Ha Jin - War Trash

Besides Shanmin, who insisted I had saved him from the pro-Nationalists' clutches, Ming also stood up for me. When I was ordered to confess what I had done in Camp 13, I said I had spent most of my time learning English. They asked me what I had read; I dared not say the Bible and instead mentioned some newspapers and magazines. Every day I was ordered to recall something new about my helping Father Woodworth teach the hymns and about my serving Wang Yong as his interpreter and henchman. I couldn't remember all the details, so they wouldn't let me go.

Then one afternoon Ming rose to his feet and spoke on my behalf. With a red face and a bulging neck, he said to the officers presiding over the mutual criticism session, "Look, Comrade Yu Yuan did make a mistake in mixing with Priest Woodworth. But he got stationery from him and passed it on to me. Unlike most graduates from the Huangpu Military Academy who paid only lip service to our Communist cause, Yu Yuan helped us and participated in our struggle constantly. He saved Commissar Pei by speaking to the American commander Smart before our comrades boarded the ships bound for Cheju Island. Nobody among us could do that, could we?" A few men shook their chins. Ming went on, "When he was jailed in the troublemakers' cell, he led two comrades in creating the Pei Code, without which communication between Commissar Pei and the camp would have been impossible. Later he helped his battalion chief get a falsely signed document back so that the enemy officer couldn't use it to clear himself of his crime. Some comrades here saw with their own eyes what kind of role he played in that struggle. Without his negotiating with the American officer, we couldn't possibly have gotten the signature back. Last spring he was ordered to go to Pusan in my place, to get reregistered there. He went without a murmur. We all thought he wouldn't come back because the Americans might dispose of the four officers they had summoned. Many comrades shed tears when seeing him off. Tell me, what else do you need to prove a comrade's loyalty to the Party? The Party told him to die, and he went to die. It was a pure miracle that he returned. Let me tell you this: on our way back from Korea, Commissar Pei and I decided to recommend him for Party membership. There isn't another comrade here who deserves it more – "

"Sit down, Chang Ming!" barked one of the officers in charge of the session. "You don't even know if you yourself will remain in the Party while you think of inducting others. You must be out of your mind.

Have you forgotten who you are, just like Pei Shan who gave merit citations right and left? Ridiculous, as if every one of you were a big hero. From now on, you must first regard yourself as a criminal."

That stunned and silenced Ming, whose record in the war had been impeccable. But his speech did help me, and since then I was pressed less often and less forcefully.

Then they began interrogating those who couldn't pass the self-criticism sessions. It was said that there were a large number of American and Nationalist spies among us, and the higher-ups vowed to ferret them out. Every week some men got arrested and sent to a prison in Fushun, a coal-mining city about a hundred miles to the south. This frightened us and made us more obedient. Many of the repatriates tried hard to please the authorities by "exposing" others and criticizing themselves more severely. Some even admitted that they were cowards and had helped the enemy, though they couldn't come up with any convincing evidence for their crimes. A few even claimed that they would have cracked if they'd been imprisoned longer, if the Party hadn't rescued them in time. I was puzzled why they reviled themselves like this, as if they had been real traitors. Probably their guilt was too deep and too convoluted for them to find a more appropriate way to express it. They often wept like wretched little boys.

Finally I heard from my fiancee's elder brother. He wrote in red ink that my mother had passed away a year ago and that if I really cared about his sister, I mustn't bother her anymore, because she couldn't possibly marry "a disgraced captive." He also said: "Don't think ill of Julan. She was good to your mom and tended to her till her last day. I hope you can sympathize with my sister and see the difficulties she is facing." I felt as though time had played a cruel joke on me. If only I had known about my mother's death when I was in Korea; if only I had foreseen that home was no longer the same place. Then at any cost I would have gone to a third country, where I could have lived as a countryless man, and probably as a lonely drudge for the rest of my life. Or I might have gone to Taiwan and restarted my life there. But now it was too late to change anything. I was crushed and took to my bed for a week. I sent Julan two more letters and also the jade barrette half, but I never got a response from her.

Then disaster befell Ming. In one of his letters to his fiancée, he wrote, "I hate the vastness of our country; otherwise we could see each other sooner, without so many mountains and rivers between us." He had always been a careful man, but he blundered fatefully this time, having forgotten that our mail was monitored. That sentence was distorted by those officers waiting to bear down on him. He was turned into a counterrevolutionary who had maliciously wished the map of our country were smaller. I felt terrible for him but couldn't do anything to help.

As I calmed down, it grew clear to me that for a long time we, the POWs, had already been written off as a loss. The reasons our delegates at Panmunjom had frequently mentioned us were that they could use our suffering to embarrass the enemy and that if they hadn't shown some concern for us, more prisoners would have gone to Taiwan, and mainland China would have lost more face. Now that we were back and couldn't possibly join the Nationalists anymore, we were no longer a concern to the Party, which finally handled us in any way it liked.

What surprised me most was that the top officer, Commissar Pei, didn't fare any better than the rest of us. In other words, he and we had all been chessmen on the Party's board, though Pei had created his own board and placed his men on it as if his game had been identical with the Party's. In fact he too had been a mere pawn, not much different from any of us. He too was war trash.

We were not allowed to leave the Repatriates Center until the next summer. With few exceptions we were all discharged dishonorably, which meant we had become the dregs of society. All the Party members among us lost their membership, because before going to Korea they had taken an oath at Party meetings that they would never surrender under any circumstances. Therefore the Party viewed their captivity as a breach of their pledges. Hundreds of men were imprisoned again, labeled as traitors or spies. From now on we were all placed under special control for the rest of our lives. Ming was sent back to his hometown in Szechuan to carry water for a bathhouse to make a living; his fiancée married another man who had been Ming's classmate at Beijing University. Shanmin was returned to his home village to be a peasant. Commissar Pei went to a state-owned farm in

Panjin, in western Liaoning, to be a rice grower, though nominally he was a vice manager of the farm. Chaolin, who had joined us later at the Repatriates Center, was assigned to a steel plant where he became a foreman in a workshop. We had all thought he'd be able to keep his former rank because of his service on the persuasion team in the Demilitarized Zone, but that operation had foundered miserably – they'd persuaded only about four hundred men to come back. So, like us, he was disciplined and demoted.

Compared with most of them, I was lucky. Because I was not a Party member and had neither broken any promise nor followed the pro-Nationalists to Taiwan despite being a graduate from the Huangpu Military Academy, I was given a job in a middle school, teaching Chinese, geography, and later English. I liked the job, which I held until I retired six years ago. Since the fall of 1954 I have lived in Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province. I have never returned to Szechuan.