• Five •

In spite of the turbulent din, Otto Braun, still heartsick about having left his wife in Yan’an, managed to talk with Zhou Enlai through Professor Chen’s translation. Braun was upset, his eyes flickering with red rims. His lips curled and stopped just short of a grimace.

“How come it’s so easy for these kids to go to the Soviet Union? They all have a visa?” he asked.

Zhou smiled and said, “We made an agreement with our Soviet comrades long ago to send some children there to study, so we had their papers prepared beforehand.”

“Then I still don’t understand why Lilian can’t come with me. She’s my legal wife. This makes me feel like a fraud just using a Chinese woman.”

“We double-checked with the Comintern. They instructed us that you go back alone. I’m sorry about this, Otto.”

“That will make Lilian believe I’ve taken advantage of her all these years.”

“I totally understand,” Zhou said amiably. “We’re all revolutionaries and often have to sacrifice our personal interests and happiness.”

“I know that, but I don’t see the necessity in my case.”

“We’re in a similar situation, having to obey orders from the Comintern even though we might not understand their reasons.”

“You think they’re all rational?”

“I don’t see why I should doubt them.”

Yomei had been following their conversation attentively, though she didn’t appear to be listening. She liked and even worshipped Li Lilian for her vivacious personality and mellifluous singing voice and for her gorgeous figure. Few actors at the time could act in both movies and musicals like Lilian. Now, that woman, only in her midtwenties, may have been abandoned. How heart-wrenching this situation must be for her! Yomei also felt that Lilian had been used or misused. Intuitively, she reminded herself that she must take care to avoid that kind of situation in the future. So many revolutionaries seemed to have no second thoughts about leaving their spouses behind when they were ordered to pull up stakes. If this was the way they would act, why get married in the first place? It was irresponsible.

At the Lanzhou airport, Yomei saw squadrons of fighter planes and asked Father Zhou why those Russian aircraft were here. He explained that those Soviet pilots were helping China fight Japan, which was also Russia’s perpetual enemy. Lanzhou was a transitional point where the materials and weapons sold to China by the Soviet Union were gathered. The fighter planes were shipped here straight from the USSR and then flew inland to deliver themselves to the Chinese military or to participate directly in air battles. Yomei had witnessed Japanese planes bombing and strafing civilians, but never had she thought that China had its own air force, even if it belonged to Chiang Kai-shek’s army.

The Zhous stayed in Lanzhou for three days and then flew to Tihwa, present-day Urumuqi, where Father Zhou bought Yomei a pair of brown leather loafers with tassels, which made her beside herself with joy, never having worn such nice shoes. Seeing the girl’s new footwear, Mrs. Zhou frowned a bit, then told her husband with a smile, “You’ve never been so openhanded for me, Enlai.”

“Yomei is a young girl and we mustn’t let her appear shabby in front of foreign comrades.”

“Mother, I’ll buy you beautiful shoes when I make money,” the girl enthused.

Mrs. Zhou nodded and said, “Just enjoy yourself. I was joking with your dad. You don’t need to worry about the future.”

They stayed in a spacious suite in a two-story building for the night. The hotel was quite elegant, surrounded by weeping willows. It used to be warlord Sheng Shicai’s personal residence, but now served as a guesthouse, mainly to accommodate the Communist cadres and officers passing through, because Sheng Shicai needed the capable military personnel of the Red Army to help him build his mechanized battalions equipped with Russian vehicles and automatic weapons. Two more children joined the Zhous at the guesthouse—Liu Yunbin and his sister Aichin—whose father was Liu Shaoqi, a key leader of the CCP, running its Central Plains Bureau. The boy was fifteen and the girl eleven. Together with them were also those boys who had arrived on the same plane with the Zhous. Yomei was the oldest among these youngsters. In total, there were six of them, all regarding her as an elder sister.

After dinner the kids gathered in the room shared by Yunbin and Aichin. Over hot cocoa made by Yunbin, they chatted about their future plans. Little Tiger was too young to know what he would like to study in the Soviet Union. He just wanted to go there and have a good time with his buddies. The other older boys all wanted to study sciences and specialize in industrial fields. Their parents, all experienced revolutionaries, had urged them to avoid military academies, because the officers sent to China from the USSR had turned out to be incapable and often made terrible blunders and because the CCP had adept officers galore but lacked experts in almost every civil field. So the parents all wanted their children to specialize in a subject that could be more useful for the new China they’d been fighting to establish. Unlike Yomei, none of them was interested in the arts or the humanities. She realized she might be a black sheep among them, because she was eager to study theater, which was her passion. She had talked about this with her adoptive parents, who both supported her choice, saying she could specialize in whatever she preferred and that the revolutionary cause could use all kinds of experts.

That night she wrote a letter to her aunt Jun, to whom she hadn’t been able to say goodbye when she left Yan’an in a hurry. She didn’t reveal her destination to Jun and just said she’d write her again once she settled down. She also gave Jun her mother’s new address in Chongqing, where Ren Rui had just transferred to the office of the Eighth Route Army, where she was to direct its library. Yomei enclosed a five-yuan bill for Jun, saying she had no need for such money anymore. Indeed, she’d soon be using rubles instead.

The Zhous stayed in Tihwa for about a week. Zhou Enlai had many matters to attend to, talking with Sheng Shicai and meeting the Communist cadres working in the region to ensure that this place, so close to the Soviet Union, would serve as a secure base for the CCP in the future.

Sun Weishi’s letter to her sixth aunt, Ren Jun, signed “Yomei”

There were other children and wives of the Communist leaders on their way to Russia for medical treatment and recuperation, and also for education, but some of them were yet to arrive at Tihwa. So the Zhous and Professor Chen, unable to wait for their arrival, were going to leave for the Soviet Union before them. The two men and Mrs.

Zhou and Yomei bid the kids goodbye, hoping to see them in Moscow soon. Meanwhile, the children needed to learn as much Russian as possible from Uncle Peng, a senior officer who knew some Russian. The next morning, the Zhous and the Chens boarded a smaller plane to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Yomei was thrilled to see down below the Great Wall, battered and broken in places, like a giant sleeping python stretching along mountain ridges to the edge of the sky. Then the forest disappeared, replaced by an immense desert swelling with endless sand dunes.

“Now China is behind us,” said Professor Chen. Zutao, his son, and Yomei nodded solemnly, as if too awestruck for words.