New York times Feb. 9,1992

Only the Jailers Change

HUNGER TRILOGY

By Wang Ruowang.

Translated by Kyna Rubin with Ira.Kasoff.

ISSpp. Armonk, N.Y., M.E.Sharp Inc $19.95

By Nicholas D. Kristof

PRISON fiction in China, unfortunately, never becomes dated. The tragedy of contemporary China is that the passage of time makes beautiful books like this one ever more relevant.

Wang Ruowang is a 74-year-old Shanghai writer and supporter of human, rights who, like .many such Chinese, is also an authority on prison life. “Hunger Trilogy” is a thinly fictionalized account of his experiences in prisons before and after the Communist victory of 1949. Mr. Wang wrote this book to keep a promise that he made to inmates who died in prison: "If I ever got out of there alive, I would spend the rest of my life struggling with that bunch of inhumane pseudo-Marxists" who locked them up.

The life of Mr. Wang -- and this work – parallels the trajectory of intellectuals' emotions about the Communist Party, initial enthusiasm that eventually fades into despair. The three sketches in this trilogy all deal with hunger, perhaps a less evocative topic in the United States than in China, where there is a long history of famines and where people still sometimes greet each other by asking 'Have you eaten yet?"

In the first part of the trilogy Mr. Wang recalls his days in a Shanghai jail in the 1930’s, when he was serving a 10-year prison sentence for working in the under-ground Communist movement. Mr. Wang was just 16 years old when the Kuomintang, which then ruled China, threw him in a dark prison cell. He began to sob at the thought of spending the next decade m such a place, but the other inmates comforted him and taught him how to get by. Among the key lessons: eat the maggots in the rice and enjoy them as a kind of meat.

The two meals a day, of spoiled rice and bad vegetables, with maggots as a condiment, were awful and inadequate, and so the inmates decided to stage a hunger strike for better rice, a piece of meat each week and more reading materials. For five days, Mr. Wang got by on little more than some peanuts and a bit of rice cake, but the hunger strike worked. The entire prison population stuck with the fast, and in the end the warden met the demands.

The author was released from prison after three years and rejoined the Communist forces. The second part of the trilogy describes how he and a small group of other partisans became lost in a forest while fleeing from .Japanese troops and nearly starved to death. Perhaps this is a metaphor, for China's Communists always seem to be losing their way, in any case, Mr. Wang focuses on the dynamics of the group and how their sense of mission led them to help one another.

The book’s third part recounts how the Communist state that Mr. Wang helped erect turned against him during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960's. Red Guards persecuted Mr. Wang in the hope of coercing him into denouncing the mayor of Shanghai -- who had been one of his cellmates in the 1930’s-- as a traitor.

Mr. Wang defies his persecutors and so is trundled off to prison -- the same prison, he discovers, in which he served in the I930’s. Then he was the youngest in his cell and now he is the oldest, but now, under Communist Party rule, the conditions are even more hellish than before. Because of the present prison warden's revolutionary spirit, the inmates are virtually starving to death.

Mr. WANG briefly considers trying to organize another hunger strike, but immediately realizes that it would never work. This time the prisoners are not united in spirit as they had been in the 1930's, and besides, he suspects that these guards wouldn't mind if the prisoners died.

The book concludes on a mildly optimistic note, with the fall of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution. Such optimism seemed justified in 1980, when “Hunger Trilogy” was published in Chinese and the country seemed to be marching away from repression. The book then could be read as a memento of some curious phases in China's tortuous development, mad years that had been tossed with a thud into history's ash bin. But this able English version, by Kyna Rubin with Ira Kasoff, was published in the Summer of 1991, and sadly, as Mr. Wang's own recent experience suggests, "Hunger Trilogy" is now of greater interest than ever.

Wang Ruowang enthusiastically backed the 1989 democracy movement and was arrested after the army crackdown that ended it. As Kyna Rubin notes in her useful introduction, Mr. Wang was imprisoned for more than a year. Since his release in October 1990, he has been closely monitored by the police in Shanghai. There is little hope that books like this one will again be published in China as long as the present regime lingers.

"Hunger Trilogy" is a powerful and poignant work of prison literature by one of China's most courageous writers. It is not his fault that his work is as depressing as it is important.