Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In this searing and emblematic story, Claire Leng describes the experience of one fictional family in the Great Famine, which started in 1959 in the People’s Republic of China as a result of reforms during the Great Leap Forward. Leng subtly references causes of the disastrous famine in this tale that takes off when a man finds a toad in the road.
Listen to Claire read the story:
Toad Soup
In the summer of 1959 the government of Xu’fu City announced they had raised a colossal swine that weighed 1.5 tons and could feed the entire people’s commune for a whole year and more. That summer was scorching, like the 24/7-operating steel factory’s furnace, so this good news had soothed the comrades’ anxieties like river-cooled watermelons. That was indeed the golden period when strange things happened. For instance, the city had also harvested a white radish weighing over 2,000 pounds, and 35,000 bags of rice from a mere 1,600 square feet of farm fields.
And then there was a man, whose name is unknown, who murdered his family with a toad.
It happened on a starlit night. Like Chairman Mao’s Red Guards, the weeds riotously grew into the dirt road. The man almost stepped on the toad that jumped in front of him. No one knows how long the man and the toad stared into each other’s bulging eyes, or at their gnarly skin. Nor could anyone explain why this man dared to dash home while holding the venomous amphibian, the public asset of the country, next to his chest.
That night the man and his two kids collected tree leaves and dry branches outside the house while the man’s wife dug a hole in the floor where the kitchen used to be. One of the man’s sons folded a paper bowl, filled it with water, and hung it over the fire with a flaxseed string hanging through two holes across the bowl. The man tossed the toad into the boiling water. The toad swam in the tiny bowl for a few strokes before whirling its stomach to the ceiling. It glared at the man with its murky eyes bloated with knowing.
The man swallowed, pulled his matted hair, and sat next to the pot for a long deliberation. It might have helped if he’d had cigarettes. A few puffs could have cleared his mind. But his tobaccos belong to his community now. All he had was a straw—dry, wiry, hollow fallout from the bed’s blanket a few days ago. Holding the sullen straw in his mouth, he scooped the bland brown toad stew with his bare hand and fed each of his children a few sips before forcing his wife and himself to finish the rest of the soup.
When neighbors found their emaciated bodies and the toad bones the next day, because the man missed his labor work in the field, none of them questioned the cause. No one asked why he drank the poisonous soup and why he made his family do it too. At least this family died with food in their bellies so they would not become hungry ghosts roaming the living world.
Neighbors buried them hastily in the back of the hill and then went back to plant and harvest the grains that could feed the entire country, in a cacophony of stomach growling.
Claire Leng works as a technology consultant during the day and writes stories at night. She has published speculative fiction in both Chinese and English. Her recent works are in Daily Science Fiction, Menacing Hedge, and the Lady Thrillers anthology (Murderous Ink Press, 2021). More information about her work can be found at claireleng.com.
