A WALK IN YENAN

In Yenan last week the Communist elite of the onetime Red capital seemed gone for good, but the natives of the place--whom the Chinese Communists loved to call lao pai hsing (the common people)--were drifting back to town from their temporary and dusty bivouacs in the Shensi hills. TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin looked on, then cabled this account:

The natives are trudging back to their shops and cave homes--mostly the very young and the rather old, mothers with suckling babes, grandmothers stilting by on bound feet, greybeards leaning on staves, small fry skipping and chirping as though their world hadn't changed.

"To Do Business." You peer inside a tobacco and cake shop on Nankwan Street. It is a cubicle of dried mud and sticks, windowless, papered with yellowing sheets of the Liberation Daily. Proprietor Yang Huan-chang, a snaggle-toothed elder of 60, greets you as "Comrade," invites you in for a smoke.

Why did he come back to Yenan? Yang snorts. "I never left," he says. "I am too old for retreat." He simply took refuge in a cave overlooking the city. The day after the Government troops entered--after the street-sniping ended--Yang came down. Aiya! His shop was intact, but Government soldiers had taken his bedding and wares of toothpaste and Yenan brand cigarets. For two days he had been impressed as a water carrier. Now he was free again with a Government relief stock of cigarets and flour for ta bing (cakes).

Does he think times ahead will be better than times past?

Reflectively the old man scrapes a yellow tooth with a black fingernail. "Comrade," says he, "a very old man shouldn't fret over things bygone or things to come. I only want to do business. Then all will be right."

Farther along Nankwan a black-gowned merchant, Fan Kuang-kua, and his apple-cheeked wife have a counter full of cigarets, wooden combs, runty potatoes, homespun towels and dust-cloths. Yes, says Fan, the Communists had posted many signs and slogans along this very street. Yes, they had been anti-American--they had said Chiang Kai-shek was trying to sell China to the U.S. What does Fan believe? "I understand little of this," Fan says. "I am just lao pai hsing."

"Confiscate Anything." A short walk beyond, Housewife Yu Chi-ping is sweeping debris from the dark cliffside cave in which her family lives. The table, two chairs, and a chest are gone, Yu laments. The water jar and crockery are smashed. There comes to mind the Communist high command's directive before the Communists withdrew: "To keep our troops fit... confiscate anything. . . . For firewood we shall use doors, windows, furniture. . . . Cooking vessels must be carried away. What can't be destroyed must be buried. . . . We must sacrifice for our sacred land of democracy and our president, Mao Tse-tung."

Yu's husband is still in a Government camp where those who return are registered, sorted, lectured, sometimes quickly released, sometimes not. Yu cannot understand why her husband--a simple man--is not yet home. In Yenan's Red days, Yu herself had been too busy to take much part in stirring events. Had she voted? She had not. Attended people's meetings? There were too many, but if she hadn't gone occasionally they would call her "Old Dead Brains."

Had she ever attended a liquidation of landlords? No.

"I did," pipes up Yu's little twelve-year-old son.

"Being a woman," explains his mother, "I didn't understand. Everything went into this ear and out that one."

What had she been told about the Americans? "I'm very forgetful," Yu says.

Again the little boy pipes up: "Americans are bad."

In a nearby compound, where a Government schoolmaster is trying to find out what has been taught to Yenan children, other tykes sing spiritedly:

Americans in China, what are they doing after all?

They're helping reactionaries intensify civil war.

They're slaughtering the Chinese common people. . . .

"Communists Are Everywhere." A few minutes' walk brings you to another compound. Here under guard are some of the 1,000 Communist P.W.s captured during the drive on Yenan. Most are country boys--illiterate conscripts. But some are of the party elite, like Wu Soh-sien and Chen Ku-tung, both in their early 30s, both veteran junior officers. Stubborn, suspicious, fanatic, they answer questions and speak their true faith:

"Chiang Kai-shek is a Japanese traitor. . . . America is imperialist. . . . Russia is our friend. . . . Communists are everywhere. ... We will come back to Yenan. ... We will go on to Sian, then Nanking and Shanghai. ... We will reorganize the world."

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