At war’s end, Uncle Fu was assigned to Shenyang in 1953. “I knew your Auntie Yi’s boss, and he introduced me to her, and then we got married.”
I asked if it was love at first sight.
“En’e,” he replied—dialect for “Sure”—surprising me with his candor. “Isn’t it always that way for a man, when he meets the woman he wants to marry? I don’t think that’s true for women, though.”
Auntie Yi’s family was living in Wasteland, so Uncle Fu was transferred to work at the airfield in 1957. “Land reform had finished, so the land had been carved up and distributed to the peasants, but like I said, there wasn’t much out here then. When the Cultural Revolution started, the Red Guards didn’t have anything to destroy. But our family—my wife, San Jiu—they had a tough time because their ancestors had been labeled ‘rich peasants.’ I was a soldier, so the Red Guards left me alone, and I could stand in front of anyone they wanted to yell at. But they were ferocious. We didn’t know who they were; they came from the city, and it was like an invasion. You can’t even imagine it, seeing these strangers in the village, yelling at people. Really, I didn’t understand what they were doing; to a soldier, it was completely without discipline.”
I asked if there was ever talk of the army subduing the Red Guards—if, after surviving Korea, his unit didn’t want to knock the teenagers playing at revolution into the paddies. Uncle Fu smiled. “It’s logical to ask that now, but back then everyone was used to following orders—the military but also the farmers, since they had been commanded in the co-ops, then the communes. It was as if we were employees, waiting for the boss to tell us what to do.”
Chairman Mao died at three o’clock on September 9, 1976. “A store in Lonely Outpost had a television, so the whole village gathered there. Can you imagine that, all of us standing there, trying to get a look? We all cried, and then someone would get tired and have to step away, so the crowd would move up a spot. You waited until someone got tired from crying, and then you could see the screen better,” he said. “But I was genuinely sad. It was three days of silent mourning, and people really were silent. The next year Zhou Enlai died, and Zhu De died after that, but by then I couldn’t cry anymore, even if he was the founder of the People’s Liberation Army.”
Uncle Fu didn’t have a single photograph of any of this: his home village south of the Yangtze, his parents, his classmates, his fellow soldiers, his camps in Korea, his airport hut, or the construction of this house. “No one took photographs then,” he said, shrugging. “They didn’t start recording statistics or taking a census here until 1956, when Wasteland became a village and the administrative office opened. Before then this place had no records. Officially, our history begins in 1956. That’s how I understand it. I arrived the following year.”
Tunk went the cork thermos stopper, and he carefully poured hot water into my bowl. I wondered if Uncle Fu had ever seen an American up close in the war. His mouth fell. “I forgot to tell you! I was there when the American bombers took out the bridge in Dandong.”
The city’s name meant “Eastern Peony”; my wife had been named Peony in Chinese because her uncle returned from a trip to the Yalu River town the night she was born. I found this as ignominious as being named Fargo, but Uncle Fu said it linked her arrival to a journey, just like life itself: “When you have a child, put a character from this place in its name.”
“Waste or land?”
He chuckled. “You don’t have to ask me that.”
Uncle Fu said the fight for the bridge in Dandong was the time he was most scared in the war. “The commanders said we were going to cross that bridge into North Korea,” he recalled. “But during that battle, I couldn’t imagine it.”
You can stand on its remains; the bridge has become a patriotic education base, but one more muted than the museum perched on Dandong’s hill, whose entrance greets visitors with that catchy ditty “Defeat Wolf-Hearted America.” Its exhibits tell visitors that Chinese soldiers “took good care of every mountain, river, grass, and tree owned by the Korean people” as they repelled the “attack of U.S. imperialists and its running dogs.” The War to Resist America and Aid Korea Museum is not for our friendship.
But neither is the minor industry in Chinese gloating that thrummed on Dandong’s shore. Every half hour, from dawn to dusk, ferries motored halfway across the Yalu so tourists crowding the railings could snap photos of the North Korean town of Sinuiju. It showed rusting ships, fishermen in threadbare tank tops, and a man pedaling an old bicycle. Chinese passengers said:
“Look at how backward they are! So poor!”
“This is what China looked like during the Cultural Revolution.”
“I hear they still use ration coupons to buy food.”
“They must think we betrayed communism. But they must admire our development.”
Only a generation ago, many Chinese cities looked nearly as moribund. The ferry made a wide turn, and we saw what the North Koreans face all day: cranes building high-rises, billboards advertising banking services, and roads filled with private cars. The War to Resist America and Aid Korea Museum. Along the bustling promenade: a row of telescopes, where people pay to stare at an empty shore.
They also see the black steel bridge that stops mid-river. Built in 1911, the former railroad bridge once linked Japanese-controlled Korea with Manchuria.
Now visitors can walk five hundred yards, halfway across the Yalu, where the bridge ends at an observation deck. Four concrete pilings draw a dotted line to the far shore. Tourists pose next to a disarmed bomb, and a plaque that says the United States bombed the bridge from November 8 to November 14, 1950. The story ends there.
But Uncle Fu had said he was most scared then.
In late 1950, the war had seemed all but over. North Korean troops had been pushed out of Seoul and back across the Thirty-eighth Parallel; United Nations soldiers occupied Pyongyang, and the North’s air force had been destroyed. From his Tokyo headquarters, General MacArthur, commander of the UN forces, declared that his troops would be home by Christmas.
Despite OSS reports of Chinese movements toward the Yalu River, MacArthur repeatedly asserted that China would not cross into North Korea. The Communists had just won China’s civil war and inherited a crippled economy. Its army could not even invade Taiwan, let alone take on the United States.
Chairman Mao, in turn, saw that America’s post-world-war commitments stretched from Berlin to Tokyo, and now into Korea. China could put four times as many men on the ground as the UN forces, which it did, nearly surreptitiously, in October 1950 by having them march at night and hide in caves during daytime. A sixteen-year-old Uncle Fu was among the 120,000 troops that flanked the American Eighth Army. An additional ninety thousand soldiers were en route.
Meanwhile, MacArthur had cabled Washington, D.C.: “The defeat of the North Koreans and of their armies was thereby decisive.” In fact, the war was about to be extended another twenty months.
Until November 1950, UN forces had been fighting “under wraps,” ordered to “stay clear of Manchurian and Soviet boundaries.” American naval pilots, taking off from carriers in the Yellow Sea, could not pursue Chinese pilots in Soviet-supplied MiG jets or attack antiaircraft guns stationed across the border. This mandate created “MiG Alley,” a zone of airspace along the Yalu River where American pilots played a deadly game of cat and mouse. Chinese fighters took off from Dandong’s airfield, climbed to thirty thousand feet, dove with guns blazing on American planes, then darted back across the Yalu and safety. Among their targets was a young ensign named Neil Armstrong. Before he took one giant leap for mankind on the moon, Armstrong was shot down over Korea, evading capture and flying a total of seventy-eight combat missions before leaving the Navy at age twenty-two to become a test pilot.
MacArthur pressed President Truman to allow pilots to engage in “hot pursuit” over the Yalu. Truman, fearing China’s entry into the war, instead prohibited any air strike within five miles of the bor
der.
In his memoir, MacArthur wrote that these restrictions made him feel “astonishment” and “inexpressible shock.” He told his chief of staff: “For the first time in military history, a commander has been denied the use of his military power to safeguard the lives of his soldiers and safety of his army.”
MacArthur threatened to resign, but Truman—facing down McCarthyism, criticism that he had “lost China to the Reds,” and a predicted Democratic defeat in congressional elections—relented on the five-mile exclusion zone. MacArthur could bomb the Yalu River town of Sinuiju, the seat of Kim Il-sung’s fugitive government. In reply to his request to destroy its bridge, severing it from China, he was ordered: Only take out the span’s “Korean end.”
It is easy to imagine MacArthur’s jaw clenching as he read the cable. Had the joint chiefs—including General Omar Bradley, commander of Allied forces in western Europe during World War II—forgotten how difficult it was to level a bridge from the air? The flooring itself was easy to drop, but also easy to replace. Even when poorly defended, taking out a bridge by plane required multiple low, pinpointed bombs at key supports. Furthermore, because the United States “did not want to be in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy,” General Bradley and the Joint Chiefs authorized the Yalu River bridge mission only on the condition that American airmen attacked the structure on the perpendicular, not by the more effective approach of lining up their planes along the bridge’s axis and releasing their bombs.
The pilots would have to fly into a hail of antiaircraft flak and Chinese fighters, and try to hit the bridge on a pass. At a preflight briefing, an admiral told his men: “Our naval pilots have been given a most difficult task. Our government has decided that we cannot violate the air space over Manchuria or attack on Manchurian territory regardless of the provocation. If such attacks were made, the world might be thrown into the holocaust of a third world war.”
On November 8, American B-29s used napalm and incendiary bombs to level 60 percent of Sinuiju. Sixteen other cities were hit as well. “All of North Korea would be cleared in ten days,” MacArthur promised. “Unfortunately, this area will be left a desert.”
In history’s first all-jet air battle, Chinese planes intercepted Americans targeting the Yalu bridge. Remarkably, no pilots on either side were downed. Neither was the span.
The next day Navy pilots tried again, with Panther jets hitting the bridge under the cover of propeller-driven Corsairs, which fired at the antiaircraft guns. From twenty-seven thousand feet, through unrelenting flak, “we came down in a high-angle attack, probably around in a 70-degree dive,” a pilot recalled. “I remember I went down on my target with my wheels down. You did that in a Corsair for high angle dives in order to keep your speed down. Otherwise you’d get up to too much speed and you couldn’t use your flaps as the speeds were so fast you’d just blow them right off. The landing gear was designed to take the high speeds encountered in steep dives.”
The bridge remained standing.
Back in the United States, Harry S. Truman followed the results of the 1950 congressional elections aboard the presidential yacht. Truman was “drunker” (on bourbon) and “more dejected,” his official biographer wrote, “than anyone had ever seen him.” Earlier that week he had been the target of a botched assassination attempt by Puerto Rican separatists, and now the election brought further woe: Republicans had gained five seats in the Senate and twenty-eight in the House.
President Truman missed the next day’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs (his memoir noted only that he was “unable” to attend), where they concluded that MacArthur wanted an all-out war with China. They favored a political solution to Korea, such as the one proposed by Great Britain, that UN forces retreat and the countries stay divided at the Thirty-eighth Parallel. General Bradley later wrote that they should have stood up to MacArthur then. “We read, we sat, we deliberated and, unfortunately, we reached drastically wrong conclusions and decisions. We let ourselves be misled by MacArthur’s wildly erroneous estimates of the situation and his eloquent rhetoric, as well as by too much wishful thinking of our own.”
MacArthur had refused to salute Truman at their last face-to-face meeting, on Wake Island the previous October, but the president had not disciplined him, writing: “You pick your man, you’ve got to back him up.” Nor did he confront the general after he wrote the House Republican leader to criticize Truman’s management of the war, having ignored his suggestion of opening a second front in China using Nationalist troops from Taiwan. Now MacArthur would not call off attacks on the Yalu bridge even after Chinese forces had realized the Americans could not cross into their territory. They had even stopped camouflaging their antiaircraft guns.
American pilots flew headlong at them, soaring low along the spine of the bridge, then banking up hard to avoid entering Chinese airspace.
Still the attempts continued, into the gales of flak and ninety-five-mile-per-hour crosswinds. After six hundred sorties, the “Korean half” of the Yalu bridge finally fell on November 14, 1950.
Five days later, the river froze.
Chinese forces, including Uncle Fu, marched over the ice to join the war. For MacArthur, “the wine of victory had turned to vinegar.” The conflict would last for another twenty months, but MacArthur wouldn’t be there at the end: Truman sacked him for insubordination in April 1951. A cease-fire would divide the Korean Peninsula at the Thirty-eighth Parallel. The war solidified Chairman Mao’s control of the Party and China. It also claimed his eldest son, killed at age twenty-eight in the November air raids by a napalm bomb dropped from a South African plane.
Under a withering sun on the day I visited, a group of South Korean tourists toting umbrellas crowded the end of the Yalu River Broken Bridge, getting to within five hundred yards of that forbidden shore. I stood apart, imagining propeller planes diving at seventy degrees with their landing gear down, dodging dogfighting jets. Antiaircraft guns flashing along both riverbanks. Water spraying. Thunderous explosions. Against a twisted steel support, tourists posed beside the bridge’s plaque that explained only: During the war, the United States bombed it from November 8 to November 14, 1950.
CHAPTER 16
Beginning of Autumn
In August, Wasteland ripened green. The rice nearly reached my hips, and its broadening stalks cloaked the paddy’s water. Walking down Red Flag Road felt like cutting through a plush carpet that needed to be combed for frogs. Their pulsing croaks reverberated from the fields.
It was the solar term named the Beginning of Autumn, and, San Jiu said, the most stressful time for a rice farmer. Harvest was only thirty days away, and he walked through his plants checking for diamond-shaped yellow lesions made by a fungus called rice blast. Historically, it was the grain’s deadliest pathogen, and one that could destroy an entire crop. “It’s always a threat,” San Jiu said, “but it usually appears about three-quarters of the way through the growing season.”
He checked each plant, whose fuzzy seedpods crumbled like damp chalk when cracked. “One more month,” he said. He pulled weeds from the irrigation ditch, explaining that soon he would drain some water to strengthen the rice’s roots. “Now the days are hot and the nights are chilly. When the days cool down, too, we can harvest.”
I noticed that he never added the Chinese equivalent of “Knock on wood.”
“Superstitions are useless,” he said. “You have to do the work.”
But every day fresh fruit appeared before his home’s statue of Shennong, the bald, long-bearded icon representing the founder of Chinese agriculture. “That’s not a superstition,” San Jiu said, seriously. “That’s a tradition.”
Mr. Guan had no icons in our house, or much of anything. No ticking clocks, no alarms, no television or radio. It was the quietest place I had ever lived: my cell phone ring often startled me, which, when I yelped, Mr. Guan thought was hilarious. I changed its setting to silent.
My runs had lengthened
to ten, then twelve, then fourteen-mile loops. Compared to the surrounding hamlets, Wasteland looked kempt and cared-for. The official’s visit had left the mementos of houses painted harvest yellow, the clean cement of widened Red Flag Road, and solar-powered streetlights. They were the area’s first, and while people said they were good, villagers didn’t go out much after sundown anyway, because that was time for dinner, television, and bed. Auntie Yi eyed the blue-and-red bunting adorning each lamppost. It advertised Big Wasteland Rice and Shennong Hot Spring.
“Eastern Fortune paid for this road, so now it’s their billboard,” she said. “What we need is a speed limit sign.” It was true: the improved road looked like a runway. Cars tore down it as if attempting to get airborne. It was unsafe for bikers and pedestrians, and I diverted my running route north, onto dirt roads.
Someone had already tagged a few of the poles with graffiti praising Falun Gong, the tai chi–practicing sect that the government had banned in 1999 as an “evil cult.” In Wasteland, however, spray-painted stenciled characters proclaimed it “good.” It was the only graffiti I ever saw in the village, and soon it popped up on other lampposts and the metal staircase that ascended the new bridge over the high-speed train tracks.
Also posted: a notice announcing Eastern Fortune was hiring men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five to work in the polishing shop, loading sacks of grain and running the machines. Mr. Guan got the job; his shift began at eight. He was pleased, because he could still fish before clocking in. Just like that, he said, he had a second income. Eastern Fortune was good.
In Manchuria Page 28