The Homecomer: Chen Tusheng’s Wandering Through War

In the bitter winter of 1922, Chen Tusheng was born into a desperately poor farming family in Macheng, northeastern Hubei. In the eleventh lunar month of 1937, a blizzard claimed the lives of his parents. The fifteen-year-old orphan joined villagers in the Macheng Peasant Uprising, driven by little more than the need to find food and stay alive. He lifted a heavy spear, and the cruel gears of fate began to turn.

Captured during a Nationalist encirclement campaign, he put on a gray-blue uniform to save his life. Amid the blood and fire of the Battle of Shanghai, he fell into Japanese hands and was forced into a Kwantung Army uniform, watching his countrymen kill one another in humiliation. During the bloody Battle of Taierzhuang, with Nationalist bayonets closing in, he fell to his knees and cried out the truth of where it all began: “I was a Red Army soldier in the Macheng Uprising!” In a dramatic twist, he found himself back in the Nationalist ranks. When civil war erupted once more, he was captured by the Fourth Field Army amid the bombardment of the Liaoshen Campaign. At last, amid cries to “liberate all of China,” he donned a khaki uniform again, this time as a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army.

In 1950, he crossed the Yalu River. The ice and snow of Changjin Lake failed to claim his life, but he was captured once more on foreign soil. After enduring the hardships of the Geoje Island prisoner-of-war camp, the fighting finally ended at Panmunjom in 1953. Scarred and carrying a past he could never put into words, he returned to his hometown of Macheng after nearly twenty years away.

Captured seven times, he changed sides seven times. Red Army, Nationalist Army, Japanese Army, Nationalist Army, People’s Liberation Army, Chinese People’s Volunteers, prisoner of war, peasant... His identities drifted like duckweed on the wind, repeatedly swept away and reshaped by the flood of war. He was neither a hero nor a coward, just an ordinary man swept along by the relentless wheels of history, struggling to survive by the most basic of instincts. In the 1980s, his grandson opened a history textbook and pointed to the words “Victory at Taierzhuang,” then asked: