From Guardian (link):
In 1934, hundreds of thousands of communists were driven from southern China by nationalists fighting against a socialist state. Only a fifth of them survived the 8,000-mile ‘Long March’. Sun Shuyun set out in search of the handful of surviving veterans.
Wang Quanyuan woke up on a bright morning in May feeling a moment of happiness. She had spent a rare night with her new officer husband. Outside the wooden house, their temporary village billet in Sichuan province, she could see a blue lake surrounded by fields of barley with tall, snowy mountains rising up behind; where she came from there was no snow and to her it looked like sugar. It was 1935, the second year of the Long March. Wang’s marriage was to prove unequal to the adversities ahead. Had she known, she might have been torn between the desire to seal their union more tightly by having her husband’s child, and the fear of falling pregnant – one of the greatest fears among women on the epic march through China.
