Isn’t it strange? I lived in Rangoon for many years and never saw Prime Minister U Nu. Yet after returning to China, I saw him in Kunming.
It was at the turn of summer and autumn in 1956. I was working in the central laboratory of the Yunnan Optical Instrument Factory in Kunming. It was a secret factory producing military goods, and its public name was Factory 298.
Its predecessor had been Arsenal No. 22 under the Nationalist government. It was completed in January 1939, outside Kunming’s south gate in Liuba Village, and specialized in the manufacture of optical instruments such as binoculars and artillery rangefinders. The quality of its products was excellent and comparable to that of Germany’s Zeiss.
During the War of Resistance, because the factory was located on the outskirts of Kunming and was an obvious target, it was often bombed by Japanese aircraft. Later it was moved to the Haikou area in the western suburbs, more than twenty kilometers from the city. The factory was built by tunneling into the mountainside, and antiaircraft guns were placed on the mountain above, so Japanese planes did not dare fly low. In October 1940, Japanese planes bombed Haikou, but the underground factory was completely unharmed.
After Yunnan’s peaceful uprising in 1950, the People’s Government took over the factory. It continued producing military instruments and recruited young workers from many ethnic groups, expanding to a workforce of four or five thousand.
Security at the factory was strict. Workers from one workshop were not allowed to wander freely into another. I did chemical analysis in the central laboratory. My job was to prepare the standard titration solutions needed for chemical testing and to analyze the copper content in metal samples sent by the various workshops. Apart from my own work, I did not know what the other workshops were making, nor was I permitted to ask.
One day we heard that a distinguished foreign guest was coming to visit. Workers from the various workshops lined up along the factory corridors to welcome the visitors. I squeezed into the crowd, clapping while craning my neck to look.
Suddenly I saw provincial leaders in Zhongshan suits accompanying a guest dressed in Burmese clothing. He wore a Burmese headwrap, a longyi, and a white collarless Burmese shirt.
Someone in the crowd whispered, “That’s the prime minister of Burma.”
Walking beside him was a middle-aged man of medium height whose face looked strangely familiar.
Wasn’t that Huang Kaichang?
In my excitement, I called out his name. He seemed startled and looked through the crowd. Two guards also became alert and began searching around. I suddenly sensed that the atmosphere was not quite right and quickly shrank back behind the people around me. At that kind of place, at that kind of moment, it was all too easy to arouse unnecessary suspicion or misunderstanding.
Huang Kaichang did not see me. He calmly continued on, and the distinguished guests entered one of the workshops.
I walked outside the factory corridor and saw black sedans and jeeps parked beside the basketball court. Near the vehicles I ran into Comrade Zheng Hua, who was serving as a driver. We were delighted to see one another and talked for a while. Only then did I learn that the visitor was Burmese Prime Minister U Nu.
A factory like this was rare not only in Burma but even in China. Its technology was advanced.
Huang Kaichang was serving as U Nu’s Burmese-language interpreter. Only several years later did I learn that after returning to China, Huang Kaichang had changed his name to Huang Li.
I entered Nanyang Middle School when it was first founded in Rangoon. At that time, Huang Kaichang was a reporter and Burmese-language translator for Rangoon’s *People’s Daily*. He also taught Burmese at Nanyang Middle School and was a member of the Irrawaddy Choir.
During the War of Resistance, he had been an active patriotic young man in the struggle against Japan and had participated in the Burmese Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Wartime Work Corps, usually called the Wartime Work Corps.
The driver transporting the foreign guests that day, Zheng Guosan, was more than 1.7 meters tall, dark-complexioned, sturdy and strong. He had been the first school-bus driver when Nanyang Middle School was founded. He liked to study and enjoyed sports. After returning to China, he changed his name to Zheng Hua.
In the spring of 1949, Zheng Hua returned to China and joined the “Borderland People’s Guerrilla Column” led by General Zhu Jiabi, known locally as the “local Communists.” After Yunnan was liberated, the guerrilla force was reorganized into the regular People’s Liberation Army. He did not want to become an officer and preferred driving, so he stayed on in the provincial government and drove sedans for its leaders.
In 1956, when U Nu, chairman of Burma’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, visited China, he toured the Tianjin Textile Machinery Factory and presented fifty tons of rice to its workers in thanks for the textile machinery they had manufactured for Burma. Xinhua News Agency reported this.
But before returning home, U Nu also visited the Yunnan Optical Instrument Factory. Perhaps because the factory was secret, this visit was never reported in the newspapers.