Ha Jin - War Trash

"Yuan," Commissar Pei said in a tobacco-roughened voice, "I want to ask you a serious question."

"Sure," I said.

"Would you like to join the Communist Party?"

Taken aback, I hesitated for a moment, then answered, "I want to, but I don't think I'm qualified yet."

"Why not?" Ming put in.

"I went to the Huangpu Military Academy, and for the last few months I got entangled with the Nationalist followers again."

"Don't take that as a burden," the commissar said. "I sent you to the reregistration and the Party is responsible for what happened. As for your past in the Nationalist academy, you have done enough to correct it."

How could I correct my past? His remark amazed me. Ming said, "Don't be so modest, Yuan. You've contributed a lot to our struggle in the prison camps. You're qualified."

"Yes," Pei said, "I can't think of another comrade, except maybe Ming, who has done more than you for our struggle. I don't mean to force you to apply for Party membership. But if you do want to, keep in mind that I'll be happy to be your advocate."

"The same here," Ming added.

"Thank you, I'll remember that," I said.

That ended our long day. A rooster crowed from the village and dawn was breaking, so we all went to bed to catch a few hours' sleep before we set out for China. My heart was again filled with warm feelings. In every way it seemed right for me to go back.

The first snow had covered Changtu Town when we arrived, and the crowns of trees, in which sparrows were twittering hungrily, looked like clouds. The returned POWs were billeted in a large barracks, altogether over six thousand men. The place was called the Repatriates Center. During the first two weeks, some top provincial officials came to visit us. They brought along live pigs and sheep, thousands of solicitous letters from the civilians, and an opera troupe that performed for us twice. One afternoon some girls from a local middle school came to sing to us and presented us with two huge bouquets of fresh flowers. On top of those, a hefty brass medal was conferred on every one of us. The leaders in charge of the center told us that we should rest well and study some to catch up with the country, and that soon we would all go to different jobs. So we felt excited and grateful. The returned officers ranking above regimental commander stayed at a guesthouse in the compound, but they and everyone else had the same kind of board, which was good, much better than what regular servicemen ate. We often had meat and fish; tofu and vegetables were plentiful, though there was more wheaten food than rice, which was scarce in the Northeast. In spite of the nourishing diet, most of us still looked sallow and much older than the staff members running this place who were roughly our age, as though we had all joined their parents' generation. Some fellows already had bald heads and gray beards, and some had lost their teeth.

To my delight, I found my young friend Shanmin here, who hadn't changed much, though he was a bit taller. He told me that Weiming had suffered a stroke and had been hospitalized in Shenyang City. Together we wrote him a letter, but we never heard from that good man.

During the first few weeks we went to study sessions to be briefed about the development of our country, but mostly we relaxed, just to recuperate, and tried to enjoy ourselves. All the men were fond of hot baths, which I rarely took for fear of revealing my tattoo to others in the bathhouse. When I had to bathe myself, I would face a wall while undressing, and would wrap a towel around my waist on my way to a pool. I was not alone in bearing such an embarrassing mark; more than forty men had anti-Communist slogans on their bodies too. I went to the clinic and begged Dr. Liang to remove the tattoo from my belly. He had been helping some other men, cutting the shameful words and signs off their skin. Sometimes he didn't get rid of the whole thing and just removed a word or two to make a dark phrase unintelligible or give it a new meaning. He knew English and would play with the alphabet. In my case, he said the procedure should be easy: he suggested keeping the word FUCK and just erasing all the letters in the word COMMUNISM except the U and the S. I was reluctant at first, but an officer in charge of disciplinary work, who happened to be present, clapped and said this was a wonderful idea, so I agreed. The doctor did a good job and even added three dots behind each word. As a result, the original tattoo was transformed into FUCK… U… S…

We had all written home as soon as we arrived at the Repatriates Center, but not many of us received mail. I was anxious. So was Ming, whose fiancee was in Canton and should have been able to get his letters within three or four days.

From the fifth week on the real study sessions began. By now we had been left in the charge of the Northeastern Military Command; in other words, the leaders in Beijing had washed their hands of us. We were all ordered to confess the crimes we had committed in the enemy's prisons and to contrast ourselves with the hero Huang Jiguang, who had hurled himself on an American machine gun at the embrasure of a bunker after he ran out of grenades. The people running the study sessions announced to us these three principles, which we must follow from now on:

1) The very fact that you became captives is shameful. You could have fought the enemy to your last breath but you did not. Therefore you are cowards.

2) How could cowards carry on the struggle against our enemy? Even if there were some resistance activities in the prisons, they mainly originated from your need for survival. So you have no merit to talk about and must confess your wrongdoings and crimes.

3) You must blame yourselves for your captivity and must not attribute it to any external cause.

The study sessions terrified us. Whoever had served as a leader in the prison camps was now labeled a collaborator, and whoever had told his captors his true name and his unit's serial number was classified as someone who "betrayed state secrets." The fact that you had smoked American cigarettes meant that you had succumbed to the enemy; it was forgivable that you had eaten their food, but your acceptance of the luxury of tobacco was submission. My four merit citations were gone like smoke, not to mention those special ones Pei Shan had issued to the dead men buried on Cheju Island. Many returnees were outraged by this sudden development and often buttonholed Commissar Pei, complaining about the unfair treatment and begging him to protect them and get the citations back for them. In their eyes he was still a demigod who embodied the Communist Party, so they wanted him to confirm their awards, which might have proved their loyalty to our country. He promised to have the citations validated, though by now he must have known that his superiors would never acknowledge them.

The commissar too was under investigation and was having trouble saving his own skin. It was rumored that the Americans at Camp 8 had once drugged him and made him give a reactionary speech, which later had been broadcast on the radio. He himself had been unaware of this. Now he might not be able to clear himself from the charge of collaboration. Furthermore, his superiors believed that at least five thousand people of our former division had been taken prisoner, and that the large number indicated that the division's leaders hadn't organized their men to fight determinedly. Therefore, as one of our top officers, Pei was held responsible for our defeat. To avoid being confronted by his men, he stopped coming out of the guesthouse. But fortunately he stuck to his word in my case, asserting that it was he who had sent me to Pusan to get reregistered in place of Ming, and that I had landed in the pro-Nationalist camp while serving the Party's cause. So I wasn't classified as a traitor, though the leaders wouldn't let me off without many rounds of denunciation.