This title was the response to, “chī fàn le ma?” which is a popular greeting in China. The question roughly translates to “have you eaten yet”. The answer–my title–and the words spoken on stage: “i still haven’t”.

I have been studying China a lot this year, and recently declared my CAPS minor (China and Asia-Pacific Studies). I have been learning the Chinese Language, and also taking a class called “China Under Revolution and Reform”. This art that i witnessed on stage took a swing at encapsulating the Great Leap Forward’s Great Famine, and the impression it left with me was something of disbelief, overwhelming sadness, sympathy, and anger.

The actors all went back to their families’ hometowns and interviewed the oldest person they could find, or older family still living there.

The amount of pure sadness that was still in the hearts of the interview’d was almost intolerable to even hear about. I tried to imagine living the lives that they were forced to live. I couldn’t.

Most of the art that was presented on stage also aligned perfectly with the history i had been learning in my class. The words i read in a book for that class however, prepared me naught for the sheer heartbreak and emotion raptured onstage. These were real people, i thought, and their stories aren’t in history books (they by all means should be).

Leaving the auditorium, i couldn’t talk. i was stunted in 1959-61 with the Zhōngguó rén (chinese people) i had just connected with. The most disturbing thing, possibly the most disgusting thing that hit me, was the thought that this famine wasn’t the central government’s fault. One of the interviewed said:

“Without the Communist Party, There Will Be No New China.”

– a popular communist propaganda song from the 1940’s

The topic of Saturday night’s Caochangdi dance performance, the Chinese Great Famine of 1959-1961, is a brutally painful history. 36 million people starved to death in the countryside, villages were emptied, thousands turned in desperation to cannibalism, officials beat those who resisted or tried to send letters detailing their situation and asking for help, the list of horrors goes on. Unbelievably, while all of this occurred, the party’s granaries were full, and China continued to export grain abroad. Though the party still denies it today, the famine was the result of disastrous and incomprehensibly callous government policy.

Given this history, I was surprised by how apolitical much of the performance was. Though at times it was difficult to read the subtitles, from what I did read the interviews seemed to deal more with the everyday, human suffering inflicted by the famine than with the policies and the actions that caused it. The dances, likewise, seemed more concerned with individual experience than with institutional actions and their consequences. I wonder why this is. The documentarians wanted their work to shed light on the experiences of the Chinese people in the famine, so one possibility is that they were simply more concerned with getting these personal stories than with explaining political circumstances. Maybe, because the topic is still taboo in China today, it was simply too risky to ask people those sorts of questions – maybe they didn’t feel it was appropriate to put their interview subjects in a position where they had to confront them. At any rate, what stands out in my recollection of the performance is the emotional weight. It’s hard to feel that weight when you speak about tragedy in historical terms. By going to those who had lived through the famine and by incorporating their memories into the performance, the artists perhaps brought the audience a little closer.

I didn’t know what I was expecting from the Caochangdi Workstation performance, but it most assuredly wasn’t the performance I encountered.

The performance began without introduction. The stage was shrouded in darkness–anticipation crackled in the air, palpable and tense. Then, a film began to roll.

This first performance was a dialogue between a mother and daughter–the mother, recorded on film, and the daughter performing on stage. The mother described her painful birth experience; the daughter described how her mother once made her write a “self-criticism” letter. As the performance progressed, the daughter writes her “self-criticism” letter to her mother, repeating over and over how sorry she is for talking to a boy and that she will study harder and won’t make the mistake again. She roughly scrawls her self-criticism letter in red inked Chinese characters all over her body, voice pitching higher and higher into hysteria until–silence. The room was so quiet, as if no one dared to breathe lest they pain the performer any more. This is when I realized that the performance wasn’t about the daughter being upset about her mother punishing her. This was the performer as an adult, trying to convey to her mother how sorry their relationship has deteriorated. How sorry she is that their communication has been lost. She used the medium of her 15 year old self to convey her pain until she leaves the stage in a swatch of red light, leaving a sense of unresolved sorrow and a wistful nostalgia for the relationship that had been.

The performance was masterfully done–her interpretive dance, as well as the cadence of her speech, combined with the minimalist English subtitles strongly evoked emotion from the audience. I can’t say I enjoyed the rest of the performances quite as much.

The rest of the performance was confusing. Interpretive dance sequences and short monologues were interspersed with documentary clips on the Great Famine, which plagued China from 1959-1961. These clips were fascinating, organic pieces which showed the performers interviewing old villagers in their own hometowns who survived the famine. The combination of standard Mandarin Chinese from the younger performers and the rural dialects of the villagers provided an interesting contrast between the modern world and the old–though admittedly 1960 was not long ago. While these clips provided a fantastic, first hand account of the famines and the culture of the villages, the interpretive dances were harder to understand. I’m probably just bad at understanding performance art, but I had a very hard time trying to understand the message they were so clearly trying to convey. The dances, while interesting, at times pulled away from the core of the performance, which I thought was the interviews with the villagers. In comparison to the first dance which enhanced the message and comprised most of the performance, these interpretive dances were difficult for me to understand and left me confused and my brain tired from trying to make sense of it all. I would have liked to see more interaction from the documentaries.

I left the performance feeling slightly dissatisfied, but I can’t say I’m sorry I went.