Inside Red China.

For the past 3 hours, I have been completely absorbed with a first-hand account of life inside Red China. Written in 1939 by a radical female journalist, Nym Wales, it offers throatcatching descriptions of the youths that formed the backbone of the Red Army.

“I looked down at the living waves of gray-blue uniforms, the red-starred cap and sun-tanned young faces bobbing up and down like phospherescent flashes on a tropical sea during a typhoon, and wondered if the bayonets glittering in the brilliant sun did not have a kind of hypnotic effect on the observers like the juggling knives of Indian fakirs. . .”

I skimmed quite a bit at first, not believing that I could find a credible shred of information to include in my paper. But the ground perspectives. They are unlike any history textbook, any history lecture. It was a book where real people took precedence over the usual political-socio-economic framework.

“Youth is always ready to fling its ashes to the four winds, but in patriarchal China this spirit lends a peculiar sacrificial quality to revolution. . . Again and again in China, you are impressed by the potentialities of the insurgent youth of the nation. . . Everywhere you turned you found them – they made up the personnel of the dramatics troupes, they were an important part of the courier service, they were in the vanguard at the front and in every kind of activity at the rear.

” ‘Hsiao kueh (little devil)’ is a generic, not organizational term. It referred to those tiny little boys, usually orphaned, who had elected to share the fortunes of war with the Red Army. They had many different duties, but their hearts and homes were always with the Army. Most of them said they were about 11 or 12 years of age, but they looked younger to me.”

“The precocity of youth in China is one of the most outstanding characteristics of Chinese society. In every Chinese shop the set-up is the same. You walk in through the door. There the owner greets you with a bow – but at his elbow is always what he calls a ’small boy’, who awaits orders with bright, inquisitive eyes. If you try to speak Chinese to the owner, he will usually look at you blankly for about 5 minutes – but in the meantime, the ’small-boy’ has already brought out on the counter everything you were trying to ask for.

And when she started devoting the second half of the book to women in the revolution, one literally gets infused with the sense of purpose that the book speaks of. It became impossible not to be inspired and caught up with the spokes of revolution and for a while I wondered if I was turning communist myself.

“Lo Fu’s ‘pocket wife’, Liu Ying, was the tiniest little creature conceivable. How could she possibly have kept from being blown away during the Long March I can’t imagine. But there she was, as chipper and bright-eyed as a spring robin and busy with her work in the Communist Youth League. I suppose good revolutionaries also come in small packages.”

It’s an excellent book. Read it. Inside Red China, by Nym Wales. Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. 1939.