Where the martyrs rest

Standing on a piece of desolate land mostly covered by weeds, the martyrs' shrine looks dusty and rundown. Inside, the memorial tablets of the old soldiers are just pieces of red paper which have become mildewed and faded. There are rows of names inscribed on white cloths that hang from the wall, reflecting the number of lives sacrificed to war. They are the lives of Chinese Nationalist soldiers who continued to battle against the Chinese Communists in the regions around Burma, Laos and Thailand after the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan in 1949. All that remains of their miserable lives are the characters inscribed on the white cloths hanging in this ramshackle shrine.

For years, the Chinese troops stranded in these regions fought guerrilla battles with the Burmese, the Laotians and the Vietcong. Eventually, they retreated to the mountainous region of northern Thailand and settled down. Most of the time they were barely able to eat, let alone build a graveyard for their comrades who had lost their lives in the battles. This makeshift shrine was the only form of tribute they could afford to pay to all the martyrs. As for the survivors, the lucky ones were allowed the chance to move back to Taiwan during two major withdrawals, while a few thousand less fortunate ones remained stranded here. After two generations, the population of Chinese veterans and their families in Thailand has now reached about sixty thousand.

Liu An-ding was one such Chinese veteran. He was born in Yunnan in 1931, a time when war was rampant in China. "An-ding" literally means "stability." It was the single most earnest wish of all Chinese of that era. Yet to Liu An-ding, his name is the greatest irony of his life. In his sixties, after living through a war-torn life, he passes his remaining days in the Ban Mai Nong Bua Nursing Home, finally leading a life that could be described by the word "an-ding." When I met him, he was sitting with a hollow sleeve hanging from his right shoulder. His right arm had been injured in a bomb attack. He tried hard to recall the particular battle during which he lost his arm, but there had been too many battles in which he fought against different enemies that he failed to remember. Perhaps to him that was not important anymore. He had lived through the painful amputation of his right arm, so the inconveniences of living with only one arm didn't seem so difficult to endure.

This was my fifth visit to northern Thailand. From the nearest town, Amphur Fang, it took us more than an hour to drive over the rugged mountain road before we reached the mountain village, Ban Mai Nong Bua. It had rained the previous night. Fortunately, though the surface of the road was awfully muddy, the road bed was still intact and we were able to drive along slowly.

Two meals a day

We arrived at the Ban Mai Nong Bua Nursing Home at noon. No lunch was served as the veterans had long been used to having only two meals a day ever since the days of guerrilla warfare. In the 1950s, when the Chinese troops first settled down in Thailand, there were many mouths to feed. Yet the arid land of the mountainous regions could not produce enough food for all. Thus, the veterans developed the habit of having only two meals a day. In the nursing home, the first meal of the day is served at eight in the morning and the second sometime between three and four in the afternoon.

With a strong Yunnan accent, Liu slowly recounted to me his life story. The veterans here all have similar stories, and Liu's was to some extent an epitome of their collectively vagrant, war-torn lives. But there was something unique about Liu's experience--he was conscripted into the army right after his wedding. It was the year 1950 and Liu was only nineteen when he bid farewell to his parents, brother, sister and his wife of twelve days. That was also the last time he saw them, for he was never to return.

Following the troops, Liu came to Burma and then to the deep forest in northern Thailand. At times, the troops advanced north and won victories over their enemies; however, they would soon be defeated and forced to retreat back to the mountainous regions again. Liu could no longer remember how many battles they had fought altogether--there were just too many and their enemies changed from one people to another. First, they fought against the Chinese Communists, then it was the Burmese. At one time, they even fought for the Thai government in exchange for a modest food supply and refugee permits.

After settling down in Thailand, Liu married a native woman who later bore him a son. A problem arose: the child did not have legal status in Thailand, which meant he was ineligible for Thai citizenship. Yet Liu did not want his child to live his entire life in this remote, barren region.

"Have you ever contacted your family in Yunnan?" I asked Liu. "How about your wife at home?" Perhaps because of his missing arm, he sat in a very tense, upright posture.

"I had lost contact with my family for a long, long time until recent years," said Liu. "When I got in touch with my family again, my parents had long passed away. My brother had passed away too. The only family I had left was my sister. My bride waited for three years before she remarried. She was still so young then, and we didn't have any children. It would have been unfair to keep her waiting. Our troops fought and moved along. Finally we came to Thailand. Little did I know that I would lose my arm during the battle on Phamang Mountain." At this point, he suddenly recalled the battle that took his arm. In the 1970s, the Thai government hired the Chinese troops in northern Thailand to help pacify the border. The troops suffered heavy casualties in that battle. Liu was in fact fortunate to have lost only one arm.

"After I lost my right arm, I could no longer farm. Soon, the native woman that I had married left me, leaving me our young child. I brought him up alone." At this, Liu sank into quiet reminiscence again.

The veterans in the nursing home shared some common characteristics. Most of them were illiterate and inarticulate, and they rarely poured out their grievances. I wondered if it was because after they had undergone so much suffering, they had become immune to it.

On my sixth visit to northern Thailand, I was told by the director of the nursing home that Liu An-ding had passed away in the middle of a cold night from an asthma attack. It was upsetting to realize that our last meeting turned out to be our final one. I could find consolation only by thinking that he had reached the end of his suffering after living his final days in stability.

A life of solitude

The Ban Mai Nong Bua Nursing Home was originally called the "Home of the Veterans in Northern Thailand." The veterans living here used to belong to the troops that battled around the borders of Yunnan, Burma, Thailand and Laos. They are mostly handicapped and without families. The crude buildings of the nursing home, which consists of three blocks of dormitories, is home to them now.

Our visit stirred up a little commotion in the nursing home. Old soldiers streamed out from the rear blocks with excitement on their faces. Two of them walked with the help of walking sticks; one's left leg had been amputated from the knee down, while another's right leg had been replaced with an artificial limb. Without warning, the second veteran suddenly lifted his shirt to show off his battle-scarred belly. He did not say much before he put his shirt down again. Was he trying to show me evidence of his brilliant combat performances, or the ineffaceable scars of his life?

The living conditions here were much poorer than those of nursing homes in Taiwan. Two or three veterans shared a sparsely furnished room. The rooms looked untidy and a foul smell lingered. Some worn-out blankets, pillows, mosquito nets, hot water bottles, and glasses spotted with tea stains--these were all that the veterans possessed.

There were old men who lay in bed with their eyes half shut. Could they be sick? Or were they simply resting because they were feeling weak from not having had enough to eat? Walking into the room next door, we saw three single beds and a figure of the Buddha on the wall. The niche for the Buddha was just a small rack with a thin wooden board on top. A vase of plastic flowers and a pot with a green plant were placed on each side as offerings to the Buddha. This was the most elaborate decoration we had seen in the dormitory. An old man sat on his bed smiling at us--the niche for the Buddha was his last refuge and all that he had left.

In another room, an old man lay in bed. A worn-out mosquito net hanging above the bed made the dim room appear even gloomier. I went up to the bedside. The old man's clothes looked grayish and the buttons on his shirt had fallen off, exposing a thin body with ribs wrapped tautly in dehydrated skin. I could not tell whether he was awake as his eyelids were drooping, but when he heard my footsteps he struggled to lift his eyelids and open his mouth, apparently trying to say something.

"Erh... I..." He tried very hard to speak, but only produced a raucous noise from his throat. Then he suddenly became voiceless and wearily closed his eyes. Just before his eyes shut again, I caught sight of the tears in them. In this foreign land far from home, a lonesome old man was coming to the end of his life. What was he trying to say? Perhaps nothing at all could really express what he wanted to say.

Happiness and longevity

Leaving the gloomy room and the old man behind us, we walked down a small hill and came in front of a crude hut built with bamboo and mud bricks. There was no door. Under the eaves, a dark red wooden tablet read, "Hall of Happiness and Longevity." This shabby hut certainly had an undeserved name. I took a glimpse inside and could only see some items scattered untidily in the hall.

"When old folks pass away in the nursing home, their bodies are sent here to await cremation," said the nursing home superintendent. "We thought a good name might bring more blessings to them in their afterlives, so we named it the Hall of Happiness and Longevity."

Ironically, there is a Chinese expression for the deceased that says, "those who have enjoyed both happiness and longevity." The old folks in the nursing home had mostly retreated here in 1949. At that time, they thought they would be able to return home in two or three years, when they had defeated the Chinese Communists. Unfortunately, reality had been cruel to them. As the years went by, the veterans realized that they were stranded in this foreign land with no one coming to their aid. After a few decades, no one--not even the Nationalist government in Taiwan--talked about fighting back and reclaiming China from the hands of the Communists anymore. By this time, most of the veterans had lost their original identity certificates in the various battles and reallocations. They became neither citizens of the PRC nor the ROC, and they did not have Thai citizenship either. They had all become individuals with nothing to prove their identity.

In this big wide world, there is nowhere they can be at home, not until they enter the "Hall of Happiness and Longevity," where they finally end their vagrant lives and homesickness. There, in their long sleep, they will no longer have to strive for survival on a barren land and endure the severe weather of the mountains. If there is life after death, I hope that they no longer live in solitude, but instead enjoy both happiness and longevity.

"In this hall, we place the bodies of the old folks into thin wooden board coffins before cremation. Most of them have no family or offspring. Their ashes are buried over there." The superintendent pointed to a hill nearby.

There was a cemetery on the hill. From where I stood, I could see that the crudely erected tombs were half-immersed in the soil. It must have been due to erosion caused by the wind and rain. As the tombs of the veterans disappear slowly into the earth with the passing of time, so will the misery, solitude, hopes and despair that had filled their lives.

The most well-known region in northern Thailand is probably Ban Mae Sa Long. A few years ago, a fund-raising campaign for the Chinese veterans in Thailand was held in Taiwan, during which more people came to know about the predicament of these veterans. Since then, more tourists have been coming to this little town in Chiang Rai. The most famous monument here is the tomb of General Duan. The custodian is a 72-year-old veteran who has served in the military for 56 years. He was dressed in military uniform, complete with a helmet bearing the emblem of the Nationalist Party. I cannot describe how shaken I was when I saw that badge in this faraway land.

The veteran had been guarding this tomb for thirteen years. He told me that he volunteered for the army in 1943 during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. He was only sixteen then. When the Sino-Japanese War ended, the battle between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists immediately followed. In the end, he was incorporated into General Duan's troops.

During our conversation, he pulled out a dagger from his belt. He wanted to show me the weapon he had used to fight the Japanese, though the dagger had long turned blunt. Thus, in the sweeping sound of the winds, he recounted his war-torn life to me.

Hope for the young

Our last stop, Phatang Nursing Home, was a six-hour drive from Amphur Fang and 1,700 meters (5,610 ft) above sea level. When the Tzu Chi Foundation took over the nursing home in 1995, there were about twenty old folks living in it. This time when we visited them, there were only seven.

We brought the old folks some hot noodle soup which we had bought at the foot of the mountain. When I was confronted with the sight of the veterans gobbling down the soup from chipped bowls in their dry, quavering hands, I could only sigh inwardly. "Old soldiers never die, they simply fade away," so the saying goes.

Besides supporting the Ban Mai Nong Bua and Phatang nursing homes, Tzu Chi's relief plan in northern Thailand also included building houses in the four remote villages of Huiho, Bangala, Misara and Changlong.

In another village, Ban Huay Hian, we witnessed what pains were taken for the veterans' children to learn Chinese. Formal education in Thailand does not include Chinese in the curriculum. So after a day's classes in school, the children attend special Chinese classes from six to eight in the evening. It takes more than an hour for some of the children to travel the mountain path to and from the evening school.

When we visited the evening school, we saw a wrinkled, shabbily dressed veteran who had accompanied his child to school. The walk on the mountain path, muddied by ample rainfall, had covered his rain boots with mire. During recess, he told his child in a strict tone, "If you don't study hard, I will tell the teacher to punish you!" Like many other veterans here, he has put all his hopes on this little child, who braved the cold rain to come for Chinese lessons.

The Chinese veterans in Thailand are slowly disappearing. Yet their tragedy will not end with their lives. Most of their children, or even grandchildren, have not had the opportunity to receive formal education, and like their fathers or grandfathers they cannot obtain Thai citizenship. With the same destiny as their forefathers, they too are stranded in the mountains of northern Thailand.

It is hard to imagine that many of the people here have not set foot outside of the mountain area for as long as half a century. Tzu Chi's relief plan includes building a complete school for them. After examining more than ten possible locations, it was determined that the school would be built in Amphur Fang. "It is better to teach a man how to catch fish than to give him a fish." By providing the children the opportunity to receive formal education and vocational training, the chances of their obtaining Thai citizenship will be much higher. It is hoped that the project will eventually put an end to the tragedy of these veterans that has spanned more than half a century.