Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March (review)

It is a page-turner! Now in paperback, Choosing Revolution is a “historical narrative” incorporating the better part of four oral histories, with excerpts from eighteen others. In 1986, Helen Praeger Young, aided by her husband and students, interviewed twenty-two of the veterans remaining from the two thousand women soldiers who set out on the Long March. The Long March (1934–36) was the audacious 8000-mile Chinese Red Army “retreat to victory,” which devastated the army but ultimately won them China. Surrounded by Kuomintang troops closing in for the kill, the soldiers broke out, escaping southwest to nearly impassable areas, then north, finally sheltering in desert-bordered mountain caves, where they rebuilt.

Of eighty-six thousand soldiers who began the march, only two percent were women. Ninety percent of that entire army did not make it. Political and tactical rifts caused some women to twice recross the glacial mountains and uncultivated, quicksand-dotted, marshy grasslands. Often, there were no villages to shelter them, or the inhabitants had fled or were enemies. Their straw shoes they made themselves. A few once had bound feet and hobbled. They marched by night to avoid Kuomintang bombers and foraged for food to supply the army when they stopped. They attended the wounded, recruited new forces, and propagandized among the peasants. While usually working harder than men, they sometimes encountered life-threatening misogyny among the troops. In the First Front Army, women captured by Muslim tribes and given as concubines to the warlords were shunned as collaborators (for almost fifty years) when they finally managed to escape.

Oral historians might wish for unedited translated transcripts of the testimonies, but one might find confusion there. Young provides needed context for the four main interviews and for the excerpts from the other eighteen soldiers. All the women insisted on showing the army and the cause in the best light, even when they had undergone duress during the Long March or had been jailed or ruined in the Cultural Revolution. In the long narratives, one comes to understand why. It was fortunate that Young’s husband was fluent in three dialects (languages, really) because some of the interviewees did not speak Mandarin, compounding the difficulty of a nuanced translation. Translation was further refined with help from many other acquaintances, over years.

Young also faced difficulties beginning the project she had been invited to undertake. Because of a political transition, the agency could not make good on its offer to help, and without proper sponsorship, interviewees would not make themselves available and so on. Finally, almost two years on, Young was given quarters and aides, a television celebrity volunteered her time, and voila !

The number of interviewees was limited by age, health, location, and possibly the political favor of the people who introduced them. Young was still able to find a variety of life experiences to represent. Of the four with chapter-long interviews, two had some literacy before they became active in the Communist movement. The other two, like so many of the Long March volunteers, were tongyangxi: girls sold or given as servants to “in-law” families at birth, at five, or slightly older, as an alternative to drowning them in the urine bucket by the bed. This system was still operative in Taiwan when Margery Wolf did her fieldwork in the 1960s. I saw comparable child bondage in India, Nepal, Korea, and among ethnic Chinese in Vientiane, in the mid-1970s.

“Women’s stories reconfigure . . . [what is] considered history,” Young says (8). Oral history does this more than other recording of events. Young says the women did not, then, see themselves as participants in history: to them the March was “only one of many segments of the revolutionary path they had chosen” (8). In this frame, a woman’s history of the Long March does not begin when leaders abandon conventional warfare. It begins with her furtive decision...