Ha Jin - War Trash

Red flags fly high on October 1. Our comrades' blood bears out The American imperialists' crimes. However brutal the enemies are, We shall be more resolute. Our hands can stop their bayonets

And stones can block their bullets.

Shoulder to shoulder we form a bastion

To defend our national flag

And fight the savage foe.

Our hatred is redoubled -

The debt of blood must be paid in blood.

The evil American imperialists

Cannot escape the hands of justice.

We sons of the new China

Shall make our deeds known to the world

And keep our flags flying for good.

Best in peace, our brave martyrs.

You will always live in our hearts.

Despite its simpleminded boastfulness, this song became quite popular and served as a fighting anthem for some POWs. I disliked it and never learned to sing it. Yet I was amazed by my comrades' great zeal for songs. Every day there was so much singing in the camp that even some GIs picked up the tunes. One of them, a skinny fellow with red sideburns, would chant at us the line "March, march, follow Mao Zedong" as a kind of greeting.

Gradually I came to understand that singing was a cathartic experience for the prisoners. A song's contents didn't really matter; as long as the men could sing something together, they felt better. Many of them were depressed and cantankerous, so a songfest was an expedient for releasing their grief and anguish and for restoring their emotional balance. We missed home and our former ways of life terribly. This mental state disposed many of us to be sentimental. I saw men weep all of a sudden for no apparent reason, perhaps just touched by a happy thought or by a surge of self-pity. Without question, singing together assuaged their misery and cheered their hearts. More importantly, songfests enabled them to identify with one another emotionally so as to increase their feeling of solidarity, though the affection they felt for their fellow inmates could be momentary.

The singing also eased the prisoners' tremendous dread of loneliness. The inmates were very gregarious, as most Chinese are. Some of them feared loneliness more than incarceration. As long as they stayed together and organized, they felt they had a better chance of survival. Singing provided them with a kind of socialization that not only soothed their aching hearts but also suspended their individual isolation. Frankly, sometimes I wished I were more like them, capable of chanting whatever came to mind with total abandon.

Another question troubled me for some time. Were the arts groups' creative activities truly artistic, as they claimed? In the beginning I had respected the composers and the painters immensely. Unable to play any instrument, I'd look up to whoever could saw a tune out on a fiddle even if he played with assumed bravura. But before too long I noticed that there was a crudeness in whatever they did, as though the idea of perfection had never entered their minds. I daresay this crudeness originated from their utilitarian conception of the arts. They created every piece of work merely for its usefulness, like that of a weapon: each was made simply for the purpose of rousing people and boosting the fighting spirit. These creations had an instantaneous feel, a dash of spontaneity, but invariably ended in a slipshod fashion. Most of the time a man would finish writing a song or a poem at one go, and he'd be proud of completing it "without changing a single word," and even brag about it, as though to assert that the work had come purely from inspiration, which was a mark of genius. Patience and refinement were alien to these young men, who couldn't see that art didn't have to be useful or serve a purpose other than entertainment. Their works could be powerful at times, but never beautiful. So I began to have deep reservations about their efforts and sometimes felt they were just wasting their energy and time. No doubt these men were talented, ingenious, and passionate, but they always stopped at the point to which their cleverness led them, not going beyond into complexity and subtlety, not to mention depth. As a result, however extravagantly they used their talent, they remained like smart hacks, blind to their own shoddiness. There was no way to explain my thoughts to them without risking my neck, so I kept quiet.

Unless I had to, I didn't sing with others. My young friend Shanmin enjoyed singing, and I didn't discourage him. I spent more time reading English-language newspapers. It was my job to glean information for our leaders, so nobody interfered with my reading. Often tired of news articles, I craved a good book, a long novel or biography. This mental deprivation was more painful to me than hunger. Sometimes I sat alone with an old issue of Stars and Stripes on my lap, but my eyes couldn't register the meanings of the words as I sank into thought. This manner of sitting, however, was a safe way to indulge in my own thinking. I felt that when I was alone, my mind would be clearer and more alert. I didn't have to join the inmates in the morning exercises; instead, I would read loudly for an hour to practice my spoken English, which was also my job.

Barely having enough to eat, I couldn't run as often as I wished. Sometimes I did dozens of squats inside the shed, deliberately putting more weight on my injured leg; once in a while I ran a few laps along the fence of our compound. If I had been given enough food, I would have been happy to labor like a coolie every day, because I believed that physical work and fresh air could keep me from rotting away in jail. I wanted to return home healthy and strong. I was not yet twenty-five and should have a long life ahead.

But I wasn't well fit for hard labor. I once left the camp with fifty men to dig ditches in the South Korean army's training base, where recruits were drilled before they were shipped to the Korean mainland. The work was exhausting, though once in a while you could be lucky enough to find a turnip or a sweet potato left in the fields. That morning we set off at eight and dug away for a whole day with only a half-hour break for the midday meal. It drizzled in the afternoon; few of us had brought our rain ponchos, and by the time we returned in the evening, most of us were drenched. I couldn't get up the next morning, aching all over, and remained sick for several days. The doctor forbade me to join the ditch diggers again. My bad leg, not having fully recovered from the injury yet, couldn't stand the long hours of work. Oddly enough, this experience made me see that some of the "artists" stayed in the barracks for artistic creation perhaps because they wanted to shun physical labor, from which only officers and the disabled could be exempted. This realization instilled into me some contempt for those able-bodied shirkers.

Being an interpreter, I was regarded as an officer by the Americans and the prisoners, who literally called me "Officer Interpreter." So the inmates didn't like my joining them in their work, as if I was a nuisance to them. My bad leg wasn't strong enough for me to carry anything heavier than sixty pounds; this made me a poor hand when we unloaded a ship or truck. Some men often poked fun at me, though good-naturedly, saying they didn't need a scholar around when they were slaving away. But I wasn't a total weakling in their eyes. We had arm-wrestled several times, and I could beat many of them.

The work I liked best was shoveling, which could tone my muscles without overstraining my injured leg. At first, when I used a shovel, I would drip with sweat and have a sore back and hot, swollen hands in the evening. But gradually I adopted a rhythm when shoveling dirt or sand or gravel. I could apply a shovel with a swing of my upper body like a skilled laborer. Whenever there was shoveling to do, I would volunteer to go. Sometimes they took me and sometimes they didn't. Wet mud was much harder to shovel, but because so many hands were available, we would tie a rope to the shaft of a shovel, just above its scoop, and have two men pull at both ends of the rope to help the shoveler lift a pile of mud. This rhythmical group shoveling could be fun if you were teamed with the right men, with whom you could swap jokes.