Beyond the wire

THE top of the carrot, blackened by frost, poked just above the frozen ground. As soon as he saw it, Harry Wu dropped to his knees and scraped for it until his fingers bled. After 18 months in one of China’s laogai (“re-education through labour”) camps, hunger consumed him. Already he had sampled the half-rotten roots of cabbages left in the ground, and learned to dig into rat-holes to find stores of grain. In another hole he found a tangle of hibernating snakes, pulled them out, bit off their heads, skinned them and boiled them up for that wonderful, near-forgotten taste of meat.

He had learned to fight, too. When he took off his glasses he no longer looked like the intellectual he was. He was ready to beat up anyone who challenged his theft of a hard wotou bun or a piece of salted turnip, aiming his punch straight for the nose or the eyes so that his assailant wouldn’t try twice. The camp had made an animal of him, throwing desperate creatures together as, when a boy, he had put ferocious yellow ants and black ants in a bottle and watched them kill each other. In his case, his fall into barbarity had not taken long.