Red Army Grandmas Soldier On

Seventy years ago, Wang Yunmei was a national hero. Her experience as squadron leader of modern China’s first all-woman army unit was immortalized in the movie and ballet “Red Detachment of Women.”

Now 90 years old, Wang sits on display with three other female veterans in a memorial theme park on Hainan island, up the coast from the site of the recent spy plane collision that sent U.S.-China relations into a tailspin.

Behind wooden-barred windows with no glass, they sleep two to a room. Tourists sometimes bang on the window frames to rouse them from their naps, or agitate the women by asking them to pose wearing old Red Army caps of washed-out gray and a lone red star.

The camera flashes make their eyes tear. But it doesn’t compare to the pain they suffered helping put the Communists in power, only to live in obscurity and poverty afterward, despite moments in the sun as shallow symbols.

“I don’t want to talk about it. It breaks my heart,” said Ou Hua, an 89-year-old great-great-grandmother who was the flag-bearer in the Red Detachment.

China loves its war heroes, and the government is quick to lionize patriots when it is politically expedient.

But most of China’s aging ex-soldiers are scraping by in a depressed economy with minimal help from the state and little recognition for their status as the founding fathers, and mothers, of modern China.

China has more than 1.5 million retired army personnel from its civil war, the Korean War and other early conflicts. About 110,000 of those are veterans of the Red Army, to which the Red Detachment of Women belonged.

The unit emerged in the 1930s from a group of women in this region who made food and mended uniforms for male soldiers--then convinced local commanders that they too could and should carry guns. In the less than two years that the detachment existed, the women fought hundreds of bloody battles, often with their bare hands, to help Communist leaders escape danger.

Their story inspired a movie and a “model opera” commissioned by Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, during the Cultural Revolution. The productions put this backwater town on the map and had Chinese kids growing up humming its theme song: “March on, march on. A soldier’s burden is heavy. A woman’s hatred is deep.”

Like the female veterans, the vast majority of China’s soldiers were poor peasants before and after they joined the armed forces, said Hao Shusheng, 69, an administrator at China’s first veterans night school, in Chengdu in Sichuan province.

The school opened a few months ago to serve vets who say they need a place to gather and write their memoirs so they are not completely forgotten. It is privately run, sustained completely by donations from veterans themselves.

China provides small pensions to its veterans but has nothing like a GI Bill to help them adjust to civilian life. Many have struggled to find employment, and some have even battled social stigmas related to their service.

Key leaders of the Red Army who remained loyal to Mao Tse-tung during the Long March of the 1930s became targets of radical extremism during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

Korean War veterans still fight for recognition, especially those who became prisoners of war. Many say they endured torture and refused opportunities to defect to anti-Communist Taiwan, only to be treated as traitors upon returning to China. Their crime, they say, was coming back alive instead of dying for the motherland. And during the Cultural Revolution, many of the 6,000 returned POWs were automatically under suspicion because they had spent time abroad.

Tens of thousands of veterans have staged demonstrations and petition drives to voice their discontent, and more than 50 have committed suicide to protest the status quo, according to the National Veteran Cadres Bureau.

Fed up with inadequate medical service and delays in getting their small pensions, five cadres who had joined the Communist Party in the 1940s and ‘50s shot themselves to death in Guizhou province after delivering a petition in December 1996. In their wills they said they were resigning from the party “to oppose the darkness of the present society.”

“Our generation sacrificed so much and gave so much to our country,” said Hao, who served in the Korean War. “All of us wear scars. Few could climb to the top.”

Of the estimated 200 members of the Red Detachment, about 30 are still alive. Most were killed by Nationalists who quashed a short Communist-led uprising in the 1930s, or later by the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards.

The oldest survivor is 95 and the youngest is 89. Only four have chosen to live at the memorial park, which is billed as a retirement home for the women.

The grannies say that they would prefer to live at home, that they sometimes feel like monkeys in a zoo. But they like to believe they are still somehow serving the people, providing an educational opportunity to the masses. And they do get paid about $100 a month--more money than they ever made in their lives.

“I’d much rather stay home with my great-grandchildren,” said Wang Xianmei, 90, who is not related to Wang Yunmei. “I’m old. I don’t have too many years left. If the country needs me, I don’t mind.”

The park, a private enterprise, opened a year and a half ago near the Wanquan He--”the river of 10,000 springs.” But today’s Qionghai is nothing like the idyllic village described in the Communist opera. Now, the Red Detachment competes with the city’s red-light districts and illegal gambling halls. Still, the women attract as many as 50,000 out-of-town visitors a month.

The park spans nearly 500 acres of coconut groves and streams. Tourists pretend to live the life of girl soldiers, taking target practice, banging on drums, even getting married. In one exhibit, eerie black-and-white mug shots of elderly female cadets and girl martyrs hang next to ballet images of rifle-wielding women in blue toe shoes.

Most bypassers stick their hands through the women’s windows to wish them longevity. But few have time to sit and listen to stories that spill out in the thick local dialect of the illiterate great-grandmothers.

“The mothers in the movie who joined the army with children on their backs were based on my life,” said Wang Yunmei, who enlisted when she was about 20. Barely five feet tall, she went to battle with a newborn strapped to her body.

“I thought to myself, what’s there to fear? If I die, my daughter can’t survive. If she dies, I won’t want to live. Let’s live together and die together,” recalled Wang, sitting on her bed under a mosquito net.

After the revolt, the women fled to the mountains. Wang said her husband escaped to Southeast Asia to avoid persecution. She and her daughter, now almost 70, waited a lifetime, but no one came back for them.

After the Communists took power in 1949, Wang returned to the countryside, tending the land and occasionally helping recruit young soldiers. She never remarried.

“I joined the Red Army because the old society didn’t give women a chance. We had no education, no freedom and no way out,” she said, pausing to add, “After liberation, I still never got an education.”