(Translator’s
Preface: The story of young Chinese volunteering
to fight in the Burmese (Myanmar) Communist People’s Army was unknown to me. After reading the article below, I recently
came across a reference to the re-formation of the Burmese People’s Liberation
Army. (See: Communist
Party of Burma declares People's War against the junta government - Workers
Today – the article also has a link to a Burmese-language website of the
Burmese PLA). A couple of days ago, the journal The Diplomat also had a
reference to the PLA: “the People’s Liberation Army of the Communist Party of
Myanmar is back in the game after three decades of hibernation. It is currently
conducting military training with the help of the KIA”. (The KIA is the Karen
Independence Army, which claimed to have killed 100 Myanmar troops in the month
of August). It seems that the military junta in Myanmar has been lifting a
heavy rock only to drop it on its own toes. The interview below with Pan Dongxu
is presented through the eyes and values of the interviewer who seems to have
focussed on sensational and bloody accounts.
However, it is worth reading and knowing about the history of the
Burmese PLA.)
Pan
Dongxu: The Lonely Old Battlefield --My Days in Burma
The
Golden Triangle of the Soul and the Dream of Youth
Few
people will mention such a past event in Phoenix's Satellite TV’s "A Cold,
Warm Life". It was a time of frenzied revolution when groups of
intellectual youths came from the motherland to the south-western frontier,
crossing the border into Myanmar and joining the Burmese People's Liberation Army
to realise the ideals of revolution and the liberation of all mankind. Pan
Dongxu is such a passionate young woman. She crossed the border from Yunnan to
Myanmar when she was 14 years old and joined the Burmese People’s Army. She was
born to die on the battlefield in Myanmar. Thirty years later, the battlefield
scenes are still before her eyes.
Author
Peng Bin
Character
profile: Pan Dongxu, female, child of returned overseas Chinese from Myanmar,
member of the Yunnan Contemporary Literature Research Association, Yunnan
educated youth, joined the Burmese People’s Army in 1968, served as a signals
soldier, high-speed shooter, etc., worked as a worker, teacher, journalist,
etc. after returning to China. She is the author of Yuji's entity novel
"Lonely Old Battlefield", the first part is "The Dream of
Youth" (Tianma Publishing Co., Ltd.), and the second part is " Youth of
Blood and Fire" (to be published).
As I
sat with Pan Dongxu on a wooden chair in the Kunming Library, under the warm winter
sun, she took out her documentary-length novel The Lonely Old Battlefield and
gave it to me. She laughed at herself, saying that it was an embarrassingly
difficult book to publish because it was about an embarrassingly unseen
revolution at a special time in history. But it is the true story of the youth,
dreams and struggles of tens of thousands of Chinese youths who joined the
Burmese Communist Party. "I feel suffocated not to write about it, and I
am sorry for the youth of our generation not to write about it," she said.
She
writes about the ultimate dream - the great ideal of liberating all mankind -
in the story of the young people who began in the 1960s and lasted for 20
years, about the Chinese youth who went to the Golden Triangle to join the Burmese
Communist Party and fought in the battlefield with their great ideal in mind,
about those who were abandoned in a foreign country when an embarrassing war
ended or were displaced upon their return to China.
Pan
Dongxu was once a female Burmese communist soldier with a wealth of experience.
From army clerk, propagandist and correspondent, to prison guard and
anti-aircraft machine gunner, to female squad leader of a high-speed aircraft
company; from a small business owner who peddled small goods at the border
after her transfer, to a female Chinese teacher and volunteer in Burmese
primary and secondary school classrooms, this woman writer in her sixties is
still struggling with the fate of their group of pure idealists in relation to
the times.
Her
narrative begins in 1968.
It
was in December 1968 that Pan Dongxu, a young girl, crossed the border from
Yunnan to Burma with two other students and joined the Burmese Communist
People's Army. Before that, the three of them were from the school's
"Dongxu Combat Team".
Pan
Dongxu was an idealist from an early age, but her fate was unfortunate, as she
became a "black brat" due to her parents' rightist affiliation and
was sent down with her mother to the countryside in Tengchong County, Yunnan.
It
was 1968, the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" was in full
swing, and the Red Guards were in full swing, with all sorts of armed and
combat teams defending the revolutionary line to the death. Despite the
factions, Pan Dongxu had no part to play - no team included her as a member of
the "Black Five". No one wanted her, so she did it herself. Pan
Dongxu raised her arms, enlisted two other students in the same situation as
her, and the three of them formed the "Dongxu Fighting Team", carving
steel plates, printing tabloids and chanting slogans, all contributing their
blood and youth to the defence of the revolutionary line.
But
across the river, in the highlands of the Shan State of Burma in the Golden
Triangle, a 20-year war was beginning - the People's Army, led by the Communist
Party of Burma, launched an all-out attack on the Burmese government forces,
led by Ne Win, to overthrow Burmese nationalist rule and "establish a new,
independent, democratic, peaceful, united and prosperous Burma".
The
town of Monggu in north-eastern Burma was the first target of an attack by the
Communist People's Army (CPA), which besieged the government garrison there in
their sleep late on New Year's Day 1968. Immediately afterwards, red flags
bearing the sickle and axe were planted all over Monggu, and the soaring melody
of The Internationale echoed in every corner of Monggu. Since then,
Monggu has become a solid rearguard for the Burma Communist People's Army,
supporting the armed struggle of the main force of the People's Army thousands
of miles away.
At
the World Communist and Workers' Party Conference in 1960, the Communist Party
of Burma (CPB) explicitly adopted Mao Zedong Thought as its guiding ideology
and sided with the Communist Party of China (CPC); therefore, China has trained
a large number of military commanders for it. It was against this historical
background that the Communist Party gave permission to the Burmese People’s
Army to recruit Chinese border guards along the border with China in order to
replenish the army with new blood.
A
recruitment station was also set up in the town of Monggu.
At
home, after the “great linking up”, Red Guards were passionate, and the call
for intellectual youths to go to the countryside brought waves of revolutionary
fervour to the forefront: "Go to the countryside! Go where the motherland
needs you most! Go where the revolution is most needed!" "Down with
imperialism, revisionism and counter-revolution! Plant the red flag of the
revolution in every corner of the world!" The stirring slogans shook the
youth of a generation of Chinese youths who had nowhere else to go. They went
to the frontiers, to the countryside, to liberate two-thirds of the world's
people who were still in dire straits, to contribute all they could to the vast
expanse of the world. A group of young people, full of the red passion to
participate in the international revolution and with the heroes of the Third
World Communist Revolutionary Movement and the leader of the Cuban Communist
Party, Che Guevara, were sent from Yunnan. From Yunnan, they crossed the border
to join the Burmese Communist People's Army, carrying pamphlets depicting Che
Guevara, the hero of the Third World Communist Revolution.
Pan
Dongxu's brother, Pan Guoying, also crossed the border to join the Burma
Communist People's Army.
On
the day when his rightist mother was hauled up for criticism and beaten, at
night, her angry brother Pan Guoying dislodged the tiles of the batterer's
house and, as a result, was caught. The assailant hung Pan Guoying up by a wire,
even when his mother went to the door to confess her mistake and begged on her
knees.
Pan
Dongxu watched as the wire strangled into his brother's flesh.
That
night, her brother left.
A few
months later, her brother suddenly sent home a letter containing a picture of
himself in his PLA uniform, a picture that showed him as a glorious
internationalist soldier. Her mother showed the letter and the photo to the
director of the Revolutionary Committee and to the villagers around her. At
that moment, the family, which had been bullied and discriminated against,
lifted its head.
Pan
Dongxu couldn't sit still any longer. Anyway, she did not study in school, and
she could not pass the political examinations for recruitment or joining the
army, so she was not even qualified to join the revolution. The only option was
to join the world revolution, just like his brother, so that they could realise
their revolutionary ideals and make a difference. So, at the end of 1968, the
three children of the "Dongxu Combat Team" crossed the border river
from Savage Sea Township, Zhapang Township, Dehong Prefecture, Yunnan Province,
to the recruitment office in Menggu Township, and became clerks in the
battalion headquarters of the county brigade.
This
was the beginning of her military career. At the time, she had not yet reached
the age of 14.
Life,
fate and death
Militarised
life was new. In the early hours of the morning, the soldiers woke up at the
sound of the whistle, packed their rucksacks and washed up before the Kachin
deputy battalion commander led them in the Kachin language to "wish
Chairman Mao a long and prosperous life and Vice Marshal Lin a healthy
life", followed by morning exercises and laps around the fortress. After
breakfast, they started military drills throughout the day - aiming, shooting,
dropping bombs and occasionally studying Lin Biao's tactical theories.
When Pan Dongxu received an American-made carbine for the first time, she said to herself, "You must be worthy of this weapon”. A month later, she became the best shooter in the women's class at target shooting.
Women
soldiers generally did not go to war, so Pan Dongxu was transferred to the
county and district committees to do mass work, working with other members of
the working group to help the local ethnic groups organise production, learn
culture and raise revolutionary consciousness. At this stage, she realized the
difficulty of the people at the bottom of the population; later, she was
transferred to the famous Manguang Public Security Bureau as a documentary,
participated in the establishment of the Manguang Prison, and served as a guard
for a period of time. In the course of her dealings with all kinds of "cow
demons and snake spirits", she experienced many more vicious incidents
than she knew and witnessed many unnatural deaths.
At
the age of 14, Pan Dongxu, a young girl who thought she was still far from the
battlefield, began to see real stories of life and death, whether they happened
to animals or humans, in the army or among the people -
From
time to time, the county brigade received wounded soldiers on crutches with
their arms dangling; veterans who were blown up by grenades making their bodies
bloody; monkeys which were tied up by soldiers who ate their brains raw by
cutting open their scalps; Kachin women who bled in childbirth and turned the
soil beneath them into red mud; babies who died of seizures at birth; fugitives
who killed and escaped from prison... ...
She
told me two of the most impressive stories.
When
the team helped to investigate two "counter-revolutionaries" who had
fled the country, they accidentally found two young people who had escaped from
the country's state farms: a woman who had been raped by the company commander
of the Production and Construction Corps and was pregnant, and her husband who
had stabbed the company commander in anger and then fled across the border with
the woman. The two of them went into hiding and made a living by digging large
tobacco fields for others.
Later,
Pan Dongxu heard that the girl had died in childbirth on a night of heavy rain.
When he returned home, the husband set fire to his wife and son's body and
house.
Then,
the young man went mad!
We are
born like ants, and fate is worthless!
One
day, a beautiful political prisoner with a pretty face was brought in to Manguang
Prison on the charge of "special suspicion".
It
wasn't too complicated. The woman had delivered letters and pastries for her
brother's friend, who happened to work at a military intelligence contact
point, and she was suspected of secretly passing on information. After being
sent to prison, she waited for the screening with trust in the organisation.
Because
of her good looks, in prison she was constantly harassed by male and female
inmates and bullied by the leaders, while her boyfriend, who was out helping
her to redress her grievances, was killed in battle.
All
thoughts were lost and the female prisoner lost the courage to live. Before she
died, she took a shower, changed into her best dress, stole Pan Dongxu’s grenade
when wasn't looking and used the opportunity of working in the prison kitchen
to pull the pull ring ......
The
female prisoner was thus shattered in front of Pan Dongxu, and the kitchen was
littered with fried minced meat and charcoal ashes.
We
are born like ants and fate is worthless!
……
Step
by step, these bloody stories brutally impacted her revolutionary thinking,
changing little by little her view of the world and herself. Life and fate and
death, principles and humanity, these philosophical questions rushed through
her heart again and again, causing her to quickly transform from a simple girl
into a resolute warrior woman.
Pan
Dongxu's The Lonely Old Battlefield is written into these stories. And
at this time, she had not yet actually gone to war.
Blood
and Fire
Youth
of Blood and Fire is
Pan Dongxu's second book, this one about her personal experience of fighting
the enemy to the death on the battlefield.
Pan Guoying, Pan Dongxu's brother, was killed.
Pan
Guoying was one of the earliest youth soldiers in the People's Army. In less
than two years as a scout, he carried out more than a hundred combat missions
and received more than a dozen merits and awards, and was nicknamed
"Chinese Pan". The last time, the enemy ambushed him for three days.
After his leg was broken, he knelt down and continued to fight, covering the
entire reconnaissance squad.
The
enemy stripped him naked and threw him out on the street, where his bones ended
up is unknown.
At
the age of 19, her brother became a martyr and an example for the People's Army
to follow. 19 years old, his loyal soul was left in the jungles of northern
Myanmar!
Pan
Dongxu took her brother's letter, which said, "I am a seven-foot man who
can sacrifice myself, and I will never return home as a thousand-year old
heroic ghost." She set up a mound for her brother, and on the mound she
wrote a couplet for him: "The bones of the martyrs are dipped in blood to
write chivalry, and the cold moon is clear to mourn the souls of the faithful!”
If
you want to struggle, you will have to sacrifice, so said Chairman Mao. Pan
Dongxu was convinced that the death of her brother and all the martyrs of the Burmese
Communist Party was worth it, because this revolution will surely be won. She
believed that with millions of People's Army soldiers like her brother, Burma would
definitely be liberated. Then, they will have to go on to liberate other
countries and liberate the people in need of liberation all over the world.
In
the summer of 1970, the Communist People's Army (CPA) made a long-range assault
on Ramsar, Burma's second largest city. However, as the army was alone, it was
soon attacked by government planes and tanks and suffered heavy casualties.
At
this time, Pan Dongxu, who had inherited her brother's legacy and volunteered
to go to the front, became a female soldier of the Northeast Military District
Special Services Battalion's Security and Communications Company and officially
went to war.
In
the summer of 1970, the Burmese Communist People's Army (CPA) made a long-range
assault on Lashio, Burma's second largest city. However, as the army was isolated,
it was soon attacked by government planes and tanks and suffered heavy
casualties.
At
this time, Pan Dongxu, who had inherited her brother's legacy and volunteered
to go to the front, became a female soldier of the Northeast Military District
Special Services Battalion's Security and Communications Company and officially
went to war.
When
the radio of the communication company broke down, Pan Dongxu rode alone to the
headquarters to deliver the letter and retrieve the transistor for the repair
of the radio on the way.
When she returned, it was already dark. As she walked, the horse suddenly stopped and took a detour to a small hill. Pan Dongxu did not know what had happened, but knowing that war horses are extremely spiritual, she quietly hid behind the hillock and looked ahead: a person was lying under a small tree, the corpse of a woman who had just had her head cut off ......
The
women of the communications company were also responsible for sending
ammunition to the front line. On one occasion, before they could keep up with
the troops, it was dark as the battle line was pushing forward. A few girls
found a slightly flat area in a trench full of ground, laid down a tarp, put
down the ammunition box and slept for the night. When dawn came, the first woman
to get up pulled the tarpaulin and a human intestine flew out from under it. It
turned out that there had been a battle here yesterday, and all the soldiers
who had died in action were buried in the trench with a thin layer of soil
covering the surface, and they had slept on this huge pile of flesh and blood!
During
one rescue, Pan Dongxu, who was on rescue duty, gently dragged a wounded man
with a lung injury into the trench. When she pulled out the blood clot blocking
the casualty's mouth, a series of blood bubbles immediately emerged from the
casualty's lungs. By the time she and her comrades darted to carry the casualty
to the temporary field hospital, he was already dead.
By
the middle of the 1970s, the Burmese Communist People's Army guerrillas were
repeatedly hit and all available troops were on the front line.
During
one guerrilla war, Pan Dongxu's female anti-aircraft squad was ordered to the
front line, with the main task being to provide air cover with the one Type 54
12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun they possessed. This time they won the battle
and the girls slept soundly at night. But the next day they woke up to find
that their unit had withdrawn and that their temporarily assigned squad had
been forgotten in the position, which had been taken by the enemy.
They
hid in a cave until darkness when they used the nylon ropes they carried with
them to slide down the valley floor one by one. And it was during this process
that a weak female soldier suddenly stomped off and fell heavily on a rock, her
womb falling out of her body. The fall left the soldier disabled for life and
celibate to this day.
They
carried their fallen comrade and got lost in the mountains. It was not until
the 10th day that they were rescued by a local Luohei hunter.
The
team was given a collective credit by their superiors, and the squad leader,
Pan Dongxu, was given a second-class merit personally. The women's squad became
known far and wide as a heroic collective.
Aimless
drifting becomes a book
In
August 1971, Chairman Mao Zedong received the leader of the Burmese military
government, Ne Win, in Beijing and relations between China and Burma returned
to normal.
The
Burma Communist People's Army (BCA), which had grown to fight the government
forces, was suddenly put in an awkward position, and by this time, news of the
return of China’s youths to the cities was also arriving. The political climate
and the fleeting nature of individual lives made these young people feel a
strong sense of homesickness for their homeland. Young Burmese communists who
could not see a future reported that they had left the army.
Pan
Dongxu was one of the first to return home, and because she was the sister of a
martyr and a meritorious servant herself, her application was quickly approved.
Pan Dongxu in the Burmese People's Army
In
1978, Pan Dongxu, who had been a member of the Burmese Communist Party for 10
years, left the army and crossed the border. When she left China, her life was
full of ideals and passion, but now she did not know where her ideals lay. The
future was uncertain, and she didn't even know what to do for a living. The
only thing she brought back with her was a green uniform and a bayonet for a
carbine.
No
one recognised the former military status of the young Burmese communists, and
no one assigned them jobs, so she had to work odd jobs. With her tutoring and
junior high school education, and her writing skills from her army clerical
work, she worked as a teacher, a journalist, proofread legal documents for law
firms and wrote articles for tabloids to earn a living. Sometimes she returned
to Myanmar to teach Chinese and volunteer.
"Do
you get paid now? How much do you get a month?" I asked her.
She
told me that in 1989, the state implemented the educated youth policy, counting
her years of service from 1968, and that she currently gets a retirement salary
of more than 2,000 yuan a month, with medical insurance.
She
went on to talk about the battle for survival after her return to China.
In
the 1980s, a large number of bazaars began to open in several small towns along
the Yunnan border, known as the "Five Outer Counties", selling
foreign goods that the Chinese people had never seen before. "That was the
frontier of reform and opening up," she says with a laugh.
Many
of the returning Zhiqing soldiers were involved in this commercial war, and Pan
Dongxu was no exception. She imported American Arrow cigarettes, Taiwanese mirror
powder and Thai cosmetics from the Golden Triangle and sold them at border
markets, as well as selling herbal medicines bought at the border to the
mainland. She told me how she evaded customs checks and how she
"fought" government agents who searched for "opportunists".
In those days, "the money was very good and easy to make."
Unfortunately, all the money that Pan Dongxu made was "squandered" in
casinos.
With
their ideals lost and their lives displaced, retired veterans often felt lost
and empty inside, with a sense of disillusionment about their lives lingering
in their minds. So, when he had money on hand, Pan Dongxu would go into the
casino to "live life to the fullest". "A girl like you, who grew
up in a good family, might not understand the ups and downs of my life,"
she said to me.
The
story of her and her fellow educated youths of the Burmese Communist Party was
written by her piece by piece. In 2013, she finished her long documentary novel
The Lonely Old Battlefield, but she couldn't find a place to publish it,
nor could she get the tens of thousands of dollars to publish it herself. It
was her comrades and literary friends who lent a helping hand, and Hong Kong's
Tianma Publishing Ltd. published the book for her.
"Why
did my second and third books never come out? That's the reason", she
says. What is the right way to look at this matter of the Burmese Communist
Party? How should the value of the existence of the Burmese Communist Youth and
their contribution be evaluated? This is a key question. "Until that is
cleared up, what is it going to take to get my book out?"
In
fact, apart from herself, Pan Dongxu has many stories about the Golden
Triangle, especially women's stories, "Women who survive in the Golden
Triangle are miracles in themselves," she told me. Some of the stories
have even formed a documentary novel in her mind, such as the legendary life of
a female student who passed intelligence for the underground party in the early
days of liberation, whose domestic organization was destroyed and who has since
been displaced to Myanmar; such as Ma Guotou, who escaped from bandits and fled
into a cave but fell on a sack of money and has since become the richest person
on the side ......
She
was immersed in her story, and I was immersed in hers, until the sound of the
library closing and clearing out rang out.
I
know that Pan Dongxu has never left her stories behind. I expect that these
stories of hers will be available to us soon.
Postscript.
I
have written this piece in a disjointed manner. At the beginning, because I did
not know much about the history of the Burmese Communist Party, I consulted
some sources to sort out some clues, and then used the simplest of lines to see
what happened. Then I began to listen to the interview with Ban Dong Xu over
and over again, to understand the emotion in her narrative. In fact, her
narration was unemotional and concise, the essence of the story. "How did
you survive?" I asked her this several times during her narration,
grabbing her hand.
During
the writing process, my entire emotions have been shaken by the fires of life
and death and blood, by politics and war, by the suffering of individual
characters, and I feel that I am not able to write and am overwhelmed.
Was I
expressing what I wanted to express when I was drained? I don't know. But I
hope this piece will go down in the history of world Chinese literature for the
Pan Dongxus.
Author
Bio.
Peng
Bin, female, child of returned overseas Chinese, BA in Chinese Language and
Literature, MA in Literature and Arts. She is a member of Yunnan Writers'
Association, a director journalist and a painter. She has published more than
one million words of journalistic works, and her correspondence has won the
first prize of the National Post and Telecommunications Good News Award, and in
1998 she published her personal collection of correspondence and reportage
"Hong Cheng Net Matters" (Beijing Yanshan Publishing House). She has
published hundreds of poems, and her poems have won the second prize in the
Yunnan Province "Southern Clouds" poetry competition and the third
prize in the National Post and Telecommunications Women Writers' Essay Contest,
and some of her poems have been included in books such as "Highland Star
Morning" (Dehong Nation Press) and "Latest Poetry Dialogue"
(Nanjing Press). She wrote the long-form reportage "Chronicles of the
Overseas Chinese Mechanical Engineers in Nanyang", which was published in
"China Overseas Chinese Network", "Chunqiu" magazines, and
was included in books such as "The Soul of Nanqiao" (Yunnan Fine Arts
Publishing House), etc.
At
present, Peng Bin is dedicated to finding and exclusively interviewing famous
writers and artists of world Chinese literature as well as the inheritors and
propagators of traditional Chinese culture, and documenting them in columns
such as "Interviews with World Chinese" and "Oral
Recordings".
Article
from Sohu.com Photos from the internet
Reprinted
from the WeChat public number: 老知青家园
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