China Digital Times

Born and raised in Xinjiang, Huang Zhangjin (黄章晋) has worked as a journalist for several media organizations and is also a longtime blogger. Huang was also an editor of online forum, Uighur Online. The following post “Please Tell Them, Yahximusiz” was published on his Sohu blog on December 31, 2005, but has also recently been recirculated in the Chinese blogsphere following the violence in Urumqi on July 5. In the post, Huang tells about his experience reporting on a commemoration for the so-called “Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens Going Up Tian Mountain,” women from Hunan who were recruited by the People’s Liberation Army to go to Xinjiang in the early 1950s after being falsely promised a place in a Russian language school or better jobs. Translated by CDT’s E Shih.

The print version of the article on the Hunan maidens will be ready tomorrow, perhaps. Since I conceived a plan to go until the draft was written, something has been constantly bugging me, and I’m experiencing a strange feeling over and over. As the boss patiently tried to convince me that I could not go to Xinjiang, I would let out secret deep breaths. I was afraid that if I let my apprehensions accumulate, that once I sat down to write down the details in earnest, my mind would be blank. I would not be able to write anything.

When I first heard of the topic, “Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens Going up Tian Mountain,” I could only shake my head. It wasn’t the fact that I’d read the long form journalistic piece by that name several years ago, but that it would be too difficult to do it justice. I would be better off not doing it than botching the job. In my mind, it was an extremely intractable subject matter. It was like a frozen snake that could be warmed against one’s chest: As it slowly awoke, it would immediately sink its teeth into one’s heart. I had two aunts who were members of the Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens way back when. One had long passed away, and the one who was still alive was still struggling through life. Neither of them had ever returned home, and I had never seen them. I heard very little news of them. And I’m not sure if my other aunt was lucky or not. At the time, she waited alone with her bags on the path between Ningxiang and Changsha for the army car of the women’s division. After half a month, she returned home, disappointed: She missed her chance to attend the supposed Russian language school, or to become a woman tractor driver or accountant.

Hunan Economic Television Channel was promoting the return home of Hunan maidens at the time, and they would compensate us for travel expenses if we were to take up this topic. Mother said, even if the Hunan Economic Channel host was too shallow and made her want to curse, she couldn’t help being moved whenever she watched the segments. She was one of those “Mangliu” (”Blind migrants”) to Xinjiang in the 1960s. Because she wasn’t one of those tricked into going by government organizations, she naturally had no right to be written into history. Of course, they also never experienced the heavy bitterness of the previous generation, which had thrown themselves towards heaven only to find themselves in hell’s turmoil. Then again, the Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens were mostly minors at the time.

Since we had all agreed to do this topic, I finally got myself excited to do it and made a strong request to be included. I said, Can anyone do this topic better than I can? And so, Deng Fei, a journalist stationed at the other end, in Hunan, replied quickly. The Hunan Economic Channel would pay my way if I wanted to join the interviewing trip.

That was when I realized the extent to which the Hunan Economic Channel had played up the topic: Apparently, they were sending a private plane to bring some representatives back, and called for everyone to pay for their own trip along the same trail that the Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens had taken so many years ago. They wanted the entire convoy of thousands of vehicles to go escort the old maidens back home. At the end of the event, they would raise a giant, weathered stone excavated in Xinjiang as a monument on the bank of the Xiang River in Changsha. It was a commercial enterprise from the beginning, and stunk of that television drama I hated, “Years that Burned With Furious Passion.” But for many people it stirred something in them which I can’t define. In any case, whatever the melody, I believed this monument would be slightly less ridiculous than the movement, spearheaded by a certain newspaper in Beijing, to build a monument to the triumph against SARS. Once they got in position and the suona began playing, the sound of home brought tears to one’s eyes, no matter how far away one stood. To have given up one’s daughter so many years ago, and to have people still remember the sacrifice today—even if some sort of fatuous meaning was forced upon the commemoration–to have one’s daughter remembered in the land of China that was so bent on forgetting her sons and daughters: That had never happened before.

Personally, I’m always suspicious as to how warm a welcome the Hunan maidens will receive when they return home. Other than the fact that their unique fate is moving, it is true that the Hunan populace has a deeper emotional interaction with the territory of Xinjiang than people of other provinces, even if immigrants from other northern provinces now far outnumber the Hunan immigrant population. But the key juncture in history certainly had something to do with the Hunan people. First there was Zuo Zongtang and Liu Jintang, who conquered Xinjiang as a province. There is even a poem: “The great generals have yet to return from the borderlands, Hunan peoples fill Tian Mountain.” In the peaceful liberation of Xinjiang, the lead protester and guard, Tao Zhiyue, and the master of the handover Wang Zhen were both from Hunan. According to legend, there were less than 100,000 Han in the whole Xinjiang territory, yet there were 200,000 soldiers of the liberation army. They thought that they were fighting for the people, and that they could thus liberate themselves. They were ready to enjoy “electric lights and telephones on every floor of their new houses.” [military mobilization slogans encouraging peasants to join the PLA during the civil war.] No one expected that they would be left out to dry with no prospect of descendants. And so, [General] Wang Zhen asked Huang Kecheng [another PLA general] of Hunan for female soldiers. Thus, the Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens went up Tian Mountain.

My father’s family can trace its history back to when Zuo Zongtang began his western campaign. According to legend, one ancestor had been a soldier since a young age and returned to Hunan alone after several decades in Xinjiang. He looked like a beggar, and there was only one family within his nephews’ generation that did not mind taking him in. Later, his great nephew turned out to be good at academics, but the family was too poor to support his learning. The old man took out the knife from his belt and cut open his army boots, took out the gold that he had hidden all those years. It was because of this that my father’s family was able to rise out of poverty. However, the two following generations all went to military school. The second generation mostly served under Tao Zhiyue and were dispatched to Xinjiang. When the PLA army advanced westward in 1949, they raised their flags in favor of liberation, and all became criminals in the aftermath. Later, my father found that he could not make a living in his home town and left for Xinjiang with a document written by Tao Zhiyue himself. Before long, Tao Zhiyue was left without followers and cast aside.

By the time my parents got to Xinjiang, the children of the Hunan maidens were already school age. What’s more, youth from every province were flooding in endlessly. The Hunan population was already a miniscule percentage of the total. My mother was actually the first Hunan person in her military company. They all said, “Oh! Hunan girls are impressive!” And so, my mother heard the tale of the first Hunan Maidens. The main character was the daughter of a rich family in Changsha, who was so beautiful that she made an overwhelming impression on the Headman as soon as she arrived in Xinjiang. The Headman drove his jeep into the fields every few days to see her, but the girl in question could not be moved. This resulted in nobody at any level of leadership being able to do his job properly, as the Headman exhibited a shocking bourgeois patience. When he didn’t go to visit himself, he had his secretary write letters expressing his intent to build a revolutionary family. Once, the Headman went on a visit in the company of escorts, but the girl in question didn’t even turn her head at the great trail of followers in his wake. The Headman broke open a watermelon and offered it to her with both hands, but the girl in question took the watermelon and immediately smashed it on the Headman’s head. The Headman had killed countless multitudes in his lifetime of conquering and battle, only to be humiliated in public by a mere girl. Angered, he pulled out a gun and shot her dead on the spot. The Headman somehow avoided due process, and got away with just a period of incarceration and a transfer to a lower position within the army. The younger sister of the departed heard of this and left on a mission to get revenge, saying that she would wreak justice with her own hands even if she had to give up her life to do it. Finally, this alarmed the central authorities. As for that unfortunate Headman, no one can remember clearly whether he continued pursuing his love in the after life, or simply stayed in the land of the living as a perpetual prisoner.

Today, when we see news of the Hunan Maidens, it is almost all “introduced by the ‘organization’ [CCP], with their personal blessings.” The stories are of them finally finding happiness, and especially focus on how activists of the past have become illustrious members of the eight thousand. Perhaps the majority of them do not wish to bring up the copious tears they shed in the past, and the countless nights they spent dreaming of home, thinking of mom and dad, with no recourse but to turn their teary eyes towards the mountain and pray that their parents were well. Their days of yearning for the flora of the homeland while living in the borderlands were long past. Their generation’s bad fortune even passed on to the next generation: By 1978, their sons and daughters had long become farm laborers, and could not return home through the national examination system. Nor could they uproot their families and move back to their place of origin. They couldn’t even consider themselves in service of the nation’s expectations anymore. All they could do was place expectations on the shoulders of their grandchildren.

One of my family’s old neighbors was a soldier under the leadership of Wang Zhen at the end of the war against the Japanese who entered Xinjiang with Wang. When he has spoken of the past, he would tell us how some soldiers would look upon a life of emptiness and loneliness stretch out before them and choose suicide out of despair. When the first group of female soldiers arrived, it was as if there was a whole pack of wolves fighting over scraps of meat. The middle and lower level officers didn’t see so much as the shadow of a woman, and this made them even more desperate than before. So, there was a large assembly, during which a high level officer—a new groom himself—made a grand promise: The Central Party Committee and Chairman Mao will do what they said they would do. Some revolutionary soldiers say, mistakenly, that only the Headman gets a wife, and that simply isn’t true! Chairman Mao will make good on his word, you can be sure of that. Everyone will certainly be distributed a wife!

One of my family’s old neighbors was a soldier under the leadership of Wang Zhen at the end of the war against the Japanese who entered Xinjiang with Wang. When he has spoken of the past, he would tell us how some soldiers would look upon a life of emptiness and loneliness stretch out before them and choose suicide out of despair. When the first group of female soldiers arrived, it was as if there was a whole pack of wolves fighting over scraps of meat. The middle and lower level officers didn’t see so much as the shadow of a woman, and this made them even more desperate than before. So, there was a large assembly, during which a high level officer—a new groom himself—made a grand promise: The Central Party Committee and Chairman Mao will do what they said they would do. Some revolutionary soldiers say, mistakenly, that only the Headman gets a wife, and that simply isn’t true! Chairman Mao will make good on his word, you can be sure of that. Everyone will certainly be distributed a wife!

Perhaps it is simply that people raise extreme examples to make a point when they tell stories. But the wife distribution that the old man was talking about really did happen. The female soldiers were immediately allotted to Head Men who needed them. The Head Men could hardly wait for them to arrive before swooping in for the harvest. It wasn’t ideological work, the way it is depicted in“Years That Burned With Furious Passion,” to say the least. Because the dearth of female companionship in Xinjiang was so desperate, and because criticism doesn’t always work as weaponry, it is necessary at the critical moment to use weapons as criticism: when the door is locked, no means yes. How much resistance do you think those young girls could put up? The next day, everyone came to congratulate the newlyweds. The old man even said, laughing, that the distribution was done in the style of dividing war booty in order to prevent brawls and competition among the Head Men. When the women arrived, they all grabbed one, and you were stuck with whomever you happened to grab. I’m not sure how much this tone was exaggerated for the benefit of the mass media; but when I first heard someone tell of this chapter in history, it was like an example of one class violently overthrowing another, contained in an elegant, leisurely depiction that recalled painting or embroidery. Hearing this story before emotional maturity, I didn’t entirely feel the shock and terror that I do now. But I did once hear that a truckload of female soldiers was once kidnapped by a group of minority race bandits mid-way, and what was meant to be rations for our soldiers became their war loot. Oh, the indignation!

In reality, whether we’re talking about war loot or “supporting equipments”, there were far more than 8000 Hunan maidens. There were also many more female soldiers from various other provinces being allocated to local soldiers. According to the current narrative, the educated youths who reported to Xinjiang as members of the construction army corps numbered in the tens of thousands, and that is why the women were also called to duty. That old man’s wife is from Shandong, for example. Some say that it was from Shandong that the first female soldiers were procured, because the war had caused a particularly serious imbalance in gender in that province. Several widows were among those drafted and sent to Xinjiang. Besides those women and the young female students, there was also the odd reformed prostitute from Beijing or Shanghai. But as time progressed, there was more and more freedom in military marital affairs, and it was not as tragic as it was initially. The other provinces had also offered up so many of their daughters; but without data, they were all forgotten save the Hunan maidens.

I can roughly imagine what the response of the still living Hunan maidens will be when faced with microphones pushed at them by young reporters. Their fate is like that of China today: they were forced into marriage, but after living through the difficult years one by one, their youthful black hair was bleached white by the Gobi desert. That person became a husband, a father to their children. After years of taking it and taking it, everything became part of our history, and a part of us. Patriarchal language manipulated matriarchal memories and sentimental knowledge. Transforming forced pairing as honest wooing liberated the women from psychological pain. This is not necessarily a coping mechanism, but the effect of ubiquitous indoctrination: The authority of official language finally became their internalized understanding of themselves. Do the children of the Hunan maidens criticize their parents’ weddings? Only the batch of latecomers my own parents belonged to were free from grand phrases such as “sacrificing oneself in the hinterlands,” because in their case no one was deceived or forced to do something against her will. Nobody resigned themselves to life; they just lived life. When government policy softened, those who could move out did so, and those who could not focused on making sure that their children got into college and left this place.

But there is nowhere to hide from fate. If I ask my mother today, was it fortunate or unfortunate that my auntie, a fresh middle school graduate at the time, did not become one of the 8000, she might think for a moment and say: It doesn’t matter if it was fortunate or unfortunate, because your auntie was quickly married off to a faraway mining town to become part of a mining family. Even if she didn’t die early, if you look at her several decades later, you couldn’t tell if she was better off there or not. You could even say that Xinjiang held more possibilities, because in that era, people of that family background had no other choices. One day, when I tell my own child about history, I will tell him, that tragic era for our people was not just the felling of a great tree, but also the falling of every family, every individual, like the twigs and leaves of the tree raining down into muddy water.

And so after 55 years have come and gone, when the Hunan maiden who could never return home or leave Xinjiang hears of today’s activities, she is, of course, moved. Who’s to say that she doesn’t still privately think that the past is too painful to remember, but now takes solace in that long-dissolved official language which continues to give her life some meaning. At the very least, suffering always turns into a special sort of sentimental memory. That fulfils our psychological needs. If you think of the Japanese who participated in the colonization of Manchuria and Mongolia, and who even now quietly return to their Manchuria to remember the past, you will understand that this is a common human characteristic. Whether it is on the level of the individual or the group, people have a certain tolerance for suffering, life and fate. Back in the day, Jianzhou troops swarmed into the homeland, drowning countless men and women in a fateful sea of blood and death; but in the end, we all became part of the great Qing empire. Reading Zhao Wumian’s “If Japan Had Triumphed Over China,” one feels great indignation and finds it hard to accept his conclusions; but logic is calm and unfeeling.

Maybe using Japanese colonialists in my analogy is wildly politically incorrect. But when each group answered their nation’s call and arrived at their destinations, how were these situations different? The difference today is that one of the two is still being affirmed as a contribution of great value to the nation, and the other has been deemed a great deception for a long time now. And yet, and yet. The reason that the Hunan maiden’s homecoming event has aroused such a strong resonance is that an alternate history remains in the hearts of many. My mother said herself, back when she was considering how to name her unborn child, she thought immediately of using words from Yang Changjun’s poem, “Praise of Zuo’s Western Conquest in Gantang.” I’m not sure whether those who feel a strong resonance with the homecoming event also have that same subconscious ideology. But if we use Yang Du’s “Song of the Hunan Youth” to describe the fearless attitude towards Xinjiang-Hunan, it would sound like: “Across thousands of miles of boundary land, nine out of ten are of Hunan. General Zuo conquers the Qilian Mountains, winning them as colonies for Hunan.” （”茫茫回部几千里，十人九是湘人子。左公战胜祁连山，得此湖南殖民地。”）

Yes, I have finally brought the discussion back to here, carefully. This may already be a frightening political transgression; but has anyone ever thought about what the Uighers must feel when they watch a commemoration of the Hunan maidens’ journey? That was my real first reaction when I first heard of this topic. Because I grew up there and experienced what went on there at the time, I know that the race problem has only gotten more sensitive and more nuanced. I can’t keep from making these mental connections at a time when ethnic chauvinism is on the rise.

Yes, the Hunan maidens were an unlucky bunch. They received invitation letters to go to Heaven, and were taken to Hell instead. But they were never in want of ideology and rhetoric provided by the central organization, and they are commemorated by flags and drums in the land of their origin. Their fates were always accompanied by a steady main melody. And what about the Uighurs? Back then, they leaned on their hoes at the side of the road watching car after car of Han Chinese come from the East, put down roots, and raise children. Afterwards, countless Uighur social spaces in the old cities disappeared and were never reconstructed, while Han Chinese spaces seemed to spread everywhere of their own volition. A Uighur student studying in Beijing wrote on a BBS bulletin board that no one would listen to their voices. The official policy of ethnic benefits became a twisted and almost mocking reality. As to what they must have thought at the time, we would have to return to the beginning and think through the situation from their point of view in order to understand that.

The powerful will be much less psychologically sensitive than the weaker ethnic group. It was only many years after the fact that I remembered how, back at the school for kids of military families, I often participated in beating up ethnic minority students. They came from small villages in the area and were very few in number. When they were faced with a beating, they could only resign themselves to a position of non-resistance. I don’t know how many of my classmates finally became conscious, as adults, that what may have seemed to us the normal rough play of children must have left a certain psychological mark upon those Uighur classmates. Perhaps the majority ethnicity—those who delivered beatings—have long since forgotten, but I believe the minority ethnicity—those who received beatings—will never forget. Even their former attempts to assimilate to Han culture become a sort of humiliation. I remember there were two Uighur students in our class who had very unusual names: Revolution and Revolution Guli. I don’t know if those two classmates, who have long since become mature women still keep the symbols branded onto them by the times? And how in the world do they explain their strange names to their children in the present day?

When I see posts by angry youth on the BBS railing against Xinjiang independence, I notice that they give examples of Uighur classmates being indifferent, even revealing mocking expressions, when they hear condemnations of Japanese wartime criminality—and I believe that these scenarios have the ring of truth. It would be more shocking if they were to feel a strong sense of solidarity with their Han classmates against the Japanese. Of course the opposite occurred. I thought the angry anti-Japanese youth would be very understanding of their Uighur peers’ reaction. If only that youth could just exercise a little compassion, and spend even a tiny amount of time understanding some history. The problem is, small-minded people are small-minded, no matter what the problem at hand may be. An ethnic group that already has an advantage in sheer population size and in real power should really try to understand that history has left certain psychological sensitivities within ethnic minority groups. Because they do not have a voice, and no one listens to what they have to say. In the era of the first protectorate of Xinjiang, Yang Zengxin, Yang himself applied himself to learning the Uighur language, and required the same of his Han ethnicity officers. But today, are there any Han officials who speak Uighur? Although this may not be an appropriate comparison, that martial era, and the period of Japanese colonization in Manchuria was definitely better handled than the present day situation.

When I speak to Taras about the small-mindedness caused by the unfortunate recent history of Muslims, Taras himself said that he faced a certain internal contradiction: He can sense with full clarity that he is entertaining the small-mindedness fostered by mass historical memory, but he cannot find it in himself to put aside his prejudices. This is the standard of a saint, is it not? We must say that, in Xinjiang, the native Han ethnicity inhabitants had long term experience living amongst different ethnicities, and so understood how to respect their differences. The large-scale influx of inlanders that followed had no such experience in living with different ethnicities. Even though government policy merged the two groups of Han ethnicity inhabitants, the inland immigrants were so great in number that generations of accumulated interethnic understanding was completely diluted. When the children became adults, their understanding of the different cultural habits of ethnic minorities is mostly built on extremely humiliating demonization.

Perhaps out of a sense of reparation, I stand consciously on the side of the minorities. Interestingly, one time when I agreed to meet up with a friend I’d met online, he arranged the meeting at a Halal restaurant—because he thought I was a Muslim. Maybe a Muslim like me would be even more effective in time of war than Taras. A few days ago, he was enraged again because he saw disrespectful words about Muslims on a blog. It seems he errs on the side of extreme sensitivity. Allegedly, every year there are fellow journalists who are punished because of such slanderous activity, but it seems that such official protection of culture and religion does not weaken the divide. In fact, in some ways, it strengthens the wall that separates the ethnic groups. When I spoke to one of my colleagues here, who had been to Xinjiang a few times, it was revealed that he, too, had always thought that the banning of pork came from some sort of religious totem. The responsibility for closing this gap in understanding does not lie, I believe, with the side with less population and fewer real rights of speech. Even more so because the official language has covered up history. When many angry youth criticize American imperialism, they emphasize the fact that the Americans slaughtered and stole from the Indians, and that the apology for these grievances was several hundred years too late. But, at the very least, they have admitted this history.

When I made a trip back to the family home in October from Shenzhen, I passed a young Uighur under cover from the rain beneath an awning, manning a stand. Suddenly inspired, I said to him, “Yahximusiz! (Hello!)” His eyes were immediately filled with joy and passion. While he grilled my mutton for me, he was exceptionally garrulous in Mandarin. Actually, what most normal people care about is life—not ethnic consciousness, emotions, and what others possess. People are pragmatic whenever they can be pragmatic. It doesn’t take much: One simple sentence is enough to light someone up. That is because they are usually forced to answer to “terrorist” or “thief.” One day, you will believe, like me, that this is unfair.