Ha Jin - War Trash

What happened after dinner was even more astonishing. We were led into a secret basement in the back of the tent. It was like being inside a bunker, but it was well lit, and on a small dais of earth covered with a piece of hardboard sat a radio – a glossy case made of grained oak, about two feet long and one foot high. Colonel Lee told me that they had exchanged canned food and blankets for this machine with a grocer and had it smuggled into the compound. As I was wondering if they had radio contact with the North, Mr. Park placed his hands on Chaolin's and my shoulders, saying, "My dear comrades, only because we seized General Bell could we invite you over. But we have nothing special to entertain you with, so I thought perhaps you might like to listen to the voice of Beijing."

Heavens, they could hear broadcasts from China! We hadn't heard a single sound from our homeland for more than a year. Hurriedly we bent over and turned on the radio. Through the rasping static came a female voice, crisp, clear, and warm. It announced:

More donations were received lately. To support our army on the Korean front, two and a half million people participated in the public assemblies held in the capital last week, condemning the American invasion of Korea and championing the anti-imperialist cause. The actress of Yu Opera, Chang Hsiang-yu, donated a large sum for a jet fighter. The painter Huang Ran offered five of his paintings. A party of famous writers sold their manuscripts. All the proceeds are going to our army in Korea…

The news seemed as distant as if it were coming from another planet. At the same time it was so close that it was tightening my scalp, contracting my chest, and shaking my heart. Tears were coursing down Chaolin's and my faces. The air was so charged that nobody made a sound for a long while. Noiselessly we let our tears drop on the damp, yellow, foreign earth. Colonel Lee wept too.

There was to be a preparatory meeting at the Koreans' headquarters attended only by the key leaders. Chaolin stayed on for the meeting, so for the rest of the night I was free. As I walked out of the tent, large emotions were still surging in my chest. The salty breeze stung my still-wet face, and my heart was filled with homesickness and love. If only we could be heading home tomorrow! If only the moon were a transmitter that could send a telegram to my mother and Julan! But I curbed my fantasies and walked on, taking care not to get near the barbed wire, beyond which a group of GIs stood. They were smoking and jabbering, their guns emitting flecks of bluish light, their shiny helmets dulled by the string nets over the steel.

Somehow in my mind echoed the words of the Russian revolutionary novelist Nikolai Ostrovsky: "The most valuable thing to man is his life. Life belongs to him only once and should be spent this way: when he recalls his past, he will not regret having wasted any time or feel ashamed of having accomplished nothing. Thus he can say on his deathbed: I have devoted my whole life and every bit of my energy to the most magnificent cause of humanity – the struggle for the liberation of mankind." Like many others, I had committed to memory this passage from How the Steel Was Tempered, but now it was resonating more in my mind. I felt for the first time that I was a useful man, and that my life had finally been shaped by a goal. How small an individual was. Only when you joined a cause greater than yourself could you expand your individual role by a "multiplier." For the time being, maybe the struggle against the American imperialists was the "multiplier" I had been seeking. Even though my role at this conference made me feel rather aggrandized, I was, after all, a mere translator and didn't even play second fiddle to Chaolin. I got so carried away that I even considered applying for membership in the United Communist Association again.

I found a place in the tent reserved for the representatives and went right to bed. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, and I'd better rest well for it.

For breakfast all the representatives had jook, a Korean dish, which was somewhat like porridge but with meat and diced turnip in the rice. The word jook, I thought, must be derived from the Chinese word zhou, which means porridge. Every one of us was served a full bowl of it, and a plate of kimchee sat in the center of each table for everybody to share. The Koreans couldn't live without kimchee, which was obviously a rarity here. We ate almost ceremoniously; everyone seemed to make an effort not to rush. Chaolin and I didn't care for kimchee; the chili was too hot for us. But I liked the smell of the cabbage and ate a few cloves of garlic pickled in the sauce. The jook, however, was tender and tasty; the meat was from canned beef stew. Again I was impressed by the Koreans' resources.

The conference started at 9:00 a.m. in a large tent. In the middle of the room stood eight long tables grouped together and covered with blankets; chairs were arranged around the tables. At the end near the entrance was the defendant's seat, and at the opposite end was a chair for the head of the conference. On the wall behind this seat spread a Chinese and a Korean national flag. The enlarged committee meeting of the previous night had elected Colonel Choi the chairman and Hao Chaolin and another man the vice chairmen. So Choi took his seat at the head of the table; on his left Chaolin and I sat together. The three Korean women were seated next to me. In all, there were forty-two representatives and witnesses from seventeen compounds.

After everybody sat down, we began to discuss the agenda of the conference, which was approved unanimously. Then we sent for General Bell.

Bell came in with a ponderous gait and sat down in the defendant's seat. Colonel Choi announced that the conference had begun, and that the first major item on the agenda was to allow Bell to listen to the representatives' accusations and condemnations. He told the general in English, "You can defend yourself, but you must respect facts."

Then the representatives began to speak by turns. The Koreans had prepared a good deal of evidence for the abuse and violence they had suffered, and even claimed that some of their comrades had been coerced into joining the South Korean army. They described how their men had been tortured and killed just because they wanted to return to the North. A number of them had vanished, nobody knowing their whereabouts; had they been shipped away by our captors to some remote place as guinea pigs for the experiments in biochemical weapons? General Bell sat vacantly, perhaps because he couldn't understand much of what they were saying despite the joint effort of two interpreters, who spoke English with abrupt inflections and misplaced accents like beginners.

A tall man stood up and spoke in a hoarse voice, tears streaming down his face. He pointed his forefinger at the defendant and kept shouting. The left side of his face was scarred, burned, he said, by hot irons when he had refused to betray his comrades. He pulled up his shirt to display some dark wounds on his chest, which he kept slapping. He said these scars had been inflicted on him by South Korean guards and GIs. There was also a healed knife gash on his stomach in the shape of a horseshoe, which looked at least ten years old. The Korean interpreter was rendering his accusations into broken English that was hard to follow, but the main drift was clear. He was saying how he had been refused medical treatment because he wouldn't speak into a tape recorder.

After him, a squat man spoke. He said an American officer had given him a steel bar and ordered him to murder Mr. Park. He wouldn't do that, so they hung him up on a beam in the torture chamber and thrashed him almost to death. A South Korean sergeant even threatened to cut his anus and feed it to a dog. After this a willowy boy, about eighteen years old, stood up and spoke in a thin voice. He claimed that a GI often groped him when searching him at the gate to his compound.