依娃的新作《走陝西》（Walking to Shaanxi: Stories of Flight and Survival in
the Great Famine），以「口述—紀實—小說化寫作」的複合路徑，書寫大饑荒中「弱勢群
體中的最弱勢群體」——婦女與兒童的逃荒、被販與重生，把讀者帶回1959—1963年甘陝邊地那個災難深重的土地。作者在封面頁即點明其寫作的補史野心：這是一部彌補「歷史大事件中的細節和眼淚」的小說集，而「婦女和孩子逃荒求生」的敘述稀缺到幾乎空白。本書不僅將那場災難從抽象數字與宏觀敘事中解放出來，更把具體的人、可觸的命運與有名有姓的記憶，重新安放在讀者眼前。
依娃並非憑空虛構。她先以十年實地訪談與田野記錄，完成「大饑荒三部曲」：《尋找大饑荒倖存者》《尋找逃荒婦女娃娃》《尋找人吃人見證》，累計採訪五百餘人，成書百萬字，形成堅實的史料與證言地基；《走陝西》在此基礎上完成「人物與心靈」的再塑，既避免了紀實文體的「乾巴數據」，又保存了口述歷史的在場與證據性。她明確表示：與學者的宏觀研究不同，自己的切口始終指向「一個人、一個婦女、一個家庭在大饑荒中的遭遇、經歷、心理歷程」，旨在「從事件之真」推進到「心靈之真」。
這一轉向，也回應了當代中文敘事實踐中的一個難題：在政治—市場雙重壓力下，紀實與虛構常被迫互借衣裳，或以「小說」名義迴避風險，或以「紀實」名義迎合消費。《走陝西》避開標籤之爭，直面人物的真實：山是真山，水是真水，飢與痛都是真實的質地。這使它同時具有史料學與敘事學的雙重價值——既可被當作一份「社會記憶檔案」，也可作為一部「人之為人的文學」。（參見高伐林序言的論斷與例舉）
在歷史層面，作品完成了兩項關鍵工作。其一，刻意「命名」。作者多次強調大量人物使用真實姓名，因為「用真實的名字我就覺得她們復活了」。這不僅是敘述策略，更是抵抗遺忘的倫理宣誓。其二，呈現逃荒與遣返的「政策—個人生命」之間的斷裂地帶：書後附錄談及「大饑荒後，逃荒到陝西的婦女兒童被遣返甘肅者達五、六萬人」，並追問這些人如何被遣返、是否自願、回去後的境遇與村莊觀感等問題，這直接把宏觀政策的抽象性化為群體命運的具體性。從這個意義上說，《走陝西》不是以「事件」為中心的災難史，而是一部以「人」為中心的倖存史——它使歷史從宏大敘事回到日常倫理、親緣結構與生存技術之中。
《走陝西》最具穿透力的地方，並非獵奇式的慘烈描寫，而是它對「荒誕的真實」如何成為日常生活的細密復原。高伐林在序中稱之為「偶然中的必然」「無常中的正常」——鬧劇的外觀下，是慘劇的骨架。譬如〈人販子張廣祿〉，一個「民辦教師—人販子—尋妻父親」的身份轉換，既揭示了「販賣」的犯罪倫理，又同時暴露「救命的灰色仲介」的歷史處境：他被捕、被宣判十三年徒刑的情節，冷峻地暴露出制度—飢餓—道德彼此扭結的悖論。
而最能體現小說質地的，是它對「日常災難美學」的凝視。火車站前，張廣祿以十二歲女兒換得「救命糧」，卻被車站以「不得攜糧出省」的政策當場沒收——玉米傾瀉滿地，他抱袋而哭，語言貧乏到只剩「同志，這是救命糧啊！」這不是「戲劇性」的峰值，而是「日常性」的底色，現實的可怖正來源於它的「合乎規定」。
依娃在自序直言，哪怕在「極度貧窮的生活」里，也仍有「微弱的人性之光」。陝西那些「自己都吃不甚飽的男人」接納婦女與孩子，以「有飯吃、有個家」的最基本倫理挽救他人生命，而這些女人以「滴水之恩，湧泉相報」的方式與新家庭締結持久的互惠關係。此類敘述，拒絕將災難美學簡化為「苦難的審丑」，轉而在「尊嚴的回返」上加注筆墨。正是在「微光」的反襯下，文本中對飢餓、羞辱與恐懼的寫法，獲得了人性維度的厚度——它不是感官刺激的鴻篇，而是倫理復活的慢板。
這部書同樣提供了豐厚的社會學線索。第一，它細密呈現了災難條件下的親屬結構如何被「吃飯資格（口糧）—勞動動員—公共食堂」重組，婦女與兒童被迫在「求生/羞恥」「貞節/口糧」之間進行選擇。目錄中「到火車站領婆娘」「跟上個人」「赴陝工作組」等篇目，串接出「個體選擇—灰色仲介—基層治理」的稠密網絡。第二，它描畫了「人販子」的雙面性：既是道德的污名，也是歷史的生存技術。張廣祿在甘陝之間「跑了至少十幾趟」，前後「帶領婦女娃娃五、六十人」，其「仲介—安置—拿報酬」的流程，恰恰是饑荒年代基層社會的「非正式制度」。第三，附錄所收的媒體訪談與座談紀要，將「個案敘事」與「制度文本」對讀，使讀者得以從「經驗事實」上追索政策邏輯與群眾情感之間的縫隙——例如法廣節目訪談回溯依娃母親的逃荒與設籍經歷，強化了文本與現實之間的互證。
當下中國公共記憶的難處，不僅在於「材料之缺」，更在於「記憶之散」。《走陝西》將「口述者的痛」與「敘述者的度」穩穩攏在一起：它既讓「吃二遍苦、受二茬罪」的經驗進入可閱讀的公共空間，也讓個體尊嚴在文學中完成「歸葬」。正如序言所言：閱讀之沉重，正是「受難者血淚凝成的警號」，其目的在於「永遠不要讓噩夢死灰復燃」。這類「以文學保留歷史記憶」的努力，在事實與價值之間，搭起一座可通行的橋。依娃也明白「再寫一次」，是在與遺忘賽跑——她把「口述的真實」推進為「藝術的真實」，以抵達讀者的道德感與同情心。本書多篇目串聯成「逃荒地圖」。在〈小姐妹〉，大食堂取代灶火，「敞開肚皮大吃」的口號坍塌為一罐稀湯，姐妹倆因「打翻罐罐」而在泥地里吸食湯水；父親浮腫至死的過程被細描，讀來心驚。〈到火車站領婆娘〉則把「婚配—口糧—生存」的錯位推至荒誕邊緣：男人「在火車站前盤桓，夢想撿一個飢不擇食的異鄉女子當媳婦」，推進了「家庭—市場—災難經濟學」的極限邏輯。在〈人販子張廣祿〉，作者把敘述重心從「譴責」轉向「理解」：一方面，他「被五花大綁」於萬人宣判大會被判十三年；另一方面，他又不斷往返甘陝，安置饑民，「一手交人，一手拿錢」，在體制縫隙里完成「救命/牟利」的雙重行動。這些場景之所以動人，不在獵奇，而在它逼你承認：在那種時代，倫理之難不是「該不該」，而是「能不能活下去」。若把三部曲視為「證詞檔案」，《走陝西》就是一部「文學復調」。法廣的書評式對談指出：
依娃將鏡頭推進至婦女與兒童這一「被遮蔽的群體」，而她自己的家庭史（母親逃荒）正是寫作動力的火種。有了此前海量口述個案的鋪墊，《走陝西》得以把「集體的疼」細化為「個體的肉身感」，將「宏觀的史」化作「可感的事」。
在歷史維度上，《走陝西》以命名與證詞的方式修復了大饑荒記憶的斷裂帶；在文學維度上，它以「日常中的荒誕」與「尊嚴中的微光」，重塑了災難敘事的美學；在社會學維度上，它呈現了性別、親屬、灰色仲介與基層治理的交叉地帶；在當代公共記憶上，它以可讀與可感的方式，推動「恢復歷史真相」的公共討論向前一步。
（依娃，宋琳，《走陝西》；《尋找大饑荒倖存者》《尋找逃荒婦女娃娃》《尋找人吃人
見證》）
Writing Lives for the Victims of the Great Famine
—A Review of Walking to Shaanxi(《走陝西》)
Ma Siwei(馬四維)
Yi Wa’s new book, Walking to Shaanxi: Stories of Flight and Survival in the Great Famine(《
走陝西》), 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(《尋找大饑荒倖存者》),
Finding the Famine-Refugee Women and Children(《尋找逃荒婦女娃娃》), and Witnesses to
Cannibalism(《尋找人吃人見證》), 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(法廣) 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(法廣)
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(《走陝西》); Finding the Survivors of
the Great Famine(《尋找大饑荒倖存者》); Finding the Famine-Refugee Women and Children
(《尋找逃荒婦女娃娃》); Witnesses to Cannibalism(《尋找人吃人見證》))
