THE FAMINE SOUP There were roughly a dozen mouthfuls of rice in a bowl of famine soup, give or take a spoon. The broth was watery and faintly seasoned with salt. At the best of times, it contained a few beans or peanuts. Before things became truly scarce, the estate cooks added yam to the soup, making it more nutritious. Eventually, when the supply of yam ran short, they substituted manioc, which made people dizzy; some vomited. And then they used bran, the livestock feed, to supplement the soup. Though at the very end when the number of refugees had grown tenfold, when the soup could no longer be given twice a day, there was nothing left to go into the pot but rice, water, and salt. A single bowl a day. Who could be sustained by so little? When Tet came that year, there was no celebration. The harvest had been poor for several seasons. Still, the Japanese army forced farmers to grow jute on fertile land for its war efforts, and then requisitioned what little rice the fields yielded. People resorted to eating their seed stock and so had nothing to sow for the next planting.
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