HENAN Province, China, 1942. Nearly three million people die of starvation.

I am a descendant of these victims. But I know nothing of this great famine until 1990 at age 32 when a friend embarks on writing a history of disasters in China. He asks me to go back with him to the Henan of 1942 to help him write this story, and this is when I first learn of the magnitude of the tragedy.