Red Army veteran's vow of silence shapes legacy

In 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded, He Mulin finally no longer needed to pretend that he could not speak.

He wanted to share the news with his wife. But when he opened his mouth, no words came out.

"At that moment, he really couldn't make a sound," said his granddaughter, He Li, recounting a scene passed down by her mother.

He Mulin put his hands on his wife's shoulders and shook her, managing only indistinct sounds.

"He could only nod and answer her with his eyes," He Li said.

For 14 years, her grandfather had pretended to be deaf and mute — to conceal his identity as a Red Army soldier and to protect the villagers who had risked their lives to save him.

Born in 1904 in Huichang county, Jiangxi province, He Mulin joined the revolutionary ranks as a young man and later became a squad leader in the training battalion of the Fifth Division of the Third Red Army Corps.

On Jan 28, 1935, he fought at Qinggangpo near Tucheng in present-day Xishui county, Guizhou province. The battle came shortly after the Zunyi Conference and preceded the Red Army's first crossing of the Chishui River.

For He Mulin, Qinggangpo was where the Long March ended.

"My grandfather was badly wounded and fell unconscious on the battlefield," He Li said. "Local people later found him and carried him to a cave to recover."

The Zhao family hid him there while enemy forces searched for wounded Red Army soldiers, and secretly brought him food and herbal medicine. After more than three months, his wounds healed, but his leg remained permanently disabled.

He Mulin wanted to catch up with his unit, but feared exposing the villagers who had sheltered him as his Jiangxi accent easily identified him as an outsider.

"He didn't want to bring trouble to the people who had saved his life," He Li said.

So he stopped speaking. He survived through manual labor, eventually settling around Tucheng. The deception lasted 14 years.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China, He Mulin began trying to recover his voice.

"At first he practiced making sounds," He Li said. "Then he slowly practiced speaking one word at a time."

He repeatedly went to the banks of the Chishui River to practice.

After years without speaking, it took him about four years of practice before he could communicate relatively clearly again.

Once he regained his speech, He Mulin often walked to Qinggangpo, where comrades killed in the battle were buried.

He would sit beside their graves and talk.

He Li said the first clear words he directed to his fallen comrades carried a simple message: New China had been founded, they had won, and their blood had not been shed in vain.

He Mulin, the man who had survived by remaining silent, later became a volunteer storyteller in Tucheng in 1954, sharing his memories of the Long March with visitors for 25 years — often at the Qinggangpo battle site and the Chishui River ferry crossing where the Red Army had made its first crossing.

Among the belongings He Mulin left behind, the one that amazed He Li the most was a public medical care certificate issued to him in 1962.

It was never used — he never sought medical treatment for his old leg wound, believing that simply surviving had already made him far luckier than his fallen comrades.

He Mulin died in 1979. But the storytelling continued.

His daughter-in-law Lin Chengying, He Li's mother, spent decades sharing his story with visitors.

In 2020, He Li left a stable job in the pharmaceutical business and returned to Tucheng to continue the work. Her daughter, He Keying, later also became a volunteer guide.

Four generations have now taken turns telling He Mulin's story.

But there was one journey he never completed. After leaving Huichang, He Mulin never returned to his hometown.

In 2018, people retracing the Long March route helped the family locate his relatives in Jiangxi. He Li finally made the journey herself this year. At the end of August, she arrived in Huichang for the first time.

Relatives welcomed her with firecrackers. Then she saw two older family members whose faces immediately reminded her of her late father, He Shizhou, He Mulin's son.

"I hugged them and just started crying," she said. "It felt as if I had found my home."

zhaoruinan@chinadaily.com.cn