Word: hengyang
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...twin brothers are standing on a railway platform in Hengyang, saying what they think is their final farewell. It is a spring morning in 1949, and they are surrounded by refugees and wounded soldiers. China's civil war is reaching its climax. The 16-year-olds have received a letter that is to change their destinies forever. It is a message from their father Yang Deyuan: "You two take different roads, so no matter which side is going to win or lose, I will have a river on my left and on my right...
...Hengyang, Kweilin, Tushan, Liuchow-the names fall like a dirge on the South China wind. The time is 1944, and the stench of burning Chinese towns masks the peaceful summer scent of oranges, persimmons and rice fields. With the Japanese armies at their heels, U.S. demolition teams mine the strategic airstrips with 1,000-lb. bombs gouging the good earth as they retreat. The irony is that they outrun the enemy but are runners-up to history...
...Communists too. Another southward lunge brought the Communists within 215 miles of Canton, where weary Nationalist officials began packing again. Their next stop: Chungking, scene of their exile during most of the war with Japan. Nationalist General Pai Chung-hsi hastily regrouped what was left of his forces at Hengyang...
...them in the streets. But now overseas Chinese are again sending money from the Philippines and Southeast Asia to rehabilitate the coastal trade, and on the Chinese New Year nearly every Amoy citizen boasted the traditional (but in recent years unobtainable) new suit or dress. Inland, such cities as Hengyang and Changsha, once 98% destroyed, are 30% rebuilt. Pot-holed Canton streets are being repaired, and are expected to be shipshape in three months...
...ironic inhumanity of all this is that there is still food in Hunan. Scores of beggar children wander with chopsticks and empty rice bowls through Hengyang or lie exhausted in the gutters, but the city's restaurants still serve ten-course feasts for those who can pay. We ate such a meal one night as guests of the local newspapermen, whose slightly fantastic prelude to the banquet was the presentation of carefully wrapped samples of the clay, weeds, rice husks and grass on which people were starving not far from our table...