China’s Civil War ‘Widows’ Have Haunting Tale to Tell

Lin Xiuzhen’s husband had just put on his right shoe when he was dragged from their bed and into the Nationalist Chinese army. His wife saved the left shoe for nearly half a century, but she never saw its owner again.

Wu Ayin twisted off her gold ring so that her husband could pawn it on his journey. But when the pregnant mother reached the waterfront, the military vessel carrying him had sailed away.

“When he left, I was 26,” Wu said. “When he came back [a decade ago], I was 66. He didn’t recognize me anymore.”

The civil war between Communists and Nationalists turned towns on this island across the strait from Taiwan into eerie “widows’ villages.” As the last of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces retreated from the mainland in 1950, they took with them more than 4,000 conscripts from here to help fortify an army that might someday reclaim China.

Instead, the conscripts were stranded in Taiwan, unable to go home during nearly four decades of stalemate. Their wives were left to fend for themselves with little news of the men until relations between Beijing and Taipei eased in the 1980s.

Sparks are flying again between these old adversaries as Taiwan prepares for its second direct presidential election, on March 18. China upped the ante last month by threatening war if Taiwan continues to delay reunification talks.

Lost in the saber-rattling are haunting tales of aging widows and homesick soldiers who locals say are living testaments to the price of the long-ago war--and the need to avoid another conflict.

“I’m very scared to hear about tensions across the strait--it just makes me think of that day 50 years ago,” said Chen Qiaoyun, 81, a thin crescent of a woman who has forgotten how to smile. “I had a 3-year-old daughter on my back and 6-year-old son in my hand. There was only one sack of rice left.”

How Chen survived is a story replayed over and over in Tongbo, a farming community that lost more men than any other village here.

Chen already had lost a son seven days after his birth. The daughter drowned. The 6-year-old was the only child who survived to adulthood, though he suffered from severe asthma. She ate sweet potatoes and dry turnips every day and learned to farm several acres of land by herself.

Her husband did not know any of this for nearly four decades. Direct mail between China and Taiwan was forbidden until recent years. The only letters that reached China had been forwarded by someone in a third country. One letter from Chen’s husband arrived eight years after he disappeared. Mother and child cried as they read it--and heard no more from him for 30 years.

“It was the only letter we ever got from him,” Chen said. “I thought he was dead.”

Her husband, Huang Asong, didn’t die. But it didn’t feel much like living either. In Taiwan, the ex-conscripts had little social status, money or family relations, recalled Huang, now 89.

Huang found work stamping papers at the tax collector’s office and remained alone. When he finally could return, he was 77 and hard of hearing. When he saw his wife again, he dropped to his knees, weighed by emotion.

But the reunion seemed too little too late. Their only living child succumbed to illness at age 47, three years after the father returned, leaving the old couple to ponder the cruelty of fate.

Some of Huang’s fellow conscripts managed to marry again, and on their return home decades later they brought second wives to face the first. Others never came back.

Xie Suer last saw her husband more than 50 years ago.

“We didn’t even know when he died,” said the 73-year-old Xie. She didn’t find out for sure until last year that he would never return. “I want to go to Taiwan to bring his ashes home, but I am too old to travel.”

Instead, the peasant woman has stacks of mail he sent during the last years of his life. In them, he inquired about the family’s welfare and admitted that he was fighting worsening eyesight and crippled feet.

His illiterate wife stares at the thin pieces of paper. She can neither read the characters nor understand the thinking of the man who wrote them. One thought obsesses her: “Why couldn’t he have visited just once? Just once?”

Tongbo resident Huang Zhenguo has made it his life’s calling to assure that sentiments such as these do not go unheard simply because many local women can’t read or write. He has helped them compose thousands of letters over the years.

“One woman waited for her son until she almost went mad,” said 51-year-old Huang, who is no relation to Chen’s husband. “I helped her write him a letter on her deathbed. I even cried. It was a will. But it never made it to her son because the person in Singapore who was supposed to forward her letters to Taiwan had passed away.”

The Chinese government welcomes the retelling of these stories to foster the idea of reunification. The local government even built a museum last year to chronicle the lives of these “widows.” New cadets from the People’s Liberation Army regularly tour it, taking notes and listening to lectures.

The villagers hope that the museum will preserve and recount their past. For relatives visiting from Taiwan, the exhibit is a place to pick up details they never knew.

Such as how Shen Muhua went into the army at age 45 in his son’s place and ended up adrift in Taiwan, sweeping streets for a living. He made a flute out of a broom and played sad songs until he finally came home in 1983. Or the story of Shen Xinbao, who bought a baby pig to sacrifice when she heard that her son was coming home. The son didn’t return, and the mother waited until the pig grew old and died. She bought a new pig, and then another, and continued to hope until she died waiting.

Sun Zexiang, 81, is one of the dozen men who returned from Taiwan to his village. He still cannot forget the screaming faces of the women and children who lined the beach more than 50 years ago to see them off. All the men could do was to motion that their loved ones should go home.

“I don’t understand national or international affairs,” said the old soldier, who lost vision in his right eye after being hit by a bomb fragment during military service in Taiwan. “All I know is I hope there will be peace. War only hurts the ordinary people.”