Yuan Yang

My maternal grandparents married in 1961, amid a man-made famine. On her wedding night, the bride walked home along streets shared by the bodies of the dead. Her colleagues had surprised her with an extravagant wedding gift — a handful of boiled sweets — which she held like gemstones in her pocket. My parents were born after the harvests returned, and began secondary school in the 1970s. At the start of each autumn term, my father would pay for his textbooks with barrow-loads of sweet potatoes.…