Ha Jin - War Trash

There was another kind of political education here that was more harrowing to me. This was known as self- and mutual criticism. We were ordered to admit that one way or another we had helped the Reds and to confess whatever wrongdoing we had committed purposely or inadvertently. We had all served in the People's Liberation Army, so many men would touch on their past perfunctorily and no one would press them to confess. I was a special case, however, because for almost a year I had been away in the pro-Communist camp. Therefore, one morning in our shed, an entire session, attended by more than sixty men, was devoted to me alone. All kinds of questions were fired at me. What did you do in Camp 8? How active were you in the riot last October? What made you change your mind and come back? How can you convince us of your sincerity? Question after question, it was like attending a denunciation meeting.

I was overwhelmed, even as my mind was flooded with thoughts of my own. What's the difference between you people and the Communists? Where in the world can I ever be among my true comrades? Why am I always alone? When can I feel at home somewhere?

To my astonishment, Bai Dajian stood up, pointed at my nose, and declared in a gruff voice, "Brothers, I think this man is an agent working for the Reds."

I scrambled to ask, "Dajian, why are you doing this to me? We used to be good friends, didn't we?"

"You're not my friend anymore because you betrayed our Nationalist cause."

"Confess!" a voice commanded me.

"You're a Commie, aren't you?" another butted in.

"Come on, own up."

"Don't play dumb."

Wang Yong got up, came to the front, and stood beside me. He said, "Brothers, let's stop this dog-bite-dog business. I know how he returned to us. He showed me a letter of recommendation from an American officer based in Pusan. Feng Yan, do you still have it?"

"Yes, I have it here." I took the letter out of the inner pocket of my jacket.

"Read it to them," he said.

I read out the letter in English, then translated it into Chinese. That quieted them down. Still Dajian wouldn't let me off. He came up to me and said, "Show me the letter."

I handed it to him. He looked at it, but to my surprise, he tore it up and dropped the pieces to the floor. He said through his teeth, "This is a hoax, a fabrication." His face had lost color and the finger stumps on his left hand were quivering.

I stood there speechless, not knowing how to respond. Why had he nursed such intense hatred of me? He used to be a gentle, diffident man. Why was he so hysterical now? He must have been hurt terribly when I left him. Then it dawned on me that he might still be a passive man, and that he was malicious because he regarded me as a rival.

Suddenly Wang Yong bellowed, "I do it to your mother, Bai Dajian! You dare to destroy a document from the top. I talked with the Pusan POW Collection Center before Feng Yan was sent down, and they told me he was coming to join us of his own free will. Everything was done officially, plain like a louse on a bald head. How can you say this was a fabricated letter? What blackened your heart so? Now, you go to the kitchen and stay in there for a week helping the cooks."

The audience rocked with laughter. A few men even applauded. Wang Yong came up to me and pulled up the front end of my shirt to reveal my tattoo. "Look, brothers," he said loudly, "the words we fixed on him are still here. This proves he's been on our side all the time, don't you think?"

"Yeah!" a voice rang out.

More people guffawed. It was lucky that I had shown Wang the tattoo a few days before. He went on, "True, Feng Yan made an awful mistake in leaving us last time, but we should give him a second chance, shouldn't we?"

"Yes, this is benevolence," remarked an older soldier.

"That's the word." The chief took it up. "We're different from the Reds. We must cherish our brotherhood and treat each other unselfishly so that we can unite with one heart and one mind. Brothers, you all know Stalin popped off a few weeks ago. It's time to prepare ourselves for the great cause of toppling the Communist world.

We shouldn't just keep our field of vision within our small compound, biting and barking at each other like mad dogs. We must have the vision of a thousand miles so that we can fight all the way back to Beijing and then to Moscow."

"Yeah!" a few voices cried.

To be honest, I didn't fear this crowd all that much, because these were simpler, weaker men than the Communists. They cared more about personal relationships, especially brotherhood and group loyalty; they didn't share any concrete ideals and their actions had little consistency. I turned to face them and said: "Forgive me, brothers. I left you last year only because I had a sick old mother at home. She's very dear to me, and I'd be happy if I could remain with her till the end of her life. I'm her only child, so nobody will take care of her on the mainland. Now I'm afraid that the Reds will punish her because I'm here and going to Taiwan. Like every one of you, I can no longer fulfill my filial duty."

That silenced the crowd. A few men sighed. Somebody cursed the Communists loudly and the others followed suit.

I stole a glance at Dajian, whose cheeks somehow kept changing color, now pasty, now pinkish, now sallow. I interceded for him. "Chief Wang, please don't make Dajian do KP this time. He just got carried away. He must've been hurt by the Reds badly."

"He's a psycho. If he had an opinion, he could talk and argue, nobody would gag him. But he tore the official letter to bits like a madwoman on the street."

In the end, Dajian didn't have to work in the kitchen. I was grateful to Wang Yong for coming to my rescue, but I also realized that in the long run, if I went to Taiwan, my one year's stay in the pro-Communist camp would remain a hidden reef in my life. There would be no way to free myself from suspicion. Anyone could invoke this problematic period of my past against me.

There were three enclosures at Mosulpo, numbered 1, 2, and 3, which formed Camp 13. Each consisted of ten compounds, held about forty-seven hundred Chinese nonrepatriates, and had the same layout as Camp 8, which was thirty miles away to the northeast. Each compound within an enclosure was now called a battalion instead of a company and contained fewer than five hundred prisoners. That was why Wang Yong had become a battalion chief, though he led the same number of men. However, the gates to the compounds within an enclosure were not strictly guarded, and sometimes an inmate could slip into another battalion, since the GIs couldn't remember everyone's face.

The Americans treated these POWs more leniently than those in Camp 8. They provided them with vegetable seeds and fertilizers, encouraging them to grow sweet potatoes, cabbages, eggplants, tomatoes. The inmates could also gather seaweed and shellfish from the beach. So, though barley and corn were still the basic staples, the food here was better than what I had gotten used to eating in the pro-Communist camp. Some of the prisoners seemed to have gained a little weight. Owing to the absence of the Communists, the enclosures were peaceful on the whole. Classes were offered to illiterate inmates, and over twenty clubs had been formed, such as fellow townsmen's fraternities, mah-jongg leagues, gymnastic teams, a Catholic brotherhood, a calligraphy and painting society, a drivers' association. We had no access to automobiles, but there were a number of former drivers who offered lessons in auto mechanics and in driving skills. For the Chinese, the ability to drive a car was a professional accomplishment. On the battlefield, one headache for our army had been that we couldn't get abandoned American trucks back to our base because few of our men knew how to drive. Very often we ordered the captured GIs to move the vehicles for us, but most of them would say they couldn't handle a truck either. The truth was that they didn't want to be strafed and bombed by their own airplanes on the road.