Eight thousand Xiang women go to the Tianshan Mountains

Author: Lu Yiping
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2006-01-01
Features: In late 1949, after Xinjiang's peaceful liberation, the decision-makers of the People's Republic ordered the 200,000 soldiers stationed in Xinjiang to transform swords into plows, develop farmland, and root themselves in the region. This was to change the situation where, since the Han Dynasty, every generation of settlers had left after a single term, aiming to achieve long-term stability. However, as the saying goes, "Without a wife, one cannot settle down; without a son, one cannot take root." If the marriage issues of the soldiers were not resolved, it would hinder the smooth achievement of this strategic goal. Therefore, the decision-makers decided to recruit female soldiers to address this problem, and they first recruited 8,000 Hunan women. These female soldiers were mostly intellectuals, including top university graduates, daughters of Nationalist generals, and daughters of wealthy merchants. All of them carried dreams of youth and marched for months to arrive at the remote frontier. From then on, they began to weave stories of joy and sorrow, ideals and pursuits, glory and dreams in the vast desert and Gobi. They gave birth to, and also nurtured love, tolerance, righteousness, and resilience, earning them the title of "the mothers of the Xinjiang wilderness." This reportage is written in the form of "oral records." The fate of the Hunan women it reports is actually a microcosm of the lives of the 8,000 Hunan women. It is a collective memoir of the Hunan women who entered Xinjiang, a document narrated by them, a witness to history, the first all-around revelation of long-forgotten historical facts, and a desperate effort to restore suppressed collective memory. To write this book, the author spent five years, revised it three times, and interviewed over 100 Hunan women in Hunan, Beijing, Sichuan, and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. Some chapters were published in newspapers and magazines in serialized form and received an enthusiastic response, winning the China Reportage Literature Award and the Kunlun Literature Award.