Ghosts and Other Fine Folk: Community, Illness, and Memory in China's Great Famine

Abstract

What does it mean to be ill? How do we understand our relationship to our own bodies and our communities as sickness renders the body foreign? We often study this on a biological level – illness defined as the foreign invaders, the immune response. But what this means to us beyond the scientific – how we understand what it means to ourselves to be ill, how we reconcile our body with our minds – is a constantly mutable thing, influenced by our own perceptions of the world, shifting as we continue to reassess what it means to inhabit the body. This thesis investigates these questions in the context of China’s Great Famine (三年困难时期). Running from 1959-62, this famine was one of the most devastating events in recorded history; however, even as we stand mere decades away from one of the greatest losses of human life we have ever known, its memory begins to fade, through increasing government scrutiny and the shrinking numbers of the generations that survived the famine.

This makes it all the more crucial that we record the stories of our elders while we still can. To do so I have supplemented the work of documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang’s Folk Memory Project (《民间记忆计划》) with my own travels over the southern China, seeking to collect elders’ oral histories. People spoke about their bodies, selves, and communities as disparate objects. But as they spoke about the damage that the famine had caused them, as individuals and as communities, I started to understand on a more metatextual level the role that these stories play in the relationship between body, individual and community. Throughout this thesis I argue that illness inverts the community, forming one on an exclusionary basis rather than an inclusionary one; this new “community” necessitates the split of individual and body. Storytelling, however, allows us to keep the absence where connection once was: to note it, and to hold the room for it to someday return.