Ha Jin - War Trash

Ming, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, was too tall for the role of Harry Truman, so he kept his legs bowed all the while, his feet fanning out to form a V. This made him clownish. He said to the banker, "Paul, we need another billion dollars."

The capitalist, in a top hat and a tailcoat, answered with one hand on his potbelly, "Mr. President, we don't have much left in our bank. We gave you two billion last year." He twirled a walking stick while speaking.

"That wasn't a gift, it was a loan."

"But we've already shared the cost of the war, haven't we?"

"Come on, we're talking about this year. Can't you give us another loan?"

"At this rate, the war will soon bankrupt us, sir."

"Give me a break! You guys always make tons of money whenever there's a war."

"But we have to reserve a certain amount of capital to make profits."

"Darn it! I'm your capital, I'm your investment, I am the president of the United States!"

"But a billion dollars is astronomical to us."

"Of course it's a huge sum. We have to maintain a large army on the Korean Peninsula."

Their exchange was interrupted by the unannounced appearance of two senators, one mustachioed and the other partly bald. Then the conversation resumed, and after another round of argument, the billionaire yielded and granted the loan at high interest.

As the scene proceeded, suddenly a GI shouted from the guard tower, "Hey, Officer Feng, you goddamned buffoon! Stop making fun of our president!"

That startled me because I thought he was yelling at me. Then I realized he knew Ming only by his alias, which was Feng Wen, close to mine. Another GI thundered, "Get your ass off the stage, Truman!"

A third cried in a joking tone, "Hey, Truman, you're fired! If you don't get off of the stage, I'm going to open up on you."

But to their credit, they didn't interfere further with the performance other than a few shouts, and remained a good audience for the rest of the play. More earnest than the Americans, the South Korean guards gathered outside the fence, along the barbed wire, watching attentively. Some of them even applauded when the curtain fell.

During the next few days, a number of Americans mentioned the performance to me. They wondered how it had been possible for the prisoners to stage a full-length play and where we had gotten all the theatrical props and costumes. I told them that some of the prisoners had been professionals, specifically the director, Meng Feihan, who had specialized in the performing arts. They were more impressed. One said, "Never thought there were artists among you." I was surprised that they would use the term "artist" so loosely. To us Chinese, only a maestro should be called that.

The Americans had taken us to be an army of peasants, more like cattle than men. The play seemed to have changed their perception of us a little. Later I noticed that the guards would treat the few actors somewhat differently from the regular prisoners, with more respect. They would no longer curse them. This amazed me, because to most Chinese an actor was just an entertainer, and however talented he was, he still belonged to the lower strata of society. His job was only to please others, so he wasn't as important as an officer or an official.

Since we had moved into the new compound, the GIs guarding it had treated us less harshly. This was mainly because we kept our tents clean and were not as belligerent as the Korean prisoners. A group of U.N. inspectors visited our barracks and was satisfied with its order and sanitary conditions. As the inmates got to know the American guards better, some of them often went to the front entrance to bum a cigarette off the GIs or watch them taking coffee ladled out of a large cauldron on a kerosene stove set behind a shack. A few men asked me what coffee tasted like. "Bitter. You can't drink it without sugar," I told them. By regulation the GIs were forbidden to talk with us, but many of them did anyway.

I often went to chat with them, because I had been assigned to do so. Although our headquarters had access to Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper, we couldn't get it regularly enough to follow events outside the camp. A number of our men were in charge of cleaning and maintaining the GIs' quarters, so whenever possible, they'd secretly bring back the newspaper. My job was to read the news and translate the useful information for Commissar Pei and his staff. This was a good, rewarding job, which I enjoyed. My role as a translator enabled me to read a lot and made me feel important. From the newspaper we learned more about the Panmunjom peace talks, at which the issue of the POWs had been raised. An article reported that China had its own air force now, which often engaged American planes over North Korea, though not effectively, because our pilots were inexperienced. There were about a dozen air force divisions in our country, all equipped with MiG-15s. But we had no idea how many planes made up a division, so the prisoners often argued about the exact number – some said one hundred while others insisted on seventy-two. I also read that the American soldiers were eager to go home and that normally they stayed in Korea for no more than one winter, whose harshness intimidated them. One article implied that desertions among the U.S. troops had increased considerably in recent months, and that some GIs had even invalided themselves out of the front line by inflicting wounds on themselves.

There was some news that might have disheartened our comrades, so I didn't translate everything. For example, it was reported that North Korean and Chinese servicemen had occasionally shot prisoners who were too weak to keep up with the other captives in their march to prison camps. Another report said that a secret investigation was under way in the People's Volunteer Army, intended to "ferret out those disguised counterrevolutionaries," the primary targets of the scrutiny being the new recruits with unclear political backgrounds and the defectors from the former Nationalist army, like myself. I didn't mention this to anyone. But I told Commissar Pei that Chairman Mao's eldest son, Mao Anying, had been killed in an air raid. Pei was stunned and couldn't speak for a long while.

"This doesn't seem like a pure accident," I hazarded. "How could the American bombers be so accurate? He was in a shelter when they went to attack."

"Don't let anyone else know of this," Pei said.

"I won't."

"Our Chairman's other son is demented. This must've been a heavy blow to the old man, who must hate the American imperialists all the more. I'm afraid we won't see the end of this war soon."

My ability to control the flow of information in Compound 602 gave me a sense of power, which, to be honest, I relished. Yet what pleased me most was the opportunity to improve my English and the access to the kind of news regular Chinese publications wouldn't carry. Each issue of the newspaper consisted of more than twenty pages and many photographs, and I read every word of it.

Soon the GIs noticed that our men were pilfering their paper, so they stopped tossing it around. Our supply of Stars and Stripes became more erratic – sometimes we got five or six copies of the same issue, but then we wouldn't have any for an entire week.

So I was assigned to chat with the guards as often as possible to collect information from them. I found that most of the Americans were quite talkative. Almost without exception they enjoyed being listened to, especially by an enemy soldier who could understand their language. Sometimes after a bout of talk they would return to the sentry post; then a few minutes later they'd stroll back to me and start talking again. They too seemed lonesome and hated this place intensely. So I often listened to them talk, and from them I gathered useful bits of news.