I was assigned guard duty to keep watch over the pigpens at Tunnel No. 6, Second Company, Settlement No. 22 from May to November 1991. While I was there, the pigs stopped growing. It took me three months to discover that the political prisoners working in the mines had been eating the pig slop when I was not around or when it got dark. Later, I realized that prisoners at all the detention settlements were always so hungry that they resorted to eating animal feed whenever possible.

When I first discovered that the pigs had stopped growing, I wondered if the slops were not enough. So I brought more waste food from the drainage of the guards’ kitchen. Usually, I would go back to my barracks at the end of day and ask the prisoners to boil the waste food from the kitchen and feed it to the pigs. Every morning, I found the kettle and pigsties clean and the prisoners would tell me that they had boiled the waste food, fed the pigs and cleaned the pigsties. I was happy with the clean sties. But I often found the pigs asking for food in the mornings. I wondered for quite some time what was wrong.

One night at around ten o’clock, I decided to find out what really went on in the pigsties at night. I was so surprised to find the prisoners in the cooking section of the pigsties, eating all the chunks of waste food and searching for more food in the liquid. They gave the pigs the liquid after they picked up all the food. The pigs had no food except liquid!

I returned to my barracks that night and pretended to be unaware the next morning. However, I brought waste food from the kitchen once more during the daytime to feed the pigs and also late in the afternoon for the prisoners as before. It was indeed very sad to watch prisoners so desperate for food.