In the Famine Year, I Fed My Family Meat

In the Famine Year, I Fed My Family Meat Plot:

During the 1942 Henan Famine, Lin Xiulan’s husband lay bedridden, and her two children gnawed on tree bark from hunger. Yet she always returned home late at night with cooked meat wrapped in rough cloth. Neighbors gossiped that she “seduced men,” her mother-in-law smashed her clay pot and cursed her for “shaming the family,” even her youngest son avoided her in tears. Until one day, her husband followed her with a crutch and saw her sewing shrouds for the dead by a dim oil lamp in the mortuary—that was the “ghost work” from a local rich family, paid only with a thumbnail-sized piece of meat. And she? She squatted in the corner gnawing on moldy cornbread, clutching the warm meat saved for her kids, her fingertips red with cold.