Hail the Weather Women

They are the Charlie’s Angels of rural China. When the weather is nice, they daydream about pink lipstick and pretty things to wear. When the weather turns nasty, they snap into action, blasting artillery into the sky and pulverizing the enemy before it strikes.

Farmers in this remote pocket of north-central China have been at war with the elements for as long as they can remember. Each summer, walnut-sized hailstones threaten to tumble from the heavens and wipe out entire harvests of corn, cabbage, tobacco and wheat, ruining their meager sources of food and livelihood.

There was no taming Mother Nature until intrepid villagers formed an all-girl army of hail-busters three decades ago, a gutsy outgrowth of the Chinese women’s movement.

Working wonders with out-of-date antiaircraft artillery from China’s wars in Korea and against Vietnam, these weather guerrillas have become cult heroes to many local folks, who give thanks to them for surveying the skies and saving the crops.

“My grandfather tells me that hailstorms are afraid of young girls,” said He Liefang, 17, one of about 55 young women on duty this year here in Longxian County in Shaanxi province.

Granted, shooting artillery shells at storm clouds is an unusual way of controlling hail. A sprinkling of American farmers has experimented with similar methods, among them firing sonic waves into the sky to disperse hailstorms before they hit.

But most scientists consider such attempts wishful thinking, saying there is no way to prove what nature would have done without the effort. So any claim of success, they say, is dubious.

“I don’t want to be cruel and call it scientific illiteracy,” said Fred Carr, director of the school of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. “But people don’t really understand the cause and effect. It’s like saying, ‘I slammed the door and the hail didn’t fall on my house.’ ”

But many Chinese swear by their artillery power.

“Of course it works. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have used it for so long,” said Wang Shuaixiong, a Communist Party cadre at the weather bureau here, explaining that the artillery is laced with chemicals that speed up condensation and produce rainfall instead of hail.

Weather manipulation plays a critical role in China’s national image. The central government prides itself on delivering clear skies on demand. The Chinese believe that by using planes and rockets to induce early rainfall before major public events such as the Oct. 1 National Day, Mother Nature doesn’t rain on Chinese parades.

It is with the same confidence that Beijing has promised the world good weather for the 2008 Olympics.

In rural Shaanxi province, however, the significance of human intervention is much more profound. According to local reports, hundreds of young women have fired more than 75,000 shells at about 700 hailstorms over the last three decades.

Whatever the scientists may claim, local officials believe that these precipitation platoons have spared the region millions of dollars in potential losses.

That doesn’t mean there are no failures. Just as not every prayer is answered, the true believers of hail-busting say you must keep at it to see results.

A few other hail-prone Chinese provinces have also resorted to this unconventional method of battling nature.

But the Longxian County brigade is believed to be the only one staffed entirely by women.

It’s a legacy of the Cultural Revolution of 30 years ago. Chairman Mao preached the slogan “Women hold up half the sky.” The second sex proved its loyalty by carrying guns, drilling for oil and driving trucks.

Eager to stay on the cutting edge, a group of Longxian women volunteered in the early 1970s to staff the new anti-hail storm stations funded by the provincial government so men wouldn’t have to abandon the fields during the busy harvest season.

Job Doesn’t Pay Well

Over the years, the tradition stuck. Some women proudly passed their jobs to their daughters. Others do it simply for the money.

Which isn’t much. The government pays less than $20 a month--too little for the men, who could earn a lot more as migrants in the cities. But for the young women, most of whom can’t afford to go on to middle school, it’s a decent first job.

Almost all of the recruits are teens. The oldest is in her early 20s and the youngest barely 16. Married women aren’t eligible.

“I want to stay here. I can always find a boyfriend later,” said He, the 17-year-old dressed in a rose-petal-print blouse with white collar.

The men in the village have come to see hail-busting as a woman’s job.

“You can’t raise a family on an artilleryman’s salary, so it’s normal for the girls to do it instead,” said Wang Lin, a villager who spends six months out of the year in the city as a construction worker.

Besides, the girls are much better at it.

“The boys don’t want to do it, because most of the time it’s too boring and the money is no good,” said Yan Tienlin, another villager. “The girls are better at it because they are more patient and they won’t make mischief with the explosives.”

In fact, these young women seem to get very little supervision. After two weeks of training, they’re virtually on their own, spread out in groups of four or five across 13 mountaintops.

They live in simple brick barracks for six months of the year. They take turns going home for short breaks and never leave their posts unattended.

Twice a day, they contact the local weather bureau on ancient two-way radios that look like they were ripped out of a junkyard pickup truck.

A scratchy voice on the other end will order them, just like Charlie does with his angels, to stay put or gear up for war.

They work together as a team of loader, targeter, shooter and commander. They serve as each other’s eyes and ears, arms and legs in the wrestling match against the storm.

Their invisible bosses count on absolute obedience. No one can fire when aircraft are in the skies above. Every “attack” follows a direct order from the radio, down to the exact minute and number of shells to be fired.

“Fighting hail is a very complicated matter,” said Wang from the weather station. “We must coordinate with the air force and the airlines to determine the exact timing of the attack.”

It may sound complicated, but the hail watchers don’t even own a telephone. In fact, most of the 13 squads scattered across this mountainous region have only recently acquired electricity and small donated television sets. But the TVs sit mostly idle because none of the young women can afford to buy antennas.

So they do without, even if it means missing the all-important daily weather report that trails the evening news.

“It’s not worth it,” He said. “We’ve been here three months, but we’ve only been paid for one. We know they have no money.”

Yet there must be something irresistible about a job that can pull teenagers from their homes and plop them onto deserted hilltops to pass long, boring days waiting for a few short minutes of action.

The hail season here drags on roughly from May to October. For those months, they eat plain, homemade noodles and carry water up the hills in metal barrels balanced on a stick. They sleep two to a room in dorms just steps away from their artillery gun.

They fill the emptiness between the storms staring into the distance of terraced fields, playing a simple video game on the TV screen, picking fresh green walnuts from the trees, pulling wildflowers from the side of the road and scrubbing down their well-worn weapon.

“I was terrified in the beginning,” said Liu Ying, a shy 18-year-old with a thick ponytail and pink, strappy heels. “All I wanted to do was run back to my house.”

She stayed and became hooked on the deafening sound of artillery fire.

“When I was in the fourth grade, a big hailstorm hit our village and destroyed our family’s cornfield,” Liu recalled. “My mother was so sad, she cried. That’s when I knew I wanted to do this.”

Today she is a skilled artillery woman. Her weapon is a 1955 Soviet-made antiaircraft gun, a museum piece that still bears the insignia of a bygone era.

“Without the people, there is no people’s army,” reads one of two fading Chairman Mao slogans on the rusted panels. “Without the people’s army, the people have nothing.”

Preparing to Fight

Liu’s job during an attack is to load the ammunition into the gun. Stacks of hefty steel shells pop in and out of her hands.

Her comrade, He, hops into the driver’s seat and spins the steering wheel, panning the body of the weapon in a fan-shaped swing as she chases storm clouds from side to side.

The longest-serving cadet is 19-year-old Wang Qingjuan. Her job is to aim the long barrel of the gun up into the center of the storm.

One of the girls not operating the weapon waits by the radio for the command to shoot. Another runs out to yell “Fire!” The trigger--a pedal under Wang’s pink-slippered feet--is pushed.

“It’s definitely nerve-racking to do this when the rain is pounding,” said Wang, the oldest of three siblings, who joined the hail-busters when she was 15. She stands barely 5 feet tall and loves to wear fuchsia lipstick and blue earrings. “The raincoats they issued us are too big. We don’t wear them, so we get soaked. Some of us get sick afterward.”

The girls’ only chaperon is a white-haired grandfather figure assigned to watch over them and the box of explosives stocked in the room where he sleeps.

“Without these girls, the damage to the village would be unthinkable,” said their guardian, Wang Changqian, 67, a sturdy farmer with two bottom teeth.

In nearby Henan province last month, a hailstorm killed 18 people. Wang from the weather station said he suspects a lack of hail-busters there.

“Not every attack works, of course,” he said.

“But most of the time, we attack and there’s no hail. We don’t attack and there is hail.”

Hail-Blasting History

Wang the guardian is a veteran of the Korean War.

He still remembers the days before modern artillery. Villagers tried in vain to blast hailstorms with primitive rocket grenades that basically worked like giant firecrackers.

“They didn’t reach very far,” Wang said. “Only men dared to light them.”

Today, the young women know they’ve done more for the village than their forefathers ever could. It’s written in their logbooks, in childish but proud characters that prove the girls do much more than hold up half the sky. Sometimes, they control it.

“Time: 14:03 to 14:04. Before attack: rolling thunder, howling winds, flash lightning. After attack: no damage to the fields.”