Red Tashi

A ragged but orderly column of soldiers crossed the mountains from Shixiangzi, Xuyong, Sichuan, and entered the ranges around Zhaxi, Weixin, Yunnan. They were the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. Through the eyes of Musheng, a boy from Zhaxi, the book looks back on this history. The first time fourteen-year-old Musheng saw the Red Army, he saw neither a flag nor a gun, but a trail of bare footprints in the snow. A young Red Army soldier, no older than him, had worn through his straw sandals and was walking barefoot through the snow, leaving five bright red toe prints behind.

The three copper coins left behind after buying pickled vegetables; the thoughtfulness of feeding a borrowed mule before borrowing it; Comrade Cai, a female Red Army soldier, taking off the silver bridal bracelet she had worn all the way from Jiangxi to Yunnan and accepting a poor girl as her goddaughter, "Hongmei"; soldiers passing around cornmeal porridge in a wounded man's bowl... These small acts one by one disproved the rumor that "the Red Army are bandits" and showed the mountain's poor people, for the first time, that there was a force in the world willing to shoulder their burdens.