September 17, 1942 - Sing Wai, China
Rice in the sawdust
I have fled with some of my siblings to my father’s hometown in Guangdong province.
Life was getting very difficult in Hong Kong. My father lost his job, and we have been living on savings ever since. There is a food shortage, and everyone is hoarding as much as they can. The city is in disorder, the electricity is always going out, and spies are everywhere. It’s not uncommon for thieves to break into homes to steal food. On one such occasion, myself and a few others happened to be home, and I recognized one of the thieves as an old classmate from elementary school. When he realized we knew him, he ran away in shame. Such is war: people become so desperate they turn against their own.
My father’s solution was to build a hiding-place for the food. He built a partition in the cellar and filled it with sawdust from the dockyards, and we kept the canned goods and the rice buried inside. Everyday we had to strain the rice and dig out all the bits of sawdust before we cooked it.
This being our situation, my parents decided that some of us should go back to the village where we could grow our own food. Mother sewed money into the hems of our pants and sent us here, along with my younger sister and 3 brothers. We’ve been here three weeks, and my second brother has already died. He had TB, but we couldn’t treat him because medication is so hard to get here. Everyone back home took the news pretty badly, especially his wife (they were married earlier this year) and Wayne, his best friend. I remember my brother taking Wayne downtown to get him a sharkskin suit and leather shoes.
I have fled with some of my siblings to my father’s hometown in Guangdong province.
Life was getting very difficult in Hong Kong. My father lost his job, and we have been living on savings ever since. There is a food shortage, and everyone is hoarding as much as they can. The city is in disorder, the electricity is always going out, and spies are everywhere. It’s not uncommon for thieves to break into homes to steal food. On one such occasion, myself and a few others happened to be home, and I recognized one of the thieves as an old classmate from elementary school. When he realized we knew him, he ran away in shame. Such is war: people become so desperate they turn against their own.
My father’s solution was to build a hiding-place for the food. He built a partition in the cellar and filled it with sawdust from the dockyards, and we kept the canned goods and the rice buried inside. Everyday we had to strain the rice and dig out all the bits of sawdust before we cooked it.
This being our situation, my parents decided that some of us should go back to the village where we could grow our own food. Mother sewed money into the hems of our pants and sent us here, along with my younger sister and 3 brothers. We’ve been here three weeks, and my second brother has already died. He had TB, but we couldn’t treat him because medication is so hard to get here. Everyone back home took the news pretty badly, especially his wife (they were married earlier this year) and Wayne, his best friend. I remember my brother taking Wayne downtown to get him a sharkskin suit and leather shoes.
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