by Ha Jin
I remember vividly the day when Dr. Greene came to take out my stitches. It was on October 31, 1951, six days after the first anniversary of China’s entering the Korean War. Having removed the twelve stitches with scissors and tweezers, she helped me get out of bed, then said, “See if you can stand on your feet now.”
I began trembling, both hands gripping a tent pole, a piece of rough-hewn timber. I dared not let go of it at first. Then slowly I shifted all my weight to my legs and released my grip. She came around and stood in front of me, saying, “Ah, you can stand by yourself now, very good. I’m impressed. Come on, a step toward me.”
Several inmates were watching us. Although I pulled myself together, I couldn’t move. It was as if my feet had rooted into the floor. She urged me, “Come on, take a step. Be brave, soldier.”
Too ashamed to disappoint her, I clenched my teeth and slowly stretched forward my left foot. But after having lain in bed for more than three months, I couldn’t keep my balance. As my body lurched forward, she reached out and held me by both shoulders. She said, “Come, try again. Don’t be afraid. You can do it.”
Her face was so close to mine that I smelled her sweetish perfume and I felt myself blushing. I made my utmost effort to straighten up my back and then advanced a step. Miraculously, I didn’t fall!
“Good, try another step,” she said.
So I did one more, which marked a new beginning in my life. Clapping, she smiled like a child. If she had not been in uniform, nobody would have taken her for a soldier, let alone one on the enemy’s side. When she had helped me come back to my bed, I was sweating all over. She sat down too.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Feng Yan.” I was surprised by her question.
“I know. I mean what two characters do you go by?”
I had no pen, so she pulled out her ballpoint and handed it to me, together with a prescription pad.
I wrote out the words “Feng Yan” in a cursive script. I had practiced calligraphy for years, so the characters came out handsomely.
She looked at the two words for a moment, then said, “You’re an excellent calligrapher and a good-tempered man, I can tell. Can you teach me how to write the characters?”
Unsure whether she asked that as a lark or in earnest, I answered, “You speak Chinese very well, so you must write it well too.”
“Not at all,” she said. “Although I grew up in China and graduated from Tongji Medical School, I’ve never been able to write the characters well. When I was a child, I didn’t spend time doing calligraphy. Later in college when I took notes in class, I just scribbled everything down and didn’t pay attention to my handwriting.”
Now I understood why she spoke Chinese so fluently and treated us so kindly. I didn’t ask about her parents, who must have been missionaries. The medical school she’d attended in Shanghai had been well known for its Western-style education, where most courses had been taught in English and some by foreign professors. After the Communists took over the country, that school had been closed down. I couldn’t contain my curiosity and said to her, “May I ask you a question?”
“Of course you may.”
“How come you’ve become an army doctor here?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Did you volunteer?”
“Yes and no. Last year, after graduation I went back to the States to see my biological mother. On my way back I stopped in Japan. The Korean War had just broken out and army doctors were in short supply, so I was recruited by the Far Eastern Headquarters. Then I came to Korea.”
“Don’t you hate China because we came to fight the U.S. Army?”
“When I joined up, I’d never thought China would take part in this war. Later China rushed in, but I still can’t hate China, to be honest. I was raised in China, which is my second country.” She turned thoughtful, then continued, “I have a question for you too. You have no airplanes, no warships, and no tanks; how can you possibly win this war?”
I said sincerely, “MacArthur’s army would have crossed our border and seized Manchuria if we hadn’t come to Korea. We had no choice but to fight the better-equipped aggressors. But with justice on our side we will win this war.”
“You’re very idealistic,” she said. I could tell she was dubious.
By now several inmates had moved closer to listen to our conversation, so I switched the subject. “Do you really want me to teach you calligraphy?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“But how can I do it?”
“That’s easy. Tomorrow I’ll bring you some paper and a pen. You write a sheet of characters as models, like in a copybook. I’ll take it back with me and copy the words. This will be a good way to spend my off-hours.”
I agreed readily, determined to do what I could to repay her.
Toward the next evening, she came with a shiny black fountain pen and a sheaf of white paper. On the top page were three big characters, Ge Su-Shan, which looked stiff and slanted toward the right. Obviously her handwriting had been affected by her sloping English hand. She said, “Here’s my Chinese name. You see, this is the best I can do. Can you teach me how to write my name well first?”
I began to explain to her how to inscribe the individual strokes, the horizontal one and the vertical one. Then with the pen I illustrated the left-falling stroke, the hook, the dot, and the right-falling stroke. She tried to write a few, but couldn’t do them well. I was surprised that this was difficult for her, but I also could see that she had attempted calligraphy before, just as every pupil had to practice it in a Chinese elementary school. Frustrated, she asked me to hold her hand to inscribe the strokes so that she could feel how the pen was supposed to move. This was a common method in teaching calligraphy, we both knew. Yet I hesitated, reluctant to touch her hand, in part because I was a prisoner but mainly because of the inmates gathering around to observe. Their eyes unsettled me.
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t you Communists believe in equality between men and women? At this moment I’m your student.”
Her words embarrassed me, so I held her hand. Together we began writing the strokes. Her hair and her clothes exuded a whiff of tobacco; she must have been quite a smoker. I had noticed that the tips of her index and middle fingers were slightly yellow. Although her hand had silky skin and slim fingers, it was quite strong, its muscles tight and its bones sturdy. I was surprised to find her fingernails rather stubby. Her hand felt more like a male laborer’s. This put me somewhat at ease, and we concentrated on the hook and the right-falling stroke. In a way I was moved by her letting me hold her hand to practice. I smelled of DDT, which had just been sprayed on me for delousing.
After half an hour’s practice, she could do most of the strokes decently. She was happy about the progress.
When we stopped for the day, she asked me to write some words she could take back and copy in her spare time, since she couldn’t come every day. I thought for a few seconds, then carefully wrote down this ancient poem:
Sand dunes are glimmering like snow
Beyond our camping ground.
Behind us, moonlight
Is frosting a frontier town.
Whence comes the tootling pipe?
For a whole night
The soldiers think alike
Of the distant fireside.
She read the lines silently, her lips opening and closing, revealing her strong teeth. Then she told me, “Actually I studied this poem in middle school. But it means more to me now.”
Lifting her head, she said to the patients around, “You should all take good care of yourselves. When the Panmunjom negotiations are over, you can all go back to rejoin your families.” A few men sighed. She glanced at a man’s handless arm and added, “I hope this is the last war of mankind.”
I wanted to say something, but words deserted me.
From that day on Dr. Greene came to see me once a week, handed in her homework for me to correct, and took
back a page of sample characters I had inscribed for her. When she was here, she also checked my wound, which was healing fast. The inmates would gather around to see her homework and often praised her progress. Gushu was quite attached to her, saying she was a saint, because she had managed to stop his wound from suppurating.
Although our ward accommodated over seventy patients, most beds were unoccupied during the day. I found that a good number of the men were ambulatory and were actually fairly healthy; they were probably remaining here because the hospital offered better board and lodging than the regular prison camps. I wondered why the doctors didn’t discharge them. There was so much deliberate confusion of identities among the POWs, who often destroyed their ID tags and changed their names randomly, that the doctors could hardly keep track of all the patients. Beyond question, some of these men were malingerers, good at faking illness. The hospital seemed to have become a vacation place for many POWs.
Now that I was able to move around with the aid of crutches, I often left the tent. It was already early winter and most trees had shed their leaves. Naked branches made the yellowish land appear more drab; even the sea to the south had turned gray. But in the north the hills were still green, scattered with patches of junipers and cypresses. I often watched seagulls flying in the sky draped with ragged clouds. The birds had no walls or fences to confine them. How precious the idea of freedom was to a prisoner! I couldn’t help but compare myself with almost every creature my eyes fell upon. Even my worm’s-eye view of American airplanes often set me imagining how free the pilots must feel up in the air.
One day I heard some women singing a Russian song, “The Boatmen on the Volga River,” which had also been popular in China; afterward Captain Yoon told me that that compound, number 12, contained only female prisoners. I could see a corner of their barracks, which must have held hundreds of Korean women. The reason we had mistaken them for civilians was that some of them had been guerrillas and still wore long-sleeved white dresses, black skirts, or baggy slacks. Later I heard that there was only one Chinese woman in that compound. I had known her, Zheng Dongmei. She had served in our division’s song-and-dance ensemble and worn a pair of short braids. She was full of life and so cheerful that wherever she was, you could hear her singing and laughing. But she wasn’t a good soldier and could pitch a grenade only fourteen yards; in a live throw she got one of her front teeth cut in half by a splinter of shrapnel from a grenade she herself had flung.
From where we were, I could see only a small portion of the women’s quarters across a broad dirt road. Beyond their compound was the TB ward, which housed hundreds of consumptives. Somehow tuberculosis was still endemic to Koreans. In the evenings I would stand by the barbed wire and listen to the women singing. Though far away, I could hear their songs clearly because they always sang in chorus. Their voices transported me into reveries. They chanted all kinds of songs, sometimes passionately and sometimes lightheartedly, such as “Spring Is Coming,” “Marshal Kim Il Sung,” “The Anthem of the Korean People’s Army,” and “The Anthem of the Chinese People’s Volunteers.” Later I heard them sing “Defending the Yellow River!,” “Solidarity Is Power,” “The East Is Red,” and some other Chinese revolutionary songs, which Dongmei must have taught them. They also chorused Korean folk songs, whose names and words I couldn’t know. I liked those songs best. Contrary to the strident fighting airs, the folk songs sounded gentle and nostalgic, at times almost angelic. One morning I caught sight of two toddlers, a boy and a girl, playing with tin cans and wooden sticks in the women’s compound. They looked dirty and wore rags, but they laughed and ran about nimbly. With their mothers jailed here, they too had become POWs.
Not far away from our compound was the First Closure’s admission center, where the prisoners were registered and processed. In front of that hut there were dozens of corpses stacked together like firewood. I wondered why the Americans didn’t immediately get rid of those nameless bodies, which gave out a fetid odor—made even worse as it combined with the smell of the open-air public latrine. The latrine was fenced with a tarpaulin wall and had four hundred pits in it.
One afternoon as I was limping along the fence, I saw a tall man in the adjacent compound whose large, bony body and shoulders, viewed from the side, looked familiar. He was smoking beyond the four rows of barbed wire. I walked over. His hair was disheveled and his face emaciated, marred by a curved scar; his right forearm was bandaged. My heart began kicking as I recognized him—Commissar Pei!
He turned to face me. His eyes brightened, but he didn’t say a word, just smiled. Quietly I stopped before him and said, “How are you, Commi—”
“Shh, I’m Wei Hailong now and used to be a cook. Call me Old Wei.”
“Sure, I’ll do that in front of others.” I had to raise my voice a little because we were about fifteen feet apart.
“Always say you didn’t know me until we met here,” he said.
“I’ll remember that. My name is Feng Yan now. I told them I was a secretary in an infantry company.”
“Good.”
While we were talking, we both kept glancing right and left to make sure we were alone. He had been captured a month ago, together with the only three men left with him. To date his identity hadn’t been disclosed, though he jokingly said this was just temporary. He was certain somebody would betray him soon, because there were so many prisoners who had seen him as their commissar. I reported to him on my situation. To my surprise, he had heard of my association with Dr. Greene and encouraged me to get along with her so as to obtain information on the outside world. I told him about the Panmunjom talks, of which he had also learned. Though in disguise, he was apparently still a leader here, well informed and full of plans. He wanted me to remain loyal to our country and to pass on to him any news I heard.
To me his words were orders, so I became more at ease during my later meetings with Dr. Greene. I gave some of the paper she had left with me to Commissar Pei, which he needed badly.
About half a month later, Dr. Greene found a lump in my thigh. She felt it with her fingertips for a long while, then told me, “It looks like I should give you another operation.”
My heart trembled. “Do you have to?”
“Yes. But it’ll be a small procedure.”
She let me feel the lump in the back of my left thigh. True enough, it was hard and as large as an egg. She said, “I was worried that the muscle damage was so massive that some extravasated blood might form a lump. At the last operation I cleaned everything, but even so, a lump has now grown inside. If we don’t get rid of it in time, it may develop into a tumor. I don’t want to leave it to chance.”
Knowing that another doctor might not be so willing to help me, I said, “I’ll follow your decision.”
The morning after the next I had the surgery. And because I lay prone on the table this time, Dr. Greene assigned a male nurse to hold my chin so that I wouldn’t suffocate. This time Dr. Thomas again assisted her. He seemed more skilled than before; perhaps I had that impression because I no longer hated him. I didn’t wear an ether mask, so I remained conscious the whole time. While Dr. Thomas was giving me stitches, Dr. Greene replaced the nurse and held my chin until the entire procedure was over.
The operation was a complete success. From then on I could walk steadily, though I still needed a crutch for the time being. Whenever Dr. Greene came to check my condition and hand in her homework, I would ask her whether there was new progress in the Panmunjom negotiations, which we knew had run into difficulties. Then I would pass any new information on to Commissar Pei the following afternoon.
Three days after the Spring Festival of 1952, Dr. Greene came into our tent and said gloomily that there would be a group of patients going to Koje Island soon, and that I was on the list. So was my friend Wanlin. She took out a sheet of paper and told me, “I wrote a doctor’s note for you. It says you shouldn’t do any heavy work at least for half a year. If they want you to work, you can show the
m this.”
I took the note but was nonplussed. All I could bring out was “Dr. Greene, I will remember you for the rest of my life. Thank you for saving my leg!”
“That’s a doctor’s job.” She smiled and went on, “You can keep the pen as a souvenir. Maybe someday I’ll go to China to take calligraphy lessons from you again.”
I must have looked teary, because she said with genuine feeling, “Don’t be upset. We’ll meet again. All my friends and former class-mates are still in China. They’re waiting for me to go back.”
She pulled out a large manila envelope and handed it to me. She said, “Remember to give this to the doctor in the camp.”
The envelope contained my medical records and x-rays. In a way I wanted to leave the hospital, because I could move around quite well now. Also, our ward had grown spooky lately. A week ago a legless man, a Korean officer, had hanged himself on a tent pole. I couldn’t imagine that he could have done that alone—some of his comrades must have given him a hand.
Dr. Greene stood up to leave. As she walked out, both Wanlin and I went to the door and watched her moving away with slightly lurching steps. We shouted, “Thank you, Dr. Greene! We’ll remember you. Good-bye.”
She turned around and waved at us, then proceeded with her ward rounds. In no time she disappeared beyond the gate guarded by two South Koreans. It was snowing, the wind whistling and howling by turns. Fat snowflakes were fluttering down like swarms of moths.
“I’ll miss her,” Wanlin said to me and grimaced in an effort to smile.
5. COMPOUND 72 ON KOJE ISLAND
Koje Island lies southwest of Pusan, about twenty-five miles across the sea. In ancient times, it was a place to which criminals and exiles were banished. During the Second World War the Japanese had incarcerated American POWs there. Now the expanded prison site had become the central camp that held the majority of Korean and Chinese captives. On our way to the Pusan dock, I grew more anxious about the trip. Although I was going to join thousands of my countrymen, among whom I might feel less vulnerable, life in that camp would undoubtedly be much harsher than that in the hospital. I was agitated by the thought that the prison officers might ignore Dr. Greene’s letter and subject me to hard labor that could reinjure my femur.