Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 2: Chapter 2: Mosquito Special Transport Aircraft

Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 2: Chapter 2: Mosquito Special Transport Aircraft

In the final desperate breakthrough battle, Sima Hui’s left shoulder had also been wounded by grenade shrapnel. The fragment was small but had penetrated deep to the bone, bleeding without stop. Fortunately, Luo Dahai had risked his life to carry him back, but deep in the mountain forests, with no medicine or doctors, there was simply no way to perform surgery.

The only person in the guerrilla unit with any medical knowledge was “A Cui,” a skinny girl from Hunan who was kind-hearted and fastidious about cleanliness. Even when fleeing through deep mountain forests to avoid pursuing soldiers, she always kept herself as neat and tidy as possible. She had gone to the countryside right after finishing middle school, was one of the members who had fled south with Old Xia back then, and had worked as a barefoot doctor during her time at the rural settlement, knowing something of medicine and particularly skilled at setting bones.

A Cui’s grandfather, Su Laoyi, was a Christian who understood Western languages. During the Republic of China era, he had learned several special skills from the French, including not only internal and external medicine but also a bone-setting technique. If a patient had broken bones, Su Laoyi did not need to cut them open. By touch alone he could determine the full extent of the injury, such as how many bones were broken and the degree of each fracture, all felt out by hand. He would then align the bones, apply medicine, wrap them in bamboo splints and wooden boards, bind them with bandages, and give a few pills to take. Those he treated would recover fully without any lasting disability, and would not feel any aches or pains even on cloudy or rainy days.

A Cui could be considered the true inheritor of the “Su Family Orthopedic” tradition, but during the Cultural Revolution she suffered because of her grandfather’s background and was never able to become a military doctor. At sixteen she was sent to work in a mountain village, and at the time Old Xia, seeing how young she was and how slight her frame, would often help her with the more physically demanding labor. When they later fled south, he brought her along as well. From that time on, A Cui became the guerrilla unit’s “military doctor” and “communications officer.”

After examining Sima Hui’s wound, A Cui determined that if the shrapnel was not dug out quickly with a knife, he could very likely die from excessive blood loss. She immediately began preparing, and at the same time asked Sima Hui whether he could endure the pain.

After Xia Tiedong’s death, Sima Hui had fallen into deep despair, and the wound in his shoulder was bleeding heavily, leaving his face ghostly pale. But not wanting his partner to worry about him, he forced himself to say to A Cui: “Whatever tools you’ve got, go ahead and use them on me. If I so much as grunt, then I wasn’t raised right.”

Luo Dahai, concerned, said from the side: “You really don’t know what’s good for you. Do you think you’re Guan Yu, not even furrowing your brow while they scrape the poison from your bone? When you really can’t take it anymore, just yell as loud as you want. There’s no shame in it. Otherwise I’ll find a piece of wood for you to bite down on and grind your teeth.”

Sima Hui said through his clenched back teeth: “Honestly I think Guan Yunchang’s bone-scraping treatment was nothing special. History is full of people tougher than him. During the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom uprising, many captured commanders suffered the death by a thousand cuts. That was truly a knife carving flesh off the body one slice at a time, and not a single one of them had anesthetic. The two cases with clear historical records are Lin Fengxiang and Shi Dakai. Lin Fengxiang was bound at the Caishikou execution grounds in Beijing. During the execution, when his blood ran dry and only lymph fluid was flowing, his eyes still tracked every movement of the executioner’s blade, staring so intently that the executioner’s nerve broke. Shi Dakai was subjected to death by a thousand cuts by the Qing army in Chengdu, Sichuan, and yet from beginning to end his expression remained calm and at ease, as though he were not being executed at all, but rather soaking in a hot bath at the bathhouse. That is what it means to face death without fear. What extraordinary heroic spirit.”

Luo Dahai was completely helpless with him, and shook his head saying: “You’re just full of words, aren’t you.”

A Cui said to Sima Hui: “Stop being so stubborn. I just found a few stalks of wild grass nearby called ‘ghost whiskers.’ This wild herb has some anesthetic effect, but it will still hurt a great deal. You need to bear with it.”

Sima Hui said nothing more and bore the pain as A Cui dug out the grenade fragment. Great beads of sweat the size of soybeans covered his forehead, but he was truly tough and never made a sound the whole time.

A Cui worked with quick, deft hands, and in no time extracted the fragment, disinfected the wound with grass ash, and dressed it. When she was finished, her eyes suddenly reddened and she could not hold back her tears.

Sima Hui, enduring the pain, asked her: “A Cui, why are you crying?”

A Cui lowered her head and wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand: “I was just thinking of all the people who came out of the country with us on that long journey, and now there are only the three of us left.”

Bringing up this matter made both Sima Hui and Luo Dahai’s hearts ache. Many of the comrades who had died in Burma had died neither romantically, nor heroically, nor for any purpose at all. They lay silently beneath the cold foreign soil, never to return home, while their families back home still did not know what had become of them.

Luo Dahai was silent for a long while, then shook his head and sighed: “I just can’t understand it. When the Communist Party of Burma first rose up, they were sweeping everything before them and nearly reached Rangoon. How did it come to be that things fell apart so completely, and so fast, collapsing even faster than a paper kite?”

Sima Hui said helplessly: “This place was never suited for revolution. They had none of the advantages, not the timing, not the terrain, not the people. I think even if Che Guevara were reborn and sent to a place like this, he still couldn’t have made it work.”

The three of them took advantage of a brief lull in the fighting to analyze their current situation. The Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Army was by this point essentially a name without substance. The scattered guerrilla units could not amount to anything, and the remaining elements of the regular forces had all been absorbed into local armed factions and become regional warlords who grew drugs, trafficked weapons, cared only for profit, made no distinctions between friend and foe, and were capable of anything.

Of those who had been under Sima Hui’s command in this guerrilla unit, anyone who could escape had already done so long ago. Most of those remaining were people wanted by the military authorities who would certainly be killed if caught, with no possibility of a good outcome. There was no point hoping to negotiate a way out, and no point planning to surrender, either. Surrounded in the “Savage Mountains” with no supplies inside and no relief outside, if they intended to hold their position, only death awaited them.

The guerrilla unit had one other option, which was to flee deep into the primeval jungle of the “Savage Mountains.” But the Burmese people’s fear of this place was extreme. There were no paths at all in the depths of the jungle. The terrain was rugged and the environment was of a complexity difficult to imagine. Beyond the dense forest that shut out all daylight and the swamplands, venomous snakes and savage beasts appeared and disappeared unpredictably, and toxic mists and miasmas ran rampant. To go in was to never come out. Over the years, the number of people who had vanished inside was too many to count.

The largest single group said to have been lost there was more than two thousand men, the remnants of a Japanese army division that had been driven to desperation by British forces and compelled to retreat into the great swamp on the southern side of the Savage Mountains. They became lost almost as soon as they entered, and were then suddenly set upon by countless crocodiles. The vast majority of those more than two thousand fully armed Japanese soldiers were fed to the crocodiles, with only a handful surviving.

Therefore it was essentially impossible for the Communist Party of Burma guerrillas to make it out of the “Savage Mountains” alive. Even granting every possible concession, if by some stroke of luck they did escape, then what? The north of Burma was certainly no place for them to stand anymore. They would have to cross the border back into China, but several years earlier, Sima Hui and his group had all escaped from a labor reform camp, so what the consequences of returning now would be was easy enough to imagine.

Luo Dahai, reduced to this state of affairs, had no choice but to set aside all thought of life and death. He drew a cross in the mud with his dagger to indicate that their current situation was one of “no road to heaven, no door into the earth,” and then asked Sima Hui and A Cui: “Do you understand? This is the situation we are in right now.”

Sima Hui nodded and said with a bitter smile: “I understand. There’s not even a chance to turn a desperate situation to our advantage. Either way we’re going to die, it’s just a matter of how we die in the end.”

A Cui’s heart was heavy as well, but now that she knew her death was certain, she actually felt a strange calm settle over her. She said: “Since there’s no escaping death no matter what, I don’t want to be taken prisoner and executed. If we’re going to die, we can’t die here in this foreign mountain wilderness.”

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai shared this feeling. After careful thought, they decided to risk a crossing through the Savage Mountains. If anyone was lucky enough to survive and make it out alive, they would do their best to find a way back to China, and after that, whatever happened would happen. No matter what was said, returning to the country, even if they were arrested, at least meant falling into the hands of their own people. At the very minimum they would be handed over to the relevant authorities for review before anything else, which was still far better than being caught by the Burmese warlords, who would say nothing at all and simply put a gun to the back of your head and pull the trigger.

The three of them, their spirits low, settled on their course, then gathered together all the people in the guerrilla unit who were still alive, including the wounded and sick, and made the situation clear to everyone: they were now trapped in a desperate position and had no choice but to break out in scattered groups. The so-called “scattered breakout” was only a pleasant way to put it. What it really meant was that from this point on, their unit would no longer have any military structure or discipline binding it together. Every man for himself.

Once this news was announced, no one offered any objection, because everyone already knew it was only a matter of time. After exchanging farewells, they silently set off down the paths each of them had chosen. The great majority of them would rather be captured and torn apart by the government forces than dare venture any further into the jungle.

But among those who had decided to take the Savage Mountains route, in addition to Sima Hui’s group of three, there was also a sixteen or seventeen year old Burmese boy. This young fellow was an orphan with no home to return to, and no proper name either. He was thin as a monkey, wearing a torn sarong, with a shaved head, a slow and simple look about him, and an air of cheerful foolishness all day long. Everyone in the guerrilla unit called him “Karaweik” or “Kara.” Karaweik referred to a type of bird from local legend. Because the Burmese zodiac is different from the Chinese one, with only eight signs determined by the day of the week one is born on: Monday is the tiger, Tuesday is the lion, Wednesday is special with the first half of the day belonging to the tusked elephant and the second half to the tuskless elephant, Thursday is the rat, Friday is the guinea pig, Saturday is the dragon, and Sunday is the “Myitta bird.” Judging by this, the boy was likely born on a Sunday, and so Sima Hui and the others simply called him “Sunday” in Chinese.

Karaweik had been rescued by Xia Tiedong from a village in northern Burma just over two months earlier, an orphan whose entire family had been killed in the war. Since then he had followed the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Army wherever they went, and could not be driven away. Now that Xia Tiedong was gone, Karaweik was determined to follow Sima Hui no matter what.

Sima Hui thought to himself: “This boy still thinks that following us means he has a chance of breaking through alive, not knowing that the three of us have only death ahead of us.”

So he pointed toward the mountains in the direction of the outside world and told Karaweik: “Go become a monk at a temple.”

But Karaweik would not hear of it. To put it in Beijing terms, this person was too “stubborn,” with a one-track mind. Whatever he set his mind to, he would see it through to the very end no matter what. On top of that, while he could understand spoken Chinese, he could only speak a few very stiff words of it himself, so Sima Hui could not reason with him in any meaningful way. Left with no other option, he brought the boy along with them into the mountains.

Sima Hui figured that given where things stood, it made no difference whether there was one more person or one less. A Cui had a younger brother back home, but being in Burma, cut off from any news from the mainland, she had not seen him for several years now. By her reckoning, he would be about the same age as Karaweik, and she treated Karaweik with the same care she would give her own brother.

Sima Hui and A Cui were fine with the arrangement, but Luo Dahai did not particularly take to Karaweik. The local people were all extremely slow-natured. No matter how you urged them, they remained unhurried, and even walked at a leisurely saunter. Karaweik had shaved his head because the local people were devout Buddhists. According to local custom, women who entered a nunnery could not return to secular life, but men who wanted to become monks could do so at any time and return to secular life whenever they pleased, and their reasons for going to the temple to become monks were all over the place. Some went because they were in a good mood and wanted to spend a couple of days as a monk to enjoy themselves. Others went because their luck was bad and entered the monastery for a few days to rid themselves of bad fortune.

Because of the pervasive influence of Buddhist teachings, the local people had become relaxed and unhurried, and most were easygoing, slow-natured souls who never rushed and never worried. Live or die, it was all the same, because after this life there was the next one, and there was no point being anxious over present circumstances. Karaweik was one such person, and this “pessimistic outlook on life,” as Luo Dahai saw it, deeply annoyed him.

After Luo Dahai had finished his complaints, he saw that the rest of their people had already scattered and gone. He then destroyed some remaining documents, and noticed that A Cui and Karaweik were fiddling with the military radio set. He urged them that they would be entering the primeval jungle soon and needed to travel light, that there were no more comrade units to communicate with now, and that keeping the radio was dead weight. Better to smash it now and be done with it.

Although the old battered radio set was filled with nothing but static, crackling constantly with no intelligible voice signal, A Cui was at that moment listening very attentively and had no attention to spare for what Luo Dahai was saying. Over the past several years she had taken every opportunity to learn languages from the local people, and could be considered nearly half a translator. Now she was pressing the headphones to her ears in total concentration, and her expression was growing worse and worse. It seemed that from within those intermittent crackling radio waves, she had picked up a piece of extremely frightening news.