依娃的新作《走陕西》（Walking to Shaanxi: Stories of Flight and Survival in
the Great Famine），以“口述—纪实—小说化写作”的复合路径，书写大饥荒中“弱势群
体中的最弱势群体”——妇女与儿童的逃荒、被贩与重生，把读者带回1959—1963年甘陕边地那个灾难深重的土地。作者在封面页即点明其写作的补史野心：这是一部弥补“历史大事件中的细节和眼泪”的小说集，而“妇女和孩子逃荒求生”的叙述稀缺到几乎空白。本书不仅将那场灾难从抽象数字与宏观叙事中解放出来，更把具体的人、可触的命运与有名有姓的记忆，重新安放在读者眼前。
依娃并非凭空虚构。她先以十年实地访谈与田野记录，完成“大饥荒三部曲”：《寻找大饥荒幸存者》《寻找逃荒妇女娃娃》《寻找人吃人见证》，累计采访五百余人，成书百万字，形成坚实的史料与证言地基；《走陕西》在此基础上完成“人物与心灵”的再塑，既避免了纪实文体的“干巴数据”，又保存了口述历史的在场与证据性。她明确表示：与学者的宏观研究不同，自己的切口始终指向“一个人、一个妇女、一个家庭在大饥荒中的遭遇、经历、心理历程”，旨在“从事件之真”推进到“心灵之真”。
这一转向，也回应了当代中文叙事实践中的一个难题：在政治—市场双重压力下，纪实与虚构常被迫互借衣裳，或以“小说”名义回避风险，或以“纪实”名义迎合消费。《走陕西》避开标签之争，直面人物的真实：山是真山，水是真水，饥与痛都是真实的质地。这使它同时具有史料学与叙事学的双重价值——既可被当作一份“社会记忆档案”，也可作为一部“人之为人的文学”。（参见高伐林序言的论断与例举）
在历史层面，作品完成了两项关键工作。其一，刻意“命名”。作者多次强调大量人物使用真实姓名，因为“用真实的名字我就觉得她们复活了”。这不仅是叙述策略，更是抵抗遗忘的伦理宣誓。其二，呈现逃荒与遣返的“政策—个人生命”之间的断裂地带：书后附录谈及“大饥荒后，逃荒到陕西的妇女儿童被遣返甘肃者达五、六万人”，并追问这些人如何被遣返、是否自愿、回去后的境遇与村庄观感等问题，这直接把宏观政策的抽象性化为群体命运的具体性。从这个意义上说，《走陕西》不是以“事件”为中心的灾难史，而是一部以“人”为中心的幸存史——它使历史从宏大叙事回到日常伦理、亲缘结构与生存技术之中。
《走陕西》最具穿透力的地方，并非猎奇式的惨烈描写，而是它对“荒诞的真实”如何成为日常生活的细密复原。高伐林在序中称之为“偶然中的必然”“无常中的正常”——闹剧的外观下，是惨剧的骨架。譬如〈人贩子张广禄〉，一个“民办教师—人贩子—寻妻父亲”的身份转换，既揭示了“贩卖”的犯罪伦理，又同时暴露“救命的灰色中介”的历史处境：他被捕、被宣判十三年徒刑的情节，冷峻地暴露出制度—饥饿—道德彼此扭结的悖论。
而最能体现小说质地的，是它对“日常灾难美学”的凝视。火车站前，张广禄以十二岁女儿换得“救命粮”，却被车站以“不得携粮出省”的政策当场没收——玉米倾泻满地，他抱袋而哭，语言贫乏到只剩“同志，这是救命粮啊！”这不是“戏剧性”的峰值，而是“日常性”的底色，现实的可怖正来源于它的“合乎规定”。
依娃在自序直言，哪怕在“极度贫穷的生活”里，也仍有“微弱的人性之光”。陕西那些“自己都吃不甚饱的男人”接纳妇女与孩子，以“有饭吃、有个家”的最基本伦理挽救他人生命，而这些女人以“滴水之恩，涌泉相报”的方式与新家庭缔结持久的互惠关系。此类叙述，拒绝将灾难美学简化为“苦难的审丑”，转而在“尊严的回返”上加注笔墨。正是在“微光”的反衬下，文本中对饥饿、羞辱与恐惧的写法，获得了人性维度的厚度——它不是感官刺激的鸿篇，而是伦理复活的慢板。
这部书同样提供了丰厚的社会学线索。第一，它细密呈现了灾难条件下的亲属结构如何被“吃饭资格（口粮）—劳动动员—公共食堂”重组，妇女与儿童被迫在“求生/羞耻”“贞节/口粮”之间进行选择。目录中“到火车站领婆娘”“跟上个人”“赴陕工作组”等篇目，串接出“个体选择—灰色中介—基层治理”的稠密网络。第二，它描画了“人贩子”的双面性：既是道德的污名，也是历史的生存技术。张广禄在甘陕之间“跑了至少十几趟”，前后“带领妇女娃娃五、六十人”，其“中介—安置—拿报酬”的流程，恰恰是饥荒年代基层社会的“非正式制度”。第三，附录所收的媒体访谈与座谈纪要，将“个案叙事”与“制度文本”对读，使读者得以从“经验事实”上追索政策逻辑与群众情感之间的缝隙——例如法广节目访谈回溯依娃母亲的逃荒与落户经历，强化了文本与现实之间的互证。
当下中国公共记忆的难处，不仅在于“材料之缺”，更在于“记忆之散”。《走陕西》将“口述者的痛”与“叙述者的度”稳稳拢在一起：它既让“吃二遍苦、受二茬罪”的经验进入可阅读的公共空间，也让个体尊严在文学中完成“归葬”。正如序言所言：阅读之沉重，正是“受难者血泪凝成的警号”，其目的在于“永远不要让噩梦死灰复燃”。这类“以文学保留历史记忆”的努力，在事实与价值之间，搭起一座可通行的桥。依娃也明白“再写一次”，是在与遗忘赛跑——她把“口述的真实”推进为“艺术的真实”，以抵达读者的道德感与同情心。本书多篇目串联成“逃荒地图”。在〈小姐妹〉，大食堂取代灶火，“敞开肚皮大吃”的口号坍塌为一罐稀汤，姐妹俩因“打翻罐罐”而在泥地里吸食汤水；父亲浮肿至死的过程被细描，读来心惊。〈到火车站领婆娘〉则把“婚配—口粮—生存”的错位推至荒诞边缘：男人“在火车站前盘桓，梦想捡一个饥不择食的异乡女子当媳妇”，推进了“家庭—市场—灾难经济学”的极限逻辑。在〈人贩子张广禄〉，作者把叙述重心从“谴责”转向“理解”：一方面，他“被五花大绑”于万人宣判大会被判十三年；另一方面，他又不断往返甘陕，安置饥民，“一手交人，一手拿钱”，在体制缝隙里完成“救命/牟利”的双重行动。这些场景之所以动人，不在猎奇，而在它逼你承认：在那种时代，伦理之难不是“该不该”，而是“能不能活下去”。若把三部曲视为“证词档案”，《走陕西》就是一部“文学复调”。法广的书评式对谈指出：
依娃将镜头推进至妇女与儿童这一“被遮蔽的群体”，而她自己的家庭史（母亲逃荒）正是写作动力的火种。有了此前海量口述个案的铺垫，《走陕西》得以把“集体的疼”细化为“个体的肉身感”，将“宏观的史”化作“可感的事”。
在历史维度上，《走陕西》以命名与证词的方式修复了大饥荒记忆的断裂带；在文学维度上，它以“日常中的荒诞”与“尊严中的微光”，重塑了灾难叙事的美学；在社会学维度上，它呈现了性别、亲属、灰色中介与基层治理的交叉地带；在当代公共记忆上，它以可读与可感的方式，推动“恢复历史真相”的公共讨论向前一步。
（依娃，宋琳，《走陕西》；《寻找大饥荒幸存者》《寻找逃荒妇女娃娃》《寻找人吃人
见证》）
Writing Lives for the Victims of the Great Famine
—A Review of Walking to Shaanxi(《走陕西》)
Ma Siwei(马四维)
Yi Wa’s new book, Walking to Shaanxi: Stories of Flight and Survival in the Great Famine(《
走陕西》), takes a hybrid path—oral testimony, reportage, and novelistic reconstruction—to tell of the flight, trafficking, and fragile rebirth of those“most vulnerable among the vulnerable” during the Great Famine: women and children. It returns readers to the devastated borderlands of Gansu and Shaanxi between1959 and1963. From the very first pages, the author states an archival ambition: to make up for the“details and tears” erased by grand events, and to fill an almost blank record of“women and children fleeing famine to survive.” The book liberates that catastrophe from abstractions and macro-narratives, restoring to view concrete people, graspable fates, and memories with names.
Yi Wa does not invent from thin air. Over ten years of fieldwork and interviews, she completed a“Great Famine trilogy”: Finding the Survivors of the Great Famine(《寻找大饥荒幸存者》),
Finding the Famine-Refugee Women and Children(《寻找逃荒妇女娃娃》), and Witnesses to
Cannibalism(《寻找人吃人见证》), drawing on testimony from more than five hundred peopleand producing over a million words—an evidentiary foundation of remarkable solidity. On this basis, Walking to Shaanxi reshapes“character and inner life,” avoiding the desiccation of documentary prose while preserving the immediacy and probative force of oral history. As she makes clear, unlike scholars who work at the macro level, her focus remains“one person, one woman, one family—their ordeals, experiences, and psychological passages during the famine,” moving from“the truth of events” toward“the truth of the heart.”
This turn also answers a dilemma in contemporary Chinese narrative practice: under the twin
pressures of politics and the market, reportage and fiction often borrow each other’s
garments—adopting the label of“novel” to avoid risk, or“documentary” to court consumption.
Walking to Shaanxi sidesteps the quarrel over labels to face persons as they are: the mountains
are real mountains, the waters, real waters; hunger and pain have the palpable grain of reality.
The book thus carries a double charge—historiographical and narratological. It can be read as a“social memory archive,” and also as literature about being human.(See the arguments and
examples in Gao Falin’s preface(高伐林).)
Historically, the work accomplishes two essential tasks. First, it insists on naming. The author
emphasizes that many figures appear under their real names, because“using their true names
makes them feel alive again.” This is not only a narrative strategy but an ethical avowal against
oblivion. Second, it renders the fracture between policy and personal life in the zones of flight
and repatriation. The appendix notes that“after the Great Famine, fifty to sixty thousand women and children who had fled to Shaanxi were sent back to Gansu,” and it presses the questions of how they were returned, whether they consented, and what awaited them and their villages. In doing so, it turns the abstraction of macro-policy into the specificity of collective fate. In this sense, Walking to Shaanxi is not a disaster history centered on“events,” but a survival history centered on“people,” bringing history down from sweeping narratives to everyday ethics, kinship structures, and techniques of staying alive.
The book’s greatest force lies not in sensational depictions of horror but in its meticulous
recovery of how“absurd reality” takes on the texture of the everyday. In his preface, Gao Falin(高伐林) calls it“the inevitable within the accidental,”“the normal within the inconstant”—farcein appearance, tragedy in bone. Consider“The Trafficker Zhang Guanglu”: a man who shiftsamong identities—rural substitute teacher, human trafficker, father seeking his wife. The story exposes the criminal ethics of“selling” while simultaneously revealing the historical
predicament of a“gray intermediary” who saves lives. His arrest and thirteen-year sentence
coolly lay bare the knotting of system, hunger, and morality.
Most revealing of the book’s novelistic grain is its gaze on a“daily aesthetics of disaster.” At a
railway station, Zhang Guanglu trades for“life-saving grain” with his twelve-year-old daughter,
only to have it confiscated under a rule forbidding grain to be carried out of the province. Corn
spills across the ground; he clutches the sack and weeps, reduced to repeating,“Comrade, this is grain that saves lives!” The moment is not a theatrical peak but the baseline of daily life. Its
terror derives from being“in accordance with regulations.”
In her preface, Yi Wa(依娃) writes that even amid“extreme poverty,” there remains“a faint
light of humanity.” Men in Shaanxi who were themselves underfed took in women and children, saving lives by the most basic ethics—“a meal to eat, a home to belong to.” In turn, these women bound themselves to their new families in enduring reciprocity, paying back“a drop of grace with a spring.” Such writing refuses to reduce the aesthetics of calamity to the spectacle of suffering; it concentrates instead on the return of dignity. Against this faint light, the depictions of hunger, humiliation, and fear acquire human depth. This is not a grand canvas of sensory shock, but a slow movement toward ethical restoration.
The book also yields abundant sociological threads. First, it shows how kinship structures were
reorganized under disaster by“entitlement to rations—labor mobilization—communal canteens,” forcing women and children to choose between“survival/shame” and“chastity/rations.”
Chapters such as“Go to the Station to Fetch a Wife,”“Follow Someone,” and“The Work Team Going to Shaanxi” trace a dense mesh of“individual choice—gray intermediation—grassroots governance.” Second, it sketches the double face of the“human trafficker”: a moral stain and, at once, a technique of survival. Zhang Guanglu makes“at least a dozen” trips between Gansu and Shaanxi,“escorting fifty or sixty women and children,” his“brokerage—placement—payment” routine operating as a de facto institution of the famine era. Third, the appendix’s media interviews and roundtables set“case narratives” beside“institutional texts,” allowing readers to pursue, from stubborn experience, the seam between policy logics and popular feeling—for example, a Radio France Internationale(法广) interview that revisits the author’s mother’s flight and settlement, reinforcing the book’s mutual corroboration with lived history.
The difficulty of public memory in China today lies not only in a dearth of materials but in the
dispersal of remembrance. Walking to Shaanxi gathers“the pain of those who speak” with“the
restraint of the one who writes.” It ushers into the readable public sphere the experience of
“suffering twice over,” and lays to rest individual dignity within literature. As the preface says,
the heaviness of reading is itself“an alarm forged from the blood and tears of the afflicted,”
sounded so that“the nightmare never rekindles.” Such efforts to“preserve historical memory
through literature” build a passable bridge between fact and value. Yi Wa knows that“writing it
again” is a race with forgetting; she advances from“the truth of testimony” to“the truth of art,” in order to reach the reader’s moral sense and compassion.
Many chapters map a cartography of flight. In“The Two Sisters,” the communal canteen
replaces the household hearth; the slogan“eat your fill” collapses into a jar of thin gruel. After
the jar is knocked over, the sisters suck the soup from the mud; their father’s edema and death
are rendered in chilling detail.“Go to the Station to Fetch a Wife” pushes to the edge of
absurdity the dislocation among marriage, rations, and survival: men loiter at the station, hoping to“pick up” a starving outsider as a wife—an extreme logic of family, market, and disaster
economics. In“The Trafficker Zhang Guanglu,” the narrative shifts from“condemnation” to
“understanding.” On the one hand, he is bound and paraded before a ten-thousand-person rally toreceive a thirteen-year sentence; on the other, he shuttles between Gansu and Shaanxi, placing the starving—“one hand delivering people, the other taking money”—enacting the double movement of rescue and profit in the seams of the system. These scenes compel an admission: in such times, the ethical question was not“ought one” but“can one go on living.”
If the trilogy functions as an“archive of testimony,” then Walking to Shaanxi becomes a work of“literary polyphony.” As a review-style conversation on Radio France Internationale(法广)
notes, Yi Wa brings the lens to bear on women and children—the most occluded of groups—and her own family history(a mother’s flight from famine) supplies the spark of motive. With the groundwork of earlier cases laid down, Walking to Shaanxi refines“collective pain” into“the felt weight of individual bodies,” transmuting the“macro-history” into“palpable fact.”
Historically, Walking to Shaanxi repairs, through naming and testimony, the rupture in the
memory of the Great Famine. Literarily, it reshapes the aesthetics of disaster with“the absurd in the everyday” and“a faint light in dignity.” Sociologically, it presents the intersection of gender, kinship, gray intermediaries, and grassroots governance. In contemporary public memory, it advances the work of“restoring historical truth” in forms both readable and felt.
(Yi Wa(依娃); Song Lin(宋琳); Walking to Shaanxi(《走陕西》); Finding the Survivors of
the Great Famine(《寻找大饥荒幸存者》); Finding the Famine-Refugee Women and Children
(《寻找逃荒妇女娃娃》); Witnesses to Cannibalism(《寻找人吃人见证》))
