“Lost in the Long March” by Michael X Wang

Lost in the Long March, Michael X Wang (Overlook Press, November 2022)

Although the Long March, the Communist Red Army’s year-long retreat in 1934 and 1935 to evade the Nationalist Army, is one of the most dramatic events of 20th-century Chinese history, it seems to have featured less as a setting for recent novels than the Cultural Revolution.

English literature professor Michael X Wang found an interest in modern Chinese history years after he immigrated to the US at the age of six. He immersed himself especially in non-fiction narratives and novels set during the Long March and World War II and this interest led him to write his debut novel, Lost in the Long March, a story set mainly in 1934 around a married couple, Yong and Ping, their son Little Turnip, and their friend and comrade, an amputee named Haiwu.

Yong and Ping meet in the Red Army, she their regiment’s best sharpshooter and he a gunsmith who learned his trade as a two-bit gangster in Canton. Notwithstanding a bit of a love triangle with another comrade, Yong and Ping marry and it is on the Long March that Yong gives birth to their son, Little Turnip. At first their friend Haiwu cares for Little Turnip since his mobility is limited after his amputation after he’s shot by Nationalist soldiers. But as much as the couple tries to keep Little Turnip with them, they know he will only be put in harm’s way if he were to continue on with them.

Yong and Ping also know this day is coming because during the early months of Yong’s pregnancy, their lieutenant informed them that while pregnant revolutionaries are not a burden to the army, there is a rule against bringing babies on the Long March. Even Mao left behind a couple of children, a newborn daughter with strangers and his two year-old son with his brother. As the lieutenant tells Yong and Ping:

 

But it’d do you good to remember that the esteemed general had to leave the child with a peasant family when the operation went south. It’s against army policy to keep an infant in camp. Not even the General could keep his child. Do you want to sentence your baby to death before it is even born?

 

The lieutenant informs the couple they can look for Little Turnip after the war is over. Yong and Ping leave him with a young widow in a remote mountain village in Sichuan; she has a baby around the same age and claims that caring for two babies is no different than caring for one.

 

The Long March chapters are the strongest, but the story continues through World War II—during which the nine year-old Little Turnip joins the Japanese army and soon learns the truth about the Japanese army’s brutality— up to 1978 in Beijing; the “loss” of title has haunted the couple for more than four decades.

An otherwise strong novel has a couple of inconsistencies. Wang switches from a chapter in which Haiwu relates his experience on the Long March—and that of Yong, Ping, and Little Turnip—decades later in the first person to a third-person narrative elsewhere in the novel. Wang also switches between the Wade-Giles romanization of the era and the more contemporary pinyin. A quick author’s note to explain this usage would have alleviated this slight distraction. Wang’s powerful storytelling nevertheless makes for a promising debut.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.