The three stories in Hunger Trilogy are a group of memories of three different periods in author Wang Ruowang's life, captured in three episodes of hunger. These memories can be read as individual stories or related ones, as mentioned in the introduction, that some of the characters that appeared in story one will appear also in story two or story three. These stories are strongly autobiographical and reflected three genuine episodes of hunger in the author Wang's life. While the plots of the stories provide a useful look into the civil war between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists (KMT or Kuomintang), hardship during the war against Japan, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) during the Communist era (1949-now), it is the way the memories are arranged that should receive our greatest attention. First, the three episodes were arranged in a continuum, suggesting a continuity of history. In the later readings that we will do on Communist China, we will find that the Communists treated 1949 (the year the Communist regime was established) as the dividing line in 20th century Chinese history, and no history written after 1949 attempted to cover pre-1949 and post-1949 together except in a history survey. It was especially true that no comparisons were made between scenarios before and after 1949 because post-1949 China was a "new China" and categorically different from the old one. A few years back, Wang's book would have been denounced as "anti-Communist" and "glorifying the Kuomintang (Nationalists)!"

The greater liberalization of China in the 1980s enabled Wang to write a more self-reflective thesis exploring the similarities of his past experiences before and after the Communist takeover. He wrote the Hunger Trilogy at a time when exposes of the Cultural Revolution were the norm of the day and collectively such literature was called "Scar Literature" meaning people were using such literature to expose their scars/wounds/status as victims incurred during the Cultural Revolution. There was also a specific genre called "Prison Literature" exposing life in Chinese prisons in the Cultural Revolution. Wang's writing approximates these genres but is not quite either because of the continuum he built between pre and post 1949 China, which was still quite a taboo--it would be ok to condemn the Cultural Revolution, but it was another matter to say the Communist regime was similar to the Kuomintang (Nationalist) one! Therefore when reading this book, we not only read the content, but also pay attention to how Wang consciously organized his memory.

The first chapter deals with Wang's imprisonment at 16 when he was imprisoned by the Nationalists for spreading Communist propaganda. This was around 1933, the height of the Civil War between the Nationalists and Communists. From 1923 to 1927, the Nationalists and Communists had organized a United Front against the warlords that dominated China. In 1927, when the joint forces of the Communists and Nationalists in the Northern Expedition reached Shanghai, they split, and the Nationalists massacred thousands of Communists and Communist suspects. Communism went underground from then on, and Communist forces moved to primarily rural regions. The Nationalists continued marching north to take Beijing, unifying China under the Nationalist government, though settling in Nanking (Nanjing) as their capital because the Chinese north was still not securely under their rule. They continued the civil war and sent hundreds of thousands of troops to wipe out the Communists, forcing the latter to abandon their base in southeastern China on a long march northwest (Oct.1934-Oct.1935). Meanwhile, in the cities, Communist cells continued their clandestine activities, primarily in the form of distributing leaflets and other forms of Communist propaganda. Wang was in charge of writing Communist propaganda on bathroom doors. These underground Communists lived a perilous life, as attested by Wang's arrest, and they would eventually be persecuted a second time in the Cultural Revolution, because they had been released by the Nationalist government under an agreement between the Communists and the Nationalists on the eve of the Second United Front, formed in 1936 to fight against Japanese invasion of China. Although approved by the Communists at the time, for the political activists during the Cultural Revolution, this was not enough to prove that they did not surrender to the Nationalists in the sense that they wrote confession statements abandoning the Communist cause.

As mentioned by Kyna Rubin in the introduction, that Wang chose to write about hunger is also symbolic of something. Food is one important aspect of Chinese culture, and some simply call Chinese culture as the culture of food, as exemplified by Ang Lee's movie "Eat, Drink, Men, Women" (available from any movie rental stores). Therefore the lack of food, or hunger, became a very important thing not only in an existential sense, but also in a cultural sense, and an important way to test the soundness of an administration. The exploration of the circumstances in which he suffered hunger, therefore, became a means for Wang to explore the administrations of the Nationalist and Communist regimes.