The Three-Year-Old Dispatcher Brings Heroes Home to Their Homeland

[Adorable Three-and-a-Half-Year-Old + Turning It Over to the State + Calls from the Battlefield + Fallen Heroes Come Home + No Romance + Tearjerker Ensemble Cast + Love of Country and Family + The Whole Internet in Tears]

Three-and-a-half-year-old Gu Jinchao touched a broken battlefield telephone at a memorial hall. That night, her toy watch suddenly rang.

Call date: 1951.

In a snowstorm, the trembling voice of a nineteen-year-old soldier came through: “Operator, connect me to the Zhou family in Yushuwan. I want to ask my mother if she’s still leaving the door open for me.”

Cuddling her little blanket, Chaochao answered earnestly in her childish voice: “Uncle, I don’t know how to connect calls.”

Ninety-nine seconds later, the call ended.

Everyone thought it was a prank, until a national investigation team used the few words they’d heard to find the soldier’s ninety-two-year-old younger sister, along with the forty-seven letters his mother had written before she died.

On the eighth day, the phone rang again.

This time, Chaochao had only thirty seconds.

With tears in her eyes, she said, “Brother Wangshan, your mother never blamed you. The family got electric lights later, so no one needed to leave the door open for you.”

Silence fell on the other end for a long time, then the young man laughed through his tears. “That’s good.”

From then on, calls that had failed to get through more than seventy years ago began reaching Chaochao.

Some wanted to know if their younger sisters had gone to school. Some worried whether their children could still cross the bridge to get to class. Others only wanted to know if their comrades had managed to eat one last hot meal.

Chaochao answered the calls, the state found the names, and people today gave the past an answer.

But behind every call was the same young girl’s voice:

“Your call has connected.”

“Please hold while I help someone else.”

Only later did they learn that she had helped every hero get through on the way home, but had never dialed a number for herself.