Chen Xilian recalled: I told my mother about the idea of joining the guerrillas, and my mother did not agree. She said to me, "Your eldest sister and second sister, girls, can only help me to do some begging for food at home and dare not go." Your brother is too young. You are the pillar of the house, you are gone. What about at home?"
[Rose] I said, "If you don't go, what's the solution?" The cattle are no longer herded, and the land is not enough to eat and beg for food and is bullied. Instead of starving the whole family to death, it is better to become a guerrilla and follow the Communists, and there may be a way out. Don't the propagandists outside say that the Communist Party is the savior of our poor?"
The mother still disagreed. She knew my temperamental personality, and in case I slipped away quietly, she always waited for me to fall asleep every night before she went to sleep. Later, he tied a thread around my wrist and the other end to her hand so that she could wake up as soon as I moved.
Go, or not go, I also hesitated. Seeing my mother's tired figure, her sad face, her two weak and helpless sisters and my younger brother, I felt that my family needed me, I couldn't leave, I couldn't go. But if you don't go, where is the head of this bitter day of starvation and humiliation?
[Rose] In the end, I still made up my mind: go. This is the only way out. When the rapeseed was yellow, a guerrilla group happened to live near our village, and I realized that this was a good opportunity, so I silently prepared to "escape". One night, I pretended to be asleep, heard my mother snoring, my sister and brother had fallen asleep, I quietly got up, untied the line on my wrist, gently pushed open the door, turned around and hid the door, listened to the house there was no movement, I ran towards the place where the guerrillas lived....
[Rose] Now that I think about it, the main reason why I joined the guerrillas and joined the revolution was because
The first is to find a way out for the sake of life.
I came from a poor peasant family and grew up without my father. The widowed mother pulled on several of our children, hungry, unclothful, struggling on the line of life and death. The landlord and the old rich man treated the poor as a person, and regarded me as a cowherd even more inappropriately, and arbitrarily beat and scolded. Not only do the poor not have the right to be human, but they are even deprived of the right to beg. In order to survive, I can only choose the path of revolution.
The second is the influence of the Great Revolution and the propaganda of the Communist Party.
When I was just beginning to understand things, a vigorous revolution broke out. The jute uprising, in particular, really shook and affected all corners of the jute region. From the point of view of the pair, although I can not deeply understand the nature and significance of this revolution. But in the mouths of the people and on their smiling faces, from the changes I personally experienced, I was able to more or less comprehend some revolutionary principles. I did not enter the academy in the university hall of society, it was the Propagandists of the Communist Party who taught me the first lesson when the Communist Party entered the village to propagate, and I crowded among the adults to listen to them talk about "turning over", "the Communist Party is the savior of the poor", and so on. As if in a relationship, I felt very close as soon as I heard these words, and there was an innate sense.
The third is the reason for their own personality.
[Rose] I lost my father when I was a child, and after the separation of the family, my mother worked all day to maintain the family's livelihood, on the one hand, she had no time to take care of me; On the other hand, her rebellious personality influenced me from the opposite side. After a little understanding, I went to the landlord's house to herd cattle and work as a long-term worker, suffering hardships and being bullied. This kind of family background, life experience and social environment have made me form a stubborn and willful character, unyielding, evil as a vendetta, and the courage to resist. I didn't want to succumb to society, and I didn't succumb to my mother—despite her strenuous opposition, I finally went with determination.
The year I left was April 1929, and I was 14 years old.
The above is selected from the "Memoirs of Chen Xilian"
Memoirs of Marshal Xu Qianqian
