by Ha Jin
One morning, about three weeks after my arrival at Koje Island, I ran into Chang Ming, the editor of our division’s bulletin. At first I wasn’t sure if it was he, but then, spotting his bushy eyebrows and catfish mouth, I almost cried out with joy. He saw me too, but we pretended we didn’t know each other because there were people around. He was on the other side of the barbed-wire fences, in Compound 71. I squatted down to retie my shoelaces while he stopped to do calisthenics. When everyone had gone out of earshot, we rushed to the fences and started talking excitedly. The first thing he asked me was whether I had signed up to go to Taiwan. “Of course not,” I said proudly. He looked four or five years older now, though still robust. His thick lips were cracked. Miraculously, he hadn’t been wounded.
Through four rows of barbed wire, he told me that having seen the chaotic state the POWs were in, he and Hao Chaolin had both admitted to the prison authorities that they were officers, so that they could be transferred to Compound 71, a small place holding only about two hundred Chinese officers and staunch Communists. I was surprised to hear that Chaolin had also ended up here. I guessed both of them must have been scared by the unorganized men and the pro-Nationalist force in their former compound.
“But we didn’t tell them our true names,” he said. “I’m Feng Wen now.”
“What a coincidence—my name is Feng Yan!”
“So we sound like siblings now.” He laughed—the same carefree laugh of a confident man.
“Did you meet Commissar Pei in Pusan?” I asked.
“He’s here too, in Compound 86.”
“Really? When did he come?”
“A week ago. He hasn’t been exposed yet. We must figure out a way to protect him.”
“Do you have regular contact with him?”
“We get instructions from him once in a while.”
“What should I do? The men here are like hoodlums, although some of them want to return to China.”
“Try to get along with them, I mean with those who want to go home. Don’t remain isolated. We made a terrible mistake last fall. We didn’t think much of the leadership in the prison camp. Assuming we’d be returned to China soon, we didn’t put a lot of effort into the elections. That’s why most positions in the camp are held by the reactionaries.”
“All right, I’ll try to blend in with them. What else should I do?”
“We’ll talk about it later. Our immediate goal is to get the leadership into our hands.”
He also told me that there was another compound, Number 70, which held Chinese POWs. All the prisoners in it went out to work at the wharf and construction sites, and there were five hundred of them, all able-bodied. How I envied them! If only I hadn’t been wounded. I would love to get out of the camp every day, even if it meant sweating like a coolie.
From that day on Ming and I met regularly, almost every morning. Following his advice, I began to mix with the men in my platoon. From the moment I joined them a month earlier, Bai Dajian had caught my attention. He looked familiar to me, though I wasn’t sure if I had met him before. He was twenty-one years old, rather timid, but seemed trustworthy. Unlike others, he wouldn’t gamble, never quarreled with anybody, and often sat alone absentmindedly. As we got to know each other better, I found out that he had actually been my schoolmate at the Huangpu Military Academy, though one year after me. This discovery brought us closer. He had specialized in cavalry but studied at the academy only for a year. When the Communists disbanded our alma mater, he was still a freshman and was later assigned to the Fortieth Army. It turned out that both of us were engaged, so we showed each other photographs of our fiancées. His sweetheart, a nurse in Shenyang City, was an extraordinary beauty with large vivid eyes, a sharp nose, and clear skin, somewhat like a movie starlet. We both admitted that we missed our brides-to-be terribly and once even wept over their pictures.
Dajian had lost two fingers to frostbite. The story of his capture was so horrific that he couldn’t tell it without gnashing his teeth. One morning in January 1951, his cavalry company had followed their division commander’s Russian jeep to the front. The north wind was screaming, raising snowdrifts on the slopes and across the road, which was slippery and bumpy, rutted by American vehicles the previous fall. Coming out of a mountain pass, the commander spotted some snowmen to his left, about two hundred yards away in the woods. He told the driver to stop, wondering who on earth had found leisure to build snowmen in such a desolate place. He trudged over to the site with his orderly, escorted by a squad of cavalry. To their horror, they found that the figures were actual human beings, frozen to death, some standing, some lying on their backs, and some embracing each other, hardened into statues. They scraped the snow off one man and saw the Chinese Volunteer’s uniform; the commander realized these were actually his own soldiers.
A whole battalion, over four hundred men, had perished without being noticed by their higher-ups. The commander began cursing the regimental staff, saying he’d have some of the officers court-martialed. The truth was that these men had been under his command as well, so he ought to have been held responsible too. His orderly identified the body of the battalion commissar, who had been known as an eloquent speaker. The division commander took off his own overcoat and covered the dead officer.
Then he ordered the cavalry company to ship the bodies back to a service center. Dajian and his comrades loaded the corpses on their horses, each pair tied together with a rope and placed over the flanks of a horse. But they could carry only 230 of the dead and would have to return to pick up the rest. They walked the horses back the way they had come, while the division commander continued toward the front.
In the evening the cavalry approached a frozen lake, ready to take a rest. Suddenly a contingent of Australians under the U.N. flag appeared and surrounded them, firing mortars and machine guns and ordering them to surrender. The horsemen, exhausted and having left their Bren guns and 60-millimeter mortars back where they had found the dead, couldn’t repel the enemy. They didn’t even have their bugle with them. So in just one charge the Australians subdued them and rounded them up. They made the cavalrymen unload the corpses and give all the Mongolian ponies to a South Korean mule train that transported ammunition and medical supplies for the U.N. troops. Then they marched the captives eastward through a chain of mountains for a whole night. The next morning they handed them to the Americans, who herded them onto three trucks, which shipped them to the POW Collection Center in Pusan. It was during the night march that Dajian’s left hand had frozen. Later in the camp his index and ring fingers were amputated. A third of his comrades hadn’t survived the march, left behind on the mountains and buried by snowdrifts.
“The Communist leaders sent troops to the front without enough winter clothes,” Dajian said to me, shaking his round chin and breathing hard. “It’s a crime. They used men like beasts of burden, like burning firewood.”
Although there was truth in his remark, I dared not say anything about the Communists so openly in our tent. I whispered to him, “Shh, don’t talk so loud. Some of them are here.”
He was so angry at his former superiors that he often called them miscreants. I was worried about his outspokenness.
6. FATHER WOODWORTH
Sunday mornings provided an opportunity for all the men in the different tents to meet, because Father Hu would preach in Liberty Hall at the Civil Information and Education Center. The hall was a large tent that could seat fifteen hundred people. Over a thousand prisoners would go to Father Hu’s sermons, which he delivered in Chinese, though he was from the United States. On the face of it this pudgy man was neutral, kind to everyone; but in reality he hated the Communists and served as a liaison between the pro-Nationalist POWs and the camp authorities. So the Communists were boycotting his Methodist church.
There were other religious groups in the compound too. I chose to go to the Catholic church in a small stone house with a Calvary cross atop it. Father Woodworth preached there on Su
ndays. I attended his service mainly because I wanted to learn English and also because my mother had been a Catholic when she was a young girl. Besides, I couldn’t afford to offend the Communists by going to Father Hu’s service. There were only about forty attendees at Woodworth’s sermons, but he didn’t looK discouraged and spoke just as passionately as if he were addressing a large congregation. For that I admired him more. Woodworth was a lanky man in his mid-forties, with greenish eyes and a wrinkled but intelligent face. His legs were so long that some prisoners called him the Drawing Compasses. He was a chaplain, in uniform like an officer.
He had noticed me from my first appearance at the church, probably because I was attentive when he was speaking. Most of the audience, not knowing English, couldn’t make out what he said, and my facial expressions must have shown that I followed him. One day after the sermon, as he was taking off his surplice, I went up to him and said, “Father Woodworth, may I ask you a favor?”
“How can I help you?” he said.
“Can I have a copy of the Bible? I want to study it on weekdays.”
“You can understand it in English?”
“Yes.”
His eyes gleamed. “All right, I will have it delivered to you. Put down your name and unit number here.”
He opened his spiral-bound notebook, in which I wrote down the information. Although I had said I could understand the Bible, I wasn’t very sure of my English. Ideally I should have had a dictionary. I had lost everything when I was taken captive, including my dictionary and the dog-eared Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Whatever kind of book the Bible was, it was at least something I could read.
Among Father Woodworth’s forty attendees, a number of them seemed attached to him, probably because they intended to seek his protection, though some might truly have been drawn by his eloquent manner and his deep, resonant voice. These men were better educated than most prisoners, and the majority of them were pro-Nationalists. However, none of them knew English well enough to read the Bible or talk with Woodworth, so I must have been a rarity to him.
On Thursday afternoon the company’s orderly came to our tent and summoned me to headquarters. Off I set for the office, which was just a two-room hut, with the Nationalist flag and the Star-Spangled Banner flying above its door. The company leader, Wang Yong, was sitting at his desk when I stepped in. He motioned for me to take a seat in front of him and then patted an opened parcel on the desktop. Without any preliminaries he said, “So, you’re a well-learned man, Feng Yan. You know foreign words, eh?”
“Yes, I can read English.”
He poured a splash of saki into a coffee mug and handed it to me. “Have some,” he said.
“I don’t drink, thanks.”
“Wow, a clean man,” he sneered.
He then offered me a cigarette, which I accepted. I wondered what he had up his sleeve. He said with narrowed eyes, “I tell you what, the minute you walked into this company, I could see that you’re not an ordinary fish.”
“Thank you for your attention.” I pretended to take his words as a compliment.
“What I mean is you were an officer, not an enlisted man like you claimed.”
“I was just a secretary, in the Third Company of the 539th Regiment.”
“Come on, stop trying to hoodwink this old man. I served in both the White Army and the Red Army. I met hundreds of men and know you must’ve been somebody. I strongly urge you to go to Taiwan with us and not to follow the Commies. One of these days Generalissimo Chiang’s forces will sweep away all the Reds and recapture the mainland. It’s time for you to decide which side to take, and you better decide wisely.”
“Chief Wang,” I said in earnest, “to be honest, I’m not a Communist. The reason I cannot sign up for Taiwan is that I have an old mother at home. She’s alone and I’m her only child. My father died long ago.”
“You see, the Commies would even recruit an only son like yourself. They use men like ammo. Damn them, in just one battle with a British battalion last spring, our division lost over a thousand men. So much blood flowed on a hill slope that the next morning hundreds of rooks flew around with blood-stained wings. Still, the higher-ups called it a victory, because we had overrun the enemy’s position in the end.”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “I never thought so many Chinese would be buried in Korea.” His words conjured up the horrible image I hadn’t been able to shake off—that the war was an enormous furnace fed by the bodies of soldiers.
“Think about what I just said, Feng Yan. I won’t force you, brother, but honest and true, you don’t have a lot of time to shilly-shally anymore—everybody will have to decide soon.”
“I’ll think it over.”
“Okay, let me know once you’re done thinking. Now you can go and take this with you.” He pointed at the parcel wrapped in Kraft paper.
I dared not offend him. If he took a dislike to me, he could easily destroy me. Already he’d had a number of men taken to company headquarters and forced them to sign an anti-Communist vow, which he then posted publicly. By so doing, he had cut off those men’s route of retreat to China, where punishment from now on would await them; thus he coerced them into becoming nonrepatriates. These days Wang was busy promoting a tattoo movement among the pro-Nationalist prisoners, who volunteered to have words and drawings marked on their arms, chests, bellies, and even foreheads. Technically this primitive procedure wasn’t painful—with a writing brush they inscribed words or a picture on a man and then used a needle to puncture the skin stained with black ink. The words were mainly slogans, such as “Fight Red Bandits to Death!,” “Oppose Russia and Marx!,” “Capture Mao Zedong Alive!,” “Loyal to Nationalism!,” “Root Out Communism!” The drawings included a radiant sun representing the Nationalist emblem, a knife plunged into a hairy pig that symbolized Mao, a boat bound for the Treasure Island—Taiwan. The tattooed men often walked around with their upper bodies naked to show off the words and drawings, which did intimidate many of us.
On the way back to my tent, I was delighted to see a brand-new copy of the Holy Bible in the parcel. It was the American Standard Version, leather-bound, with Jesus’ words in red and a concise concordance at its back. Since it was too noisy inside the tent, I sat outside and began reading Genesis. The words made me slightly giddy, not because of the meaning of the Scripture but simply because I was reading something that wasn’t just propaganda. I hadn’t come across a real book for half a year; the deprivation had whetted my appetite. The English of the Bible was not difficult and I seldom came across a new word. This meant that from now on I could read some pages every day!
The next morning I met Ming again. I told him that I had been pressed to go to Taiwan and that soon everybody would have to make up his mind once and for all. He said he had also heard this. In fact, in Compound 76, which held Korean prisoners, an operation was already in the works. It was called “the screening,” at which every POW had to declare formally where he would like to go, the Koreans to North Korea or South Korea and the Chinese to mainland China or Taiwan. Ming also said that a few of our former comrades had been transferred to the company where Commissar Pei was now, because the Communists had regained power in the Third Battalion of Compound 86. Ming might go there soon, and the Communist leaders had offered the First Battalion of my regiment to exchange a pro-Nationalist for me so that I could join my comrades in Compound 86, but Wang Yong wouldn’t let me go. This last piece of information unnerved me. Why would Wang keep me in his clutches? How could I be useful to him? Then it flashed through my mind that both the Communists and the pro-Nationalists were interested in me because I knew English.
In addition to preaching, Father Woodworth also taught the prisoners hymns at the education center on Wednesday afternoons. A burly Korean man played the accordion to provide music for him. More people attended the singing sessions than the sermons, perhaps just for the fun of it. Few of them, however, understood the contents of the songs; it was the music that attra
cted them. I liked the hymns very much. Whenever I heard the joyous, melodious tunes, my heart would leap. Regardless of the uncanny words about God and Christ, the music was the only beautiful thing in this hellish place. So more and more people went to learn to sing hymns.
On the last Wednesday in March, when the singing session was over, Father Woodworth called to me. Agitated, I walked up to him. He said in a sonorous voice, “I also want to ask you a favor, Mr. Feng.”
A few inmates turned around to look at me while trooping out of the classroom, because usually a prisoner wasn’t addressed as “Mister” by our captors. “Sure, what is it you want me to do?” I asked.
Fingering the lanyard of his pince-nez, Father Woodworth said, “Do you think you can put some of the hymns into Chinese?”
“I don’t feel I can translate them well because I really don’t know much about music. Even though I put the words into Chinese, they may be hard to sing.”
“I don’t mean to ask you to translate them into verse like the original. Just do a rough translation so that we can read it to the others before they learn how to sing them. I reckon that if they know the general meaning of a hymn, they can sing it better, don’t you think?”
“That’s true.”
He unzipped his scuffed leather briefcase and took out a new notebook, a pencil, and some loose pages from a hymnal. “You can use these,” he said.
I was moved and promised, “I’ll do my best.”
For a whole week I worked on the hymns, which were not difficult to translate—I was supposed to provide merely the gist of each song. From the next Wednesday on, I would sit in the front row when Father Woodworth taught us the hymns. Before we started singing he’d call to me, saying, “Number seven, ‘There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,’ ” or “Number nine, ‘Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.’ ” I would stand up, turn to the audience, and read out my Chinese translation. My assistance to the chaplain drew people’s attention in the compound. In the prison camp every company had at least one interpreter, who in most cases just knew a few words of English. So it was said that I spoke English better than any of those interpreters, perhaps because I had talked with Father Woodworth in front of hundreds of men without being outwardly nervous.