Red Star over China (8 page)

Opium poppies nodded their swollen heads, ready for harvest, along the newly completed motor road—a road already deeply wrinkled with washouts and ruts, so that at times it was scarcely navigable even for our six-ton Dodge truck. Shensi had long been a noted opium province. During the great Northwest Famine, which a few years before had taken a
toll of 3,000,000 lives, American Red Cross investigators attributed much of the tragedy to the cultivation of the poppy, forced upon the peasants by provincial monopolies controlled by greedy warlords. The best land being devoted to the poppy, in years of drought there was a serious shortage of millet, wheat, and corn, the staple cereals of the Northwest.

I spent the night on a clay
K'ang
^*
in a filthy hut at Lochuan, with pigs and donkeys quartered in the next room, and rats in my own, and I'm sure we all slept very little. Next morning, a few miles beyond that city, the loess terraces rose higher and more imposing, and the country was weirdly transformed.

The wonderful loess lands, which cover much of Kansu, Shensi, Ninghsia, and Shansi provinces, account for the marvelous fertility of these regions (when there is rainfall), for the loess furnishes an inexhaustible porous topsoil tens of feet deep. Geologists think the loess is organic matter blown down in centuries past from Mongolia and from the west by the great winds that rise in Central Asia. Scenically the result is an infinite variety of queer, embattled shapes—hills like great castles, like rows of mammoth, nicely rounded scones, like ranges torn by some giant hand, leaving behind the imprint of angry fingers. Fantastic, incredible, and sometimes frightening shapes, a world configurated by a mad god—and sometimes a world also of strange surrealist beauty.

And though we saw fields and cultivated land everywhere, we seldom saw houses. The peasants were tucked away in those loess hills also. Throughout the Northwest, as has been the habit of centuries, men lived in homes dug out of the hard, fudge-colored cliffs—
yao-fang,
or “cave houses,” as the Chinese call them. But they were no caves in the Western sense. Cool in summer, warm in winter, they were easily built and easily cleaned. Even the wealthiest landlords often dug their homes in the hills. Some of them were many-roomed edifices gaily furnished and decorated, with stone floors and high-ceilinged chambers, lighted through rice-paper windows opened in the walls of earth also athwart the stout, black-lacquered doors.

Once, not far from Lochuan, a young Tungpei officer, who rode beside me in the cavorting track, pointed to such a
yao-fang-ts'un
—a cave village. It lay only a mile or so distant from the motor road, just across a deep ravine.

“They are Reds,” he revealed. “One of our detachments was sent over there to buy millet a few weeks ago, and those villagers refused to sell us a catty of it. The stupid soldiers took some by force. As they retired the
peasants shot at them.” He swung his arms in an arc including everything on each side of the highway, so carefully guarded by dozens of
pao-lei—
hilltop machine-gun nests—manned by Kuomintang troops.
“Hung-fei”
he said, “everything out there is Red-bandit territory.”

I gazed toward the spaces indicated with keener interest, for it was into that horizon of unknown hill and upland that I intended, within a few hours, to make my way.

On the road we passed part of the 105th Division, all Manchurians, moving back from Yenan to Lochuan. They were lean and sturdy youths, most of them taller than the average Chinese soldier. At a roadside inn we stopped to drink tea, and I sat down near several of them who were resting. They were just returning from Wa Ya Pao, in north Shensi, where there had been a skirmish with the Reds. I overheard scraps of conversation between them. They were talking about the Reds.

“They eat a lot better than we do,” one argued.

“Yes—eat the flesh of the
lao-pai-hsing!”
^*
another replied.

“Never mind that—a few landlords—it's all to the good. Who thanked us for coming to Wa Ya Pao? The landlords! Isn't it a fact? Why should we kill ourselves for these rich men?”

“They say more than three thousand of our Tungpei men are with them now. …”

“Another thing on their side. Why should we fight our own people, when none of us want to fight anybody, unless it's a Japanese, eh?”

An officer approached and this promising conversation came to an end. The officer ordered them to move on. They picked up their rifles and trudged off down the road. Soon afterwards we drove away.

Early in the afternoon of the second day we reached Yenan, where north Shensi's single road fit for wheeled traffic came to an end—about 400 li,
^†
more or less, south of the Great Wall. It was a historic town: through it, in centuries past, had come the nomadic raiders from the north, and through it swept the great Mongol cavalry of Genghis Khan, in its ride of conquest toward Sianfu.

Yenan was ideally suited for defense. Cradled in a bowl of high, rock-ribbed hills, its stout walls crawled up to the very tops. Attached to them now, like wasps' nests, were newly made fortifications, where machine guns bristled toward the Reds not far beyond. The road and its immediate environs were then held by Tungpei troops, but until recently Yenan had been completely cut off. The Reds had turned upon their enemy the
blockade which the Generalissimo enforced against themselves, and hundreds reportedly had died of starvation.

The long Red siege of Yenan
^*
had been lifted a few weeks before I arrived, but signs of it were still evident in the famished-looking inhabitants and the empty shelves or barred doors of shops. Little food was available and prices were alpine. What could be bought at all had been secured as a result of a temporary truce with the Red partisans. In return for an agreement not to take the offensive against the soviet districts on this front, the soviet peasants now sold grain and vegetables to the hungry anti-Red troops.

I had my credentials for a visit to the front. My plan was to leave the city early next morning, and go toward the “White” lines, where the troops were merely holding their positions, without attempting any advance. Then I meant to branch off on one of the mountain lanes over which, I had been told, merchants smuggled their goods in and out of the soviet regions.

To state precisely the manner in which, just as I had hoped, I did pass the last sentry and enter no man's land, might have caused serious difficulties for the Kuomintang adherents who assisted me on my way. Suffice it to say that my experience proved once more that anything is possible in China, if it is done in the Chinese manner. For by seven o'clock next morning I had really left the last Kuomintang machine gun behind, and was walking through the thin strip of territory that divided “Red” from “White.”

With me was a single muleteer, who had been hired for me by a Manchurian colonel in Yenan. He was to carry my scant belongings—bedding roll, a little food, two cameras and twenty-four rolls of film—to the first Red partisan outpost. I did not know whether he himself was a Red bandit or a White bandit—but bandit he certainly looked. All this territory having for several years alternately been controlled by armies of both colors, it was quite possible for him to have been either—or perhaps both.

For four hours we followed a small winding stream and did not see any sign of human life. There was no road at all, but only the bed of the stream that rushed swiftly between high walls of rock, above which rose swift hills of loess. It was the perfect setting for the blotting-out of a too inquisitive foreign devil. A disturbing factor was the muleteer's frequently expressed admiration of my cowhide shoes.

“Tao-la!” he suddenly shouted around his ear, as the rock walls at
last gave way and opened out into a narrow valley, green with young wheat. “We have arrived!”

Relieved, I gazed beyond him and saw in the side of a hill a loess village, where blue smoke curled from the tall clay chimneys that stood up like long fingers against the face of the cliff. In a few minutes we were there.

A young farmer who wore a turban of white toweling on his head and a revolver strapped to his waist came out and looked at me in astonishment. Who was I and what did I want?

“I am an American journalist,” I said in conformance with the instructions Wang the Pastor had given me. “I want to see the local chief of the Poor People's League.”

He looked at me blankly and replied,
“Hai p'a!”

Hai p'a
in any Chinese I had ever heard had only one meaning: “I'm afraid.” If he is afraid, I thought to myself, what the devil am I supposed to feel? But his appearance belied his words: he looked completely self-assured. He turned to the
lofu
and asked him who I was.

The muleteer repeated what I had said, adding a few flourishes of his own. With relief, I saw the young farmer's face soften and then I noticed that he was really a good-looking young man, with fine bronzed skin and good white teeth. He did not seem to belong to the race of timid peasants of China elsewhere. There was a challenge in his sparkling merry eyes, and a certain bravado. He slowly moved his hand away from his revolver butt and smiled.

“I am that man,” he said. “I am the chief. Come inside and drink some hot tea.”

These Shensi hill people had a dialect of their own, full of slurred colloquialisms, but they understood pai-hua or mandarin Chinese, and most of their own speech was quite comprehensible to an outlander. After a few more attempts at conversation with the chief, he began to show understanding, and we made good progress. Occasionally into our talk, however, would creep this
hai p'a
business, but for a while I was too disconcerted to ask him just
what
he feared. When I finally did probe into the matter, I discovered that
hai p'a
in the dialect of the Shensi hills is the equivalent of
pu chih-tao
in mandarin Chinese. It simply means “don't understand.” My satisfaction at this discovery was considerable.

Seated on a felt-covered
k'ang
I told my host more about myself and my plans. In a short time he seemed reassured. I wanted to go to An Tsai—the county seat—where I then believed Soviet Chairman Mao Tse-tung to be. Could he give me a guide and a muleteer?

Certainly, certainly, he agreed, but I should not think of moving in the heat of day. The sun had already climbed to its zenith, it was really
very hot, I looked tired, and, meanwhile, had I eaten? Actually I was ravenous, and without any further ceremony I accepted this invitation to a first meal with a “Red bandit.” My muleteer was anxious to return to Yenan, and, paying him off, I bade him good-by. It was a farewell to my last link with the “White” world for many weeks to come. I had crossed the Red Rubicon.

I was now at the mercy of Mr. Liu Lung-huo—Liu the Dragon Fire, as I learned the young peasant was called—and likewise at the mercy of his tough-looking comrades, who had begun to drift in from neighboring
you-fang.
Similarly clad and armed, they look at me curiously and laughed at my preposterous accent.

Liu offered me tobacco, wine, and tea, and plied me with numerous questions. He and his friends examined with close interest, interrupted by exclamations of approval, my camera, my shoes, my woolen stockings, the fabric of my cotton shorts, and (with lengthy admiration) the zipper on my khaki shirt. The general impression seemed to prevail that, however ridiculous it might look, the ensemble evidently served its purposes well enough. I did not know just what “communism” might mean to these men in practice, and I was prepared to see my belongings rapidly “redistributed”—but instead I was given the foreign-guest treatment.

In an hour a vast platter of scrambled eggs arrived, accompanied by steamed rolls, boiled millet, some cabbage, and a little roast pork. My host apologized for the simplicity of the fare, and I for an inordinate appetite. Which latter was quite beside the point, as I had to punt my chopsticks at a lively pace to keep up with the good fellows of the Poor People's League.

Dragon Fire assured me that An Tsai was “only a few steps,” and though I was uneasy about it I could do nothing but wait, as he insisted. When finally a youthful guide appeared, accompanied by a muleteer, it was already past four in the afternoon. Before leaving, I ventured to pay Mr. Liu for his food, but he indignantly refused.

“You are a foreign guest,” he explained, “and you have business with our Chairman, Mao. Moreover, your money is no good.” Glancing at the bill I held out to him, he asked, “Haven't you any soviet money?” When I replied in the negative, he counted out a dollar's worth of soviet paper notes. “Here—you will need this on the road.”

Mr. Liu accepted a Kuomintang dollar in exchange; I thanked him again, and climbed up the road behind my guide and muleteer.

Ahead of me was a narrow escape and an incident which was later to nourish the rumor that I had been kidnaped and killed by bandits. And as a matter of fact, bandits—not Red but White—were already trailing me behind those silent walls of loess.

“Down with the landlords who eat our flesh!”

“Down with the militarists who drink our blood!”

“Down with the traitors who sell China to Japan!”

“Welcome the United Front with all anti-Japanese armies!”

“Long live the Chinese Revolution!”

“Long live the Chinese Red Army!”

It was under these somewhat disturbing exhortations, emblazoned in bold black characters, that I spent my first night in Red territory.

But it was not in An Tsai and not under the protection of any Red soldiers. For, as I had feared, we did not reach An Tsai that day, but by sunset had arrived only at a little village that nestled in the curve of a river, with hills brooding darkly on every side. Several layers of slate-roofed houses rose up from the lip of the stream, and it was on their mud-brick walls that the slogans were chalked. Fifty or sixty peasants and staring children poured out to greet my caravan of one donkey.