Lu spent his entire career behind the wheel. After driving his taxi for days, years, then decades, he could have forgotten, given how much China has changed around him. The opposite happened. As he got older, his need to understand only grew stronger. It felt like a natural necessity in a country that so often forgets its own past. "I need to know what happened to me when I was a child, what happened to my family," said this man, dark-skinned and speaking with a strong accent from the Henan countryside.
He was 6 or 7 years old when four of the seven members of his household died, in 1959 and 1960. Despite his youth, he remembers the moment hunger swept through the village: his mother ordering him to eat tree bark while neighbors threw themselves on bird droppings. He remembers that his paternal grandfather was the first to die, during the Lunar New Year of 1959, before his 4-year-old sister, whose body was placed in an agricultural basket to be taken out of the house.
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