CHINA: The Leather Shoes of Liu Yun

Only once in his life had Sergeant Third Class Liu Yun ever worn leather shoes. That was as a Szechwan peasant boy in the year of the bountiful crops. His father had made enough money that season to buy him a pair of shiny black shoes. Liu could still remember how smooth and bright they felt on his stubble-tough soles.

But that was nearly 20 years ago. Bad years had come—years of poor crops, high taxes, heavy cares about his own growing household. As youth and man Liu knew only the cloth sandals of his Szechwan neighbors.

War had come too, like a plague of locusts that remained on the fields forever. It had taken him from his paddies and his hearth to distant battlefields in the east. He had been wounded by the Japanese, had recovered, had gone back to fight. Barefoot, or in straw sandals, he had marched untold miles over the face of China.

Jung Yao. Last month, in Chungking, Liu and 40 other cotton-garbed soldiers climbed, grinning, into a shiny American monster and flew off into the east. It was a jung yao (glorious) day for him. Shanghai was the most wondrous place he had ever seen. Above all, the Japs he had fled and followed for three long years were surrendering as meekly as meadow mice. It was like a dream.

In his new barracks last week Liu, the peasant’s son, came upon the trunk of a captured Japanese. In it he found a pair of hobnailed shoes. They were worn and rough, but they were leather. Carefully Liu drew them on his feet. To his bare ankles they felt smooth and cool as silk. Liu wriggled his toes, walked a few steps, and grinned. This was no dream.