Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 2: Chapter 1: Wild Man Mountain

Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 2 Chapter 1: Wild Man Mountain

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai both found what Xia Qin had said very strange. They had a vague sense that whatever it was, it wasn’t small. But they genuinely couldn’t imagine what kind of startling news a sixteen-year-old girl could possibly bring, so they pressed her to keep going.

Xia Qin looked around to make sure no one was within earshot, then said haltingly: “My cousin… escaped back from the countryside.”

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai could hardly believe what they were hearing. They thought their ears had deceived them.

Xia Qin’s cousin was named Xia Tiedong. He stood one meter eighty-six, and always wore a pair of glasses on his nose, though he didn’t look bookish for it. If anything, he carried an air of quiet shrewdness. He loved basketball. When the Cultural Revolution began he had been studying at a university in Beijing, and having read a good deal of Western literature, his thinking was on the radical side. He had a talent for eloquent, rousing argument, threw himself into every political movement, and had been one of the core members of the earliest Red Guard units. Xia Tiedong was broad-minded, honest, and dependable, the kind of person who stepped forward when things got difficult. He was accomplished in both scholarly and physical pursuits, full of energy, and his knowledge covered an enormous range. Domestic affairs, world events, there was nothing he didn’t know about. He was fiercely loyal to his friends, had read his way through Marx, Lenin, and Mao as well as celebrated works from China and abroad, and could recite Pushkin’s poetry from any passage, forwards or backwards. He had a quality that set him apart from those around him, a natural magnetism that drew followers, and so he always had a crowd at his heels.

When Sima Hui and Luo Dahai were thirteen, they had followed Xia Tiedong back to Hunan to join the Great Liaison, retracing the Long March and climbing Jinggang Mountain again. In those six-odd months, their horizons expanded enormously. They gained experiences they never would have had, and they listened to this older brother hold forth on revolutionary truth. Xia Tiedong had told them back then: “Only by enduring the hardest hardships and braving the greatest dangers can a person accomplish anything of worth.” The two of them absorbed this with complete conviction and admired him from the bottom of their hearts.

Later, when Premier Zhou issued his directive and the Great Liaison movement wound down across the country, Xia Tiedong returned to Beijing while Sima Hui and Luo Dahai drifted back to the streets of Changsha. They lost all contact with him. The only rumor that reached them was that Xia Tiedong had, for various reasons, become entangled in a serious political incident. Nothing had been formally decided yet, but his bright future was finished, and before the previous year was out he had gone to a poor rural area in northern Shaanxi for rustication.

Then, just two days ago, Xia Tiedong had suddenly slipped back to his hometown with two other educated youth, one man and one woman, having run away. He didn’t dare show his face on the street, so he had sent for Xia Qin and asked her to round up his old friends. He wanted to see everyone one more time before crossing the border out of China, an opportunity he might never have again for the rest of his life.

Xia Qin knew that Xia Tiedong and Sima Hui and Luo Dahai were close. She was worried that people with their lawless dispositions wouldn’t just fail to talk him out of anything, they would actually follow him across the border. That was what had made her hesitate for so long before finally telling them.

After hearing all of this, Sima Hui said to Xia Qin: “Little Xia, you’re worrying too much. I know your cousin better than anyone. He’s not the kind of person who would defect to the enemy. Just look at his name: Xia Tiedong, iron devotion to Mao Zedong thought. A man like that sneaking off to defect? You could cut off my head before I’d believe it.”

Luo Dashetou agreed. “Even Lin Chong, with all his abilities, still had to pledge his life to get into Liangshan Marsh. Old Xia right now is just a rusticated educated youth. He doesn’t have access to state secrets. Even if he actually wanted to defect, they probably wouldn’t take him.” The two of them decided on the spot that they had to go see Xia Tiedong as soon as possible.

The following evening, Sima Hui brought along several companions who had traveled the country with Xia Tiedong during the Great Liaison, crossed the river into the city, and found their way to a modest house near the Martyrs’ Cemetery. There they saw Xia Tiedong again for the first time in several years.

Xia Tiedong was noticeably darker and thinner than before, and he carried a subdued sadness in his expression. But the relentless physical labor of daily life in the Shaanxi countryside had made his body harder and stronger than it had ever been. When he saw the young companions who had once followed at his heels, now all grown up, he felt genuinely moved. He shook hands with Sima Hui and Luo Dahai as he would with adults, and the joy of being reunited was so overwhelming that all three of them found their eyes going wet, struck speechless for a long moment.

More young people kept arriving after that, filling the already cramped house to overflowing. They were all old classmates and friends of Old Xia. Everyone sat in a circle, like a meeting at a production brigade, catching up on what had passed, which made Sima Hui and Luo Dahai’s group look conspicuously young, like a bunch of junior foot soldiers who had wandered in.

Seeing so many old friends, Xia Tiedong grew more animated. After reflecting on all that had passed, he told them what he had been through. In sixty-eight he had gone to Yanluo Gully in northern Shaanxi for rustication. At first he thought of it as going to the countryside to be tempered, to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. But as time went on he gradually came to understand that the place simply didn’t want them there. The land was barren, and no matter how many extra hands were added to the production brigade, the harvest at year’s end was always the same meager amount. Most of the time they just stood at the edge of the fields and waited on the sky. It was a life completely at odds with everything he had envisioned for himself. Within less than a year he felt he absolutely could not stay, and when he thought about being rooted in that desolate place for the rest of his life, he found the reality simply unbearable.

Xia Tiedong was a man of outstanding talent, but the weakness of such people is always the same: too much of the idealist in them. Like most young people of that era, he was filled with longing and passion for world revolution. Toiling away clearing land in China felt like a dead end. He steeled himself, and with two companions, ran back to his hometown. He told everyone gathered there what he planned to do next: “If this place won’t keep me, another will. If nowhere will keep me, I’ll join the fight. Better to throw myself into the currents of world revolution than to rot away at home and bring grief to my parents.”

Luo Dahai and the others had dreamed of real combat for years, but they didn’t quite follow what Xia Tiedong was getting at. Someone beside him asked: “The Japanese surrendered ages ago. Where exactly is there still a battle to join?”

Xia Tiedong said that while fascism had essentially been wiped out, two thirds of the world’s suffering masses were still living in misery, and as long as American imperialism survived, the people of the world would never have a good day.

Most of those present felt somewhat less than confident at this. “America is a superpower. A handful of us going over there isn’t going to liberate anyone. And even if we had the determination, we have no way of getting a ship or weapons. Never mind rockets and bombers and aircraft, we can’t even get a cleaver for every person. Are we really going to sail across the Pacific with a hand grenade each in a fishing boat?”

Xia Tiedong countered that superpowers were all paper tigers, nothing to be afraid of. The American military was brutal but hollow, an army of pampered soldiers. Besides, not all Americans were capitalists. Ninety-nine percent of them were exploited working people. Using Mao Zedong thought, they could arm the proletarians and worker-peasant-soldier brothers within the enemy’s own ranks, stir them to raise the banner and turn on their masters from within. With that kind of internal uprising working in combination with their assault from without, plus Castro hitting the Americans from their own backyard, defeating American imperialism was entirely possible. The only problem, he acknowledged, was that their forces were still very weak, and landing directly on the American mainland via the Pacific wasn’t realistic at the moment. But America was already invading Vietnam, so why not go there first and support the Vietnamese people? Fight guerrilla warfare in the tropical jungle, plant bamboo spike traps, and go up against the American military properly. When the day came to return home in glorious victory, it would show the people back in China once and for all whether they were true revolutionaries or false ones.

These young people had ambitions the size of mountains and no idea of the scale of what they were contemplating. The words were barely out of Xia Tiedong’s mouth before several companions responded in chorus: “The older generation of proletarian revolutionaries shed their blood for twenty-eight years to build a new China. Why can’t we spend another twenty-eight years liberating all of humanity?”

Luo Dahai, for his part, was never happier than when the world was on the edge of chaos, and there was no way he was going to miss something like this. On top of that, the Black House district would soon cease to exist, and if their group stayed in the city, they would all be sent to the countryside for rustication before the end of the year anyway. Not that revolutionary work had any hierarchy of dignity, and the Liberation Army certainly couldn’t have functioned without the support of the peasant masses, but the truth was that no one wanted to spend their life bent over soil from sunrise to sunset. In the minds of that generation of young people, being a soldier was the most glorious and sacred thing a person could be. If you couldn’t join the army at home, going to fight in Vietnam was the next best thing. Carrying a rifle beat carrying a hoe. And besides, they were traveling all that way to support the Vietnamese people’s liberation cause, so even if they didn’t accomplish anything remarkable, they deserved credit for the effort. When it came to tactical experience and strategic theory, that was a Chinese strength after all, thousands of years of warfare behind them, so by seniority and tradition they were entitled to think of themselves as the elder brothers. Go to Vietnam and surely they’d be handed a regimental or divisional command at the very least.

Sima Hui had spent over a decade living in Beijing and going to school every day, but he had been taught from childhood by his tutor in both literary and martial arts, and the weight of his family background shaped him in ways that a single educational mold couldn’t contain. So he was not entirely in agreement with what Xia Tiedong was proposing today. Even so, Sima Hui had always placed loyalty above all else. If Luo Dahai and the others had decided to follow Xia Tiedong to Vietnam, he couldn’t very well fall behind, and besides, without the Black House he had nowhere else to go. He decided to head south with the group.

Most of those who chose to go were children of right-wing families with nowhere to return to and no sense of a future. With the exception of one or two who didn’t dare, the rest each left behind a letter written in blood to declare their intentions, then scraped together travel money by selling off what little they had and ran away from home together. Xia Qin, watching as Sima Hui and Luo Dahai went along with the group just as she had feared, was filled with regret and tried one last time at the farewell to talk them out of it. But Sima Hui wasn’t the type to be talked out of anything. He knew Xia Qin was discreet and wouldn’t reveal their destination to anyone, so there was no need for further instructions. He also thought about the fact that they were heading to foreign soil to fight American soldiers, that bullets and shrapnel were not something to joke about, and that if he were to become one of the fallen on some distant battlefield, he truly might never come home again. After all, home is something the heart finds hard to leave, and through the haze of that feeling, the words he had meant to say slipped away unspoken.

Xia Tiedong and his twenty-odd companions said their tearful goodbyes to those who had come to see them off, set out quietly, and made their way south by a circuitous route, navigating many setbacks and hardships along the way that need not be detailed here. They finally reached the Chinese-Vietnamese border, passed through the Friendship Pass, and entered Vietnamese territory. What they found was a land already devastated by years of sustained American bombing. It only deepened their sense of shared outrage with the enemy. They were pressing forward to reach the front and join the fighting when their ambitions were cut short before they had even caught a glimpse of the legendary American soldiers. They were stopped by North Vietnamese security officers, who saw the group dressed in military uniforms but without insignia or badges and immediately assumed they were PLA deserters who had wandered in the wrong direction. Without asking any questions, they were seized on the spot. With the language barrier making any explanation impossible, they were locked up for a night and the next day bound hand and foot and marched back across the border into China.

After returning to the country, the group was interrogated, then sent directly to a labor reform farm in Yunnan. There they heard a piece of news: there was fighting going on over in Burma, intense fighting, the kind where people’s brains end up scattered across the ground. A lot of educated youth from Yunnan had already crossed over to join the Burmese Communist People’s Army. The Burmese Communist Party especially welcomed Chinese people, regardless of class background or family origin. Show up and they handed you weapons on the spot, short arms or long arms, your pick, ammunition as plentiful as you could ever need. No aircraft or missiles, but they had everything else: anti-tank rockets, anti-aircraft guns, heavy machine guns. They had even organized a special “educated youth reconnaissance battalion” that had distinguished itself in battle time and again and struck fear into their enemies.

Xia Tiedong and the others were already resentful about having missed the fighting in Vietnam. One mention of the situation in Burma and they couldn’t sit still. The group put their heads together, agreed that the farm’s security was loose, decided to make a run for it, slipped out of Yunnan across the border, swam the Nujiang River, and joined the People’s Army organized by the Burmese Communist Party.

From the time he arrived in Burma, Xia Tiedong took part in over a hundred battles, large and small. Although he was barely in his twenties, his relatively high level of education, combined with years of immersion in Chinese war films, gave him an intuitive grasp of strategy and tactics that needed no formal instruction. He fought with exceptional bravery, was naturally given greater and greater responsibility, and his comrades in arms all called him the “Che Guevara from China.”

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai stayed by Xia Tiedong’s side throughout. Over years of bloody warfare, they were forged in fire. From reconnaissance marches through terrain riddled with danger to grueling survival in the wilderness, from the hail of bullets on the front line to the crushing psychological weight of surviving when others hadn’t, every horror and absurdity that war produces landed on them in turn, and they had long since been tempered into fighters who could handle anything on their own. But the tide of the larger conflict was against them. The Burmese Communist forces suffered setbacks in battle after battle in their later campaigns, torn apart by internal contradictions and factions working against each other. The territory they controlled shrank steadily, and they were no longer a force capable of achieving anything decisive. The unit Sima Hui belonged to was finally surrounded by a large government army force and hemmed in among the dense forests on the outer edge of Wild Man Mountain in northern Burma.

Of all the comrades who had left China with Xia Tiedong, most had by now either died in battle or gone missing in action. Only a handful remained. They had no choice but to fall back into the mountains and wage guerrilla warfare. Xia Tiedong himself was wounded and captured during a reconnaissance mission, and was subsequently buried alive. His body was never recovered.

The remnant guerrilla force numbered around forty people. They were exhausted, running constantly, and had fallen back to the area near Wild Man Mountain. Ammunition was gone, food was gone, and casualties were mounting every day. No matter how capable Sima Hui and the others were, there was no reversing the situation now. The military government considered them a thorn in its side and had put out enormous bounties on their heads. The government forces didn’t dare risk entering Wild Man Mountain in northern Burma, but they had massed troops to seal off several mountain passes, intent on slowly starving the guerrillas to death in the deep forests.