Hsiao Li Lindsay. Bold Plum: With the Guerrillas in China's War against Japan

This is a remarkable document. Originally written in 1947 in English while the Lindsays were in Cambridge, Massachusetts – itself no mean accomplishment – it has been twice translated into Chinese and published, but this is its first appearance in published form in English. It tells a fascinating story. Hsiao Li Lindsay was born Li Hsiao Li (Li Xiaoli in the current pinyin system of transliteration) in 1916, the youngest child of a wealthy landowner in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province in North China. Unlike many girls at the time, she received a good education, first locally and later in Beiping (Beijing). From 1937 to 1941, she studied at Yenching (Yanjing) University. One of her teachers was Michael Lindsay, who had arrived at Yenching in 1938 to teach Economics, Logic and Scientific Method. Lindsay was tall and very English – she had trouble following his Oxford accent, which led to extra classes and eventually to a proposal of marriage. They married soon after her graduation in the summer of 1941. It is not clear how much she knew of the full extent of his extracurricular activities, but she soon learned. North China had been occupied by the Japanese since the summer of 1937, but communist guerrilla forces operated in the hills nearby. Lindsay admired the stand that the guerrilla forces made against the Japanese, and, was in contact with them from 1938. As the struggle with the Japanese continued, Lindsay, an amateur radio engineer, smuggled radio parts to them at the weekends and in the vacations and generally helped with communications. This was dangerous but foreigners were still protected by extraterritoriality and the Japanese left Yenching alone, whatever they knew or suspected about the contacts of some of the foreigners. Others involved in supporting the guerrillas included the Canadian, Dr Norman Bethune. Marshal Nie Rongzhen, the commander of the communist forces and later the father of China's nuclear bomb, pays tribute to Bethune, Lindsay and others in his memoirs. The attack on Pearl Harbor, which fell on 8 December 1941 in Beijing, changed all that. The Lindsays and some other foreigners fled just before the Japanese arrived to arrest them, and began what was to be four years with the guerrillas.

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