The Hungry Lamb And The Remains Of Morality In A Famished World

25 1月 2025

This post has unmarked spoilers on The Hungry Lamb, a Chinese-language visual novel that includes scenes of cannibalism and grotesque imagery.

In 1632, the once prosperous Ming Dynasty was on the verge of collapse. The people were experiencing famine after famine, and corrupt officials began stealing what little grain they could save. Many turned to banditry, and others who found themselves in more dire situations might resort to cannibalism.

What use are morals and ethics in a world where survival is barely possible? For Liang (良), it is better to divide up the world into two camps: the wolves and the lambs. He never explains his dichotomy to his readers, but it's clear that he sees people as prey and predators. As long as he doesn't have to kill women and children, he doesn't hesitate to use his sword.

One day, his accomplice Shetou (舌頭) tells him about a new job: they are going to smuggle four girls to Luoyang. As Liang inspects the girls, he notices a young girl who is starving like the others, but who seems to know more about the world.

Her name is Sui (穂).

The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty (饿殍: 明末千里行) is a 2024 Chinese-language visual novel developed by 零创游戏(ZerocreationGame). I knew about the visual novel when the game received a Japanese dub with Kugumiya Rie (best known as Minase Iori from iDOLM@STER) and a lot of acclaim from various Japanese writing outlets. While I was playing the game, the developers announced that the visual novel had sold its one millionth copy and that a new work in the same setting would be released in the last quarter of 2025.

I didn't know what to expect coming in. The Ming Dynasty I knew from dramas and books was one full of court intrigue and drama. The Ming dynasty that Hungry Lamb depicts is one of misery, desperation, and death. In a few short years, the Ming dynasty went from being one of the greatest kingdoms of the time to a shambling mess. There are many causes -- the Global Little Ice Age that caused many crops to fail, bureaucratic regimes that lent themselves well to corruption, and more -- but the end result is worth pondering: everyone was hungry.

The visual novel pulls no punches when it comes to depicting destitution. While the game mostly follows Liang and Shetou as they travel along mountainous roads and hide children from soldiers, flashbacks to Sui's backstory interrupt this narrative flow. Sui comes from a loving farmer family: her grandmother is still alive, her father works in the fields, her mother cooks, and she's the older of the two children. While her mother values her little brother more for his ability to continue the bloodline and pass the imperial examinations that could help the family rise in the social hierarchy, her father doesn't discriminate. Unfortunately, a series of famines has reduced the family to poverty.

The flashbacks show the breakdown of the family structure and exaggerate its excesses. When Sui's brother falls ill, her parents begin to argue about how in the world they're going to get the money to bring in a doctor. Her mother even brings up the idea of selling Sui for money, just to save the family's only son. These episodes are depicted with sepia-toned CGs: you can see how their cheeks become hollow and the desperate face Sui makes when she hears that her parents might sell her. They're heartbreaking to read, not only because the dialogue is precise, but because every reaction is rendered with another CG, as if I'm flipping through a comic book.

I find the Sui chapters to be some of the best written sections in the entire game. The narration reflects the powerlessness Sui feels as she looks around and sees her surroundings collapsing around her. Her devotion to her family makes the chapters difficult to read at times; she's too young to understand that her family's situation is getting worse, let alone know how to respond to her parents' despair. The CGs become more and more grotesque as her chapters progress.

The main chapters of the game that follow Liang, on the other hand, took me a while to warm up to. Liang is a difficult character for me to analyze. His worldview is extremely alien to mine, and that's definitely the point of his chapters: the game wants the player to question his moral system and whether he's really a "good" person, as his Chinese name might imply.

After looting a dead traveler whose belongings include tools and puppets for shadow puppetry, he quickly makes a connection with Sui when he learns that she knows how to use them. They sneak away from Shetou and the girls, and she teaches him how to perform shadow theater. These moments are a breath of fresh air after reading scenes of Liang coldly ignoring Shetou as he threatens girls left and right; Liang's interest in shadow puppetry reveals him as just another guy interested in Chinese tales of heroism and chivalry.

But this raises the question: why would an ordinary lad like him be forced to take the path of villains? We can certainly follow his lead and blame the heavens for requiring people to see the world in black and white, in wolves and lambs. But that is a social construction, a lens through which to view the world. It doesn't explain the inequalities in the world, only his worldview.

Instead, the visual novel takes an interesting, risky path that I think pays off: despite the chaotic turmoil of the late Ming period, the visual novel secretly harbors a moral standard. Yes, there are villages that are forced to eat their young. Yes, soldiers and rebels alike plunder the needy for scraps. But the visual novel believes that there are still heroes in this morally ambivalent time.

That said, this force of good doesn't appear normally. The heroes of the Late Ming Dynasty are antiheroes if they were written in any other time. Liang questions his ethics when he and Shetou tell the children that they can expect a good life in Luoyang, but he always finds a way to get the girls out of danger. His dedication to the girls' safety is commendable and even unusual in a world that has abandoned children to their deaths. In fact, he is constantly reevaluating whether he is helping the girls out of pure altruism or selfishness.

He knows too well that he cannot be let off the hook. Liang has killed too many people to be redeemed. No matter how many times he helps the girls, there is no way to erase his sins. But history does not always get the heroes it deserves: Liang enjoys watching the shadow theater Sui puts on, which includes performances of Zhang Fei slaying Lu Bu in Romance of the Three Kingdoms; though he will never be as inspiring as Zhang Fei, he pursues evil in his own way, appropriate for a historical period like the Late Ming.

Indeed, while there are many good people who will stray from the path in the Late Ming period, the game stresses, especially at the end, that there are still actual villains lurking in the background. Famines and the like may be unavoidable, but they can at least be mitigated by government intervention. Letting things go as bad as they do is downright evil. This is where the heroes, beaten and compromised as they may be, should step up and take the mantle.

This positive outlook contrasts sharply with the game's dark subject matter. I read a few many grotesque scenes that made me lose my appetite, which might have made the promise of a better tomorrow more palatable. The oppression of the poor throughout the game means that the characters cannot settle for anything less than revolution. This is not a foregone conclusion, as it requires Sui, Liang, and the player to come to an agreement on what needs to be done.

The visual novel is a linear story with choices that can lead to dead ends. Some of these choices are obvious: should Liang run or stop when soldiers start chasing them? Others lead to interesting endings, where you see Liang and Sui commit too deeply to their philosophies without adapting, so they end up losing sight of the whole journey. These latter detours allow us to explore their narrow-mindedness and why they behaved the way they did. The choices that put the player on the right path, on the other hand, are the ones that show the characters' growth and change. While the game doesn't do anything more than allow players to choose one option or the other, it is effective in guiding players to follow the characters' mindsets more closely.

I also found myself invested in the game's characters and setting because there are so many remarkable visual assets. There are a total of 58 CGs in this 8-15 hour visual novel, and the characters are composed to take advantage of the widescreen format. What's even more impressive is that the game features unique background art for each city you travel through, and there are even a few backgrounds that you see only briefly at the very end of the game. While a few backgrounds get overused (the inn being the most egregious), the many backgrounds and CGs make me feel like I've gone through a long journey with these characters. In an era where good background art is so unappreciated that so-called generative AI art might successfully "replace" it, this game stands out for its understanding of the importance of background art in conveying the game's scale and its unique aesthetic.

The game also never lost me in its historical excursions. While the characters discuss details like the price of pork being more expensive than girls, and there are various rebels fighting against the Ming Dynasty, I never felt like I had to read the Wikipedia article to know what I was supposed to be following. Historical fiction tends to be too detailed or too loose for me to follow without judicious use of the internet, but I find that Hungry Lamb's focus on the journey to Luoyang and Liang's and Sui's ethical codes meant that I didn't need to supplement my understanding. If anything, it informed how I should read the fall of the Ming Dynasty, and I've found several books on the subject for later perusal.

All that said, I think the reason The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty works the way it does is because it has a simple message: it depicts this dog-eat-dog world and all its horrors because it dreams of a world without hunger. Early in one of Sui's chapters, we learn that Sui is named as Mansui (满穗) by her family, and that it comes from her family's wish to see a field full of grain.

This may have been an impossible dream in the Late Ming Dynasty, but their poverty shouldn't have been as bad as it was. There is no doubt that there is natural scarcity, but the ruling elite can also impose scarcity for their own benefit. Inequalities lead to power dynamics where the rich can steal from the poor, and this forces the dog-eat-dog world into existence.

After finishing the game, I begin to think about my studies in international development for the past few years. The United Nations has promised everyone that world hunger will end by 2030, but we are nowhere close to eliminating it. It even admitted that "global hungers rose sharply from 2019 to 2021 and persisted at the same level to 2023, affecting over 9 percent of the world population in 2023".

And I don't have to go far to find hungry people. Hunger shouldn't be an issue in 2025, but we know that wealthy nationstates aren't interested in sharing their food with their own people, let alone other countries. We shouldn't be fighting among ourselves, but directing our anger at the leaders and governments who put us in this dog-eat-dog world. They are the class that has made us suffer and hurt each other. They are the enemy. They deserve to be taken down.

But I also see people who are uncomfortable with the suggestion of violence. Can violence really lead to a better result? Well, in Chinese history, empires rise and fall in cycles. When the Ming Dynasty fell, a new dynasty rose from its ashes: the Qing Dynasty. And just like the empires before and after it, it too fell, and new ones arise. History goes on.

The important thing is not that we don't know what the outcome will be, but that history will always continue. Violence will always erupt because of the inequalities imposed on the working class by the ruling class. Whether we participate in the violence or not, this violence will always occur.

A world without hunger is also a world without violence, without poverty, and without any form of conflict. This is a utopian dream that requires us to break out of the cycle of history. Like the author of the game, I would like to see a world where I don't have to see people as prey or predators, but as equals.

I'm not sure how we can do that. But perhaps learning who our common enemy is will make us realize that we can fight together, even if we have hurt each other. It's a fragile relationship, sure, but it's one that doesn't absolve us of our guilt and accomplishments.

That alliance, I believe, is an unbreakable bond in these troubled times.

Supplementary Notes: Learning Chinese

As promised, I'm writing about how I'm learning Chinese through visual novels.

Although this is the first Chinese-language visual novel I've written about on this blog, it's actually the second title I've finished. Qianse will have a DLC by the end of this month, so I want to read it before I write about it fully. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about it.

I played this game in Mandarin Chinese with the Japanese dub. Luna Translator works perfectly on the game without a hitch. I'm also auto-pasting onto one of those blank pages meant for hovering your mouse to read dictionary entries for. For those curious which dictionary I'm using, it's 中日大辞典　第二版. Works like a charm.

Compared to Qianse, a verbose NVL game, this game is quite easy to read. Its simple, straightforward writing style was so nice to read because it made me focus on memorizing vocabulary instead of figuring out how to read the grammar of something. And I can imagine the Mandarin Chinese voice acting will be helpful for people trying to hear what Chinese sounds like.

However, I don't really know how difficult some of the historical elements are for beginners. I'm a Chinese history buff, and mouse-over dictionaries don't always catch the terms correctly. I can also imagine that idioms are owned by people, but that's Chinese in a nutshell anyway...

I do think this is a good first read if you want to learn Chinese through visual novels. The pacing is nice, the title is short, and you get to learn about an important historical period.

While I can't fully comment on the Japanese translation, the Japanese dub makes me think it's not a bad translation. The dub was a later addition to the game, so reviews that criticize the translation tend to be critical of the earlier version. I did see one review that briefly commented on how awkward the current Japanese translation is, but it seems to have improved enough to be readable. The Japanese voice acting is also fantastic, using various localization techniques such as using different dialects to indicate different character speaking styles.

As for the English translation, I haven't really looked into it too much, but it doesn't seem all that great. There are awkward and dry lines that require some brainwork to parse...

So if you know Japanese and won't be learning Chinese for a while, the Japanese translation seems fine.