yanked up his saplings to make them taller, thus losing them all...instructed farmers to double or triple their crops by planting their seeds that much closer and leaving it at that. Mao instructed everyone to make noise and scare away the sparrows until they died of exhaustion. The crops crowded each other to death, and was eaten by insects normally kept in check by birds, or was left to rot in the fields as farmers preoccupied themselves with reaching the quota for steel.
"Over a period of three years, beginning in 1958, China's agricultural production completely bottomed out. The combination of the economic policies of the Great Leap Forward along with an unprecedented drought resulted in disaster for domestic food production.
The entire population suffered. People all over China were starving. But hardest hit were the hapless populace of rural Henan province. When the farmers could not meet their production quotas in 1959, the local government declared that the farmers were hiding their harvests and denounced the citizenry as enemies of the people. Military patrols were sent to locate these hidden caches of grain. The soldiers beat families who failed to cough up the food they were assumed to have hidden.
When winter arrived, the peasants had nothing to eat but tree bark and grass. The officials saw to it that the families' cooking pots were smashed, to prevent them from cooking grass soup. As an incentive to finally release their hidden stores of food, thousands of peasants were tortured and murdered by the local government. Military forces patrolled train stations and roads to block escape."
ETA PS: This is why it fucking pisses me off to see Stupid White People wearing Mao figurehead teeshirts at the Kensington Market. It's stupid, but it soured my mood when I went there a few months ago for the Festival of Lights. I was having such a nice day, browsing through the stalls stacked with vegetables even in the snow, and then I see it, and I remember that there are still starving people back there...and here we are. ...and I just know it's not irony, and those same SWP aren't the type to wear Hitler European Tour teeshirts, dictators are only funny and cool when it's non-white people they are tyrannizing. (Ditto for the Kim Jong 'pop icon', do those SWP realise that Jong is a rapist creep who keeps a harem of preteen girls, and lives a life of excess luxury throughout North Korea's own famine? Fuck them, I hope they backpack their way into North Korea and suffer for it)
ETA2: I need to stick to my plan of reading only things that won't make me think too much in my off hours. As humourous as Max Brook's survival guide was, it is still politically aware and thus extremely sombering.
Their first priority was the meeting hall. The patients were carried out on stretchers, their limbs shackled, their mouths gaggled. Next, they went for the boy. He came out in a body bag. His mother was wailing as she and the rest of the village were rounded up for "examinations." Their names were taken, their blood drawn. One by one they were stripped and photographed. The last one to be exposed was a withered old woman. She had a thin, crooked body, a face with a thousand lines and tiny feet that had to have been bound when she was a girl. She was shaking her bony fist at the "Doctors." "This is your punishment!" she shouted. "This is revenge for Fengdu!"
She was referring to the City of Ghosts, whose temples and shrines were dedicated to the underworld. Like Old Dachang, it had been an unlucky obstacle to China's next Great Leap Forward. It had been evacuated, then demolished, then almost entirely drowned. I've never been a superstitious person and I've never allowed myself to be hooked on the opiate of the people. I'm a doctor, a scientist. I believe only in what I can see and touch. I've never seen Fengdu as anything but a cheap, kitschy tourist trap. Of course this ancient crone's words had no effect on me, but her tone, her anger...she had witnessed enough calamity in her years upon the earth: the warlords, the Japanese, the insane nightmare of the Cultural Revolution...she knew that another storm was coming, even if she didn't have the education to understand it.
- World War Z by Max Brooks [Warnings; Greater Chongqing, The United Federation of China]
Note: The Great Leap Forward itself was a nightmare, in fact, it was the consequences of the 'Great Leap Forward' that lead to the Cultural Revolution. Look it up at your library, or to start, a summary of Mao at the Rotten Library.
The error of the Great Leap Forward (Bush America, take note), was the deployment of administrative policies based on whimsies and not actual research. Mao, not learning from the Chinese fable about the farmer who yanked up his saplings to make them taller, thus losing them all...instructed farmers to double or triple their crops by planting their seeds that much closer and leaving it at that. Mao instructed everyone to make noise and scare away the sparrows until they died of exhaustion. The crops crowded each other to death, and was eaten by insects normally kept in check by birds, or was left to rot in the fields as farmers preoccupied themselves with reaching the quota for steel.
"Over a period of three years, beginning in 1958, China's agricultural production completely bottomed out. The combination of the economic policies of the Great Leap Forward along with an unprecedented drought resulted in disaster for domestic food production.
The entire population suffered. People all over China were starving. But hardest hit were the hapless populace of rural Henan province. When the farmers could not meet their production quotas in 1959, the local government declared that the farmers were hiding their harvests and denounced the citizenry as enemies of the people. Military patrols were sent to locate these hidden caches of grain. The soldiers beat families who failed to cough up the food they were assumed to have hidden.
When winter arrived, the peasants had nothing to eat but tree bark and grass. The officials saw to it that the families' cooking pots were smashed, to prevent them from cooking grass soup. As an incentive to finally release their hidden stores of food, thousands of peasants were tortured and murdered by the local government. Military forces patrolled train stations and roads to block escape."
ETA PS: This is why it fucking pisses me off to see Stupid White People wearing Mao figurehead teeshirts at the Kensington Market. It's stupid, but it soured my mood when I went there a few months ago for the Festival of Lights. I was having such a nice day, browsing through the stalls stacked with vegetables even in the snow, and then I see it, and I remember that there are still starving people back there...and here we are. ...and I just know it's not irony, and those same SWP aren't the type to wear Hitler European Tour teeshirts, dictators are only funny and cool when it's non-white people they are tyrannizing. (Ditto for the Kim Jong 'pop icon', do those SWP realise that Jong is a rapist creep who keeps a harem of preteen girls, and lives a life of excess luxury throughout North Korea's own famine? Fuck them, I hope they backpack their way into North Korea and suffer for it)
ETA2: I need to stick to my plan of reading only things that won't make me think too much in my off hours. As humourous as Max Brook's survival guide was, it is still politically aware and thus extremely sombering.