by Ha Jin
Wang Yabing caught up with me a moment later. He clutched my shoulder and gave me a shake. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” My face was sweaty and my tongue wooden.
“You look as if you’ve been chased by a ghost.”
I was still gasping for breath. He asked again, “Did you get it?”
“Yes.” I showed him the pistol.
“Great!” He took the gun and waved it as though to fire into the sky. Together we headed back.
Our men were wrapping up the work when we returned. Chaolin was so elated to see the pistol that he wore it in his belt while listening to me report how I had stolen it. Although I admitted I had left behind the iron bar, nobody took it as a mishap, so I stopped worrying about it. Then a problem I hadn’t anticipated arose: how could we smuggle the gun back into the compound? Having talked briefly with Wang Yabing, Chaolin decided to let me carry it through the gate, because I was familiar with most of the guards.
I unloaded the five bullets and gave them to other prisoners, one apiece, to take back. This was easy for them—they could put the bullets in their mouths before going through the gate. I used a long shoelace to tie the pistol to my good thigh; the ends of the string were attached to the waist of my underwear. Most of the time the guards wouldn’t touch my thighs.
On our way back the gun chafed my groin badly, but I pretended everything was normal. Still, I couldn’t help walking bowleggedly. Some prisoners laughed at my discomfort and even imitated the way I waddled. Chaolin stared at them, eye-signaling them not to attract the guards’ attention. Thanks to my injured leg, which always gave me a limp, the GIs didn’t notice anything unusual.
The front gate opened and two guards began frisking us. When my turn came I stepped forward with a forced yawn. The GI touched my front and back, from my neck to my ankles, but he didn’t feel elsewhere. I passed the gate, then strode toward Chaolin, who was awaiting me inside the compound. The moment we got into the nearest tent, I untied the pistol and handed it to him.
My thigh and scrotum were chafed, but the medic was already in bed, so I had to wait until the next morning to have the sore treated. My muscles were strained too, owing to the awkward walk back from the wharf. Yet I was happy and went to bed without further delay. In a state of half sleep I saw myself in the American officer’s bedroom again, looking for his pistol but unable to find it. He yelled suddenly, “You can’t have it!” I woke up, my heart palpitating and the front of my shirt damp with sweat. In spite of pain and fear, I was glad I had passed the test in the way a soldier should, though in my mind a shadow of doubt was thickening. I was unsure whether the test had just been improvised by Chaolin or whether there had been a decision within the Party to give me such an ordeal. Later I asked Ming, who said confidentially that a week ago the Party had indeed decided to test my loyalty should such an occasion arise.
The next morning, a company of GIs came into our compound and ordered all the prisoners to get out of our tents. With their bayonets thrust here and there, they rummaged through all the barracks, overturning our mats and knocking down our makeshift furniture, but they found nothing. In fact, they couldn’t possibly have recovered the pistol, which had just been smuggled out of the compound by the night soil team, who had hidden it among rocks on the beach. The Americans were unsure who among us had worked the night before, though they grabbed hold of Chaolin, who claimed he couldn’t remember all the faces and names. So they ordered some of our men at the front of the crowd to step out. Unprepared for such an order, the inmates obeyed. From the back of the crowd I watched them with a pounding heart. The men who had stepped forward were innocent and most of them hadn’t gone out the night before. After inspecting them, the officer in charge, a tall man wearing two hand grenades on his chest, one on either breast pocket, picked four prisoners and had them taken away to a truck parked outside the gate. One of the four men turned colorless and hollered, “I didn’t do anything wrong! What’s this about?” The GIs couldn’t understand him and just hauled him away.
I was frightened, unsure if any of the four inmates knew about the pistol. I wondered why the officer wouldn’t have Chaolin dragged away too. Probably he was aware that Chaolin was a die-hard Communist from whom they couldn’t extract any information. I was also worried that the Americans might be in possession of the iron bar I had dropped, which could be a piece of evidence and from which they might obtain my fingerprints. A sweat broke out on my neck and forehead, but I dared not lift my hand to wipe it for fear of drawing attention. I kept a low profile, remaining in the crowd, while Ming stood at the front serving as an interpreter.
In the meantime, frustrated and unable to focus on the search, the officer began cursing us and threatened to throw some of us into solitary confinement if we didn’t tell him the names of the people involved in the theft. “I’ll try the lot of you. D’you hear me?” he shouted. “You bunch of thieves! You don’t dare to face me like a man!”
Ming didn’t bother to translate those words. We all remained silent as though nobody had understood the officer. Many looked at him with genuine confusion. Half an hour later the Americans withdrew. But before leaving, the officer warned us that this was just the beginning of the investigation.
Toward midafternoon two squads of GIs came in again, carrying shovels and pickaxes, and they also delivered to us the inmates they had taken away. The four men were all battered, their noses stuffed with bloody cotton balls and their faces swollen like loaves of bread. One had a black eye with sealed lids. They were so fear-stricken that they could hardly speak, merely nodding or shaking their heads when others talked to them. I felt awful, though none of them looked trustworthy. If they had known I was the thief, they might have given me away.
While we were busy helping the returned men, the GIs went on digging and poking around. They called us all kinds of names for causing them such drudgery, but some prisoners whistled and waved their caps at them. This annoyed them more.
They didn’t find any weapon, not even one of the five bullets, but they got hold of two pairs of pliers, which was a minor loss to us. That evening I was informed that the Party Committee here had cited me for brave service. The citation was of the third class. I was pleased, hoping that from now on my life would be easier and that they wouldn’t test me again.
The pistol was never used in our later struggle. It was passed on to the North Korean prisoners, who already possessed some small firearms.
The Communists always tested the men they suspected. I knew a number of such cases in the camp. One man was instructed to burn a warehouse storing provisions for the POWs, and under cover of darkness he torched not only the main house but also two stacks of timber nearby. The flames sprang up fifty feet high, and four fire engines raced back and forth to get water from the seaside, but everybody could see that the fire was inextinguishable. The man was awarded a special merit citation by the Party Committee afterward. Luckily for him, the Americans, after questioning many of us, gave up searching for the arsonist. Another man was ordered to steal a crate of Spam from a storehouse at night. He didn’t make it because a searchlight spotted him as he was crawling back through a hole in a fence, and he was shot dead. The guards must have thought he was either cutting the fence with pliers or attempting to blow it up with a box of explosives, which the crate of Spam might have resembled. Indeed, we had planned to breach the fence all along. In the compound there were about a dozen pairs of pliers and pincers, all smuggled in by the prisoners. The enemy knew that and often came to hunt for them. These tools would be indispensable if it came to the point where we had to break jail, so our leaders often ordered someone they meant to test to steal a pair.
15. MEETING WITH MR. PARK
There was frequent contact between us and the compounds controlled by the Korean Communists. Commissar Pei wore a steel-strapped Swiss watch offered to him by our Korean comrades. On April 30 we received a secret message from them, which requested us to send two represen
tatives to attend an important meeting. Pei let Chaolin and me go. Initially I was excited about this assignment, assuming the Party had begun to trust me now that I had stolen the pistol; but on second thought, I realized I’d become a sidekick to Chaolin in this mission mainly because I spoke English. Nobody among us knew Korean, and Pei wouldn’t want the Koreans to think we were ignorant of any foreign language, so he sent me along to save face.
The Korean POWs had been here longer than we had and possessed more resources. They were better supplied than the civilians and in a way fared even better than the South Korean troops, who didn’t have enough medicine and often starved. Our North Korean comrades could always exchange clothing for kimchee and soybean paste with the villagers, and their underground channels kept them in touch with their national leaders.
As a rule, when a multicompound meeting was to be held, all the attendees from different compounds would feign illness so as to get permission to go to the Sixty-fourth Field Hospital, where a meeting would take place. Many Korean medical personnel worked there, and the Communists controlled a good part of the hospital. On May 1, Chaolin and I got permission from Dr. Wang of our compound, so the guards let us out. Chaolin knew the camp well because he often left our compound to meet with the prison authorities. He looked runty, like a starved chicken, but he had a steel will and often quarreled with the Americans, since as the vice chief of Compound 602 he spoke on behalf of six thousand men (Zhao Teng, the nominal chief, was slow of words). Chaolin was also good at giving speeches that could sway a large audience. I respected him for his eloquence and experience, though whenever I was with him I would feel tense, wary about what I’d say and do.
The hospital was within the camp and served the POWs only; it consisted of eight tents, two small houses, and three sheds. Behind a cottage we were received by two Korean men, both in their early thirties, one with a fleshy face, which was rare among the Koreans, whereas the other looked quite feminine, delicate and slender. We sat down in the backyard, where laundered sheets hung on iron wires stretched among drooping willows, obscuring the yard considerably. A swing swayed gently in the breeze as if there had been children living in the cottage. Chaolin had met the officers before and introduced them to me as Lee and Choi, saying they were both colonels in the Korean People’s Army. Choi, the fleshy-faced man, happened to be a college graduate, had majored in history, and could speak some English and Russian. Lee was less educated, but he spoke Chinese beautifully, having lived in Manchuria as a guerrilla fighting the Japanese for over a decade. They looked healthier than regular prisoners and seemed at ease. On our way in I had noticed two young Korean nurses folding sterilized bandages in an office at the front of the house; in reality these women were keeping guard for us. Now and then they hummed a song; their laughter sounded carefree. Their pleasant voices distracted me from time to time.
The meeting was short; it wouldn’t be safe to stay in the backyard too long. But we were shocked by what the officers told us: the Koreans planned to kidnap General Bell, the U.S. commandant on Koje Island. They wanted our compound to cooperate with them.
“How can we assist you in carrying out this bold plan?” asked Chaolin.
They said we should ease the general’s vigilance by inviting him to our compound and talking with him without arousing his suspicion; after that, they would ask him to visit their barracks too. Chaolin suggested that we seize General Bell ourselves if he came to our compound, but Lee, the feminine man, said they had already made arrangements and had more “armed force” than we did. He explained, “We shouldn’t let you bear the brunt again if the Americans retaliate. You’ve already sacrificed enough.” He must have been referring to the fact that we had come all the way to Korea to fight our common enemy. Chaolin didn’t insist and promised to participate in their plan.
Before we left, they took us into a side room in the cottage, where we were introduced to Mr. Park, who was the top leader of the Korean POWs. Sitting on the glossy floor, Mr. Park was a short but muscular man in a tweed coat. His face was pale and his eyes piercingly bright. Around him sat several officers. He shook hands with Chaolin and me and gave us each a cigarette, which we lit and smoked ravenously. I was amazed that he had Lucky Strikes, the American brand. He spoke to us while Lee was interpreting for him. He thanked us for letting them have the pistol I had stolen. Then he said, “From the bottom of our hearts we are grateful to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Volunteers. You’re our closest comrades-in-arms. You have made great sacrifice and suffered for us. We salute you.”
Chaolin replied that we shared the same enemy, the U.S. imperialists, and that by coming to Korea we actually fought to protect our country as well. I was impressed by his ease in adopting an aggrandized role, as if he were equal to our host in rank. Then Mr. Park talked about the significance of capturing General Bell—this event would shock the world. He said that Marshal Kim Il Sung had ordered them to open “a second front” in the prison camp and that we must embarrass our captors and expose their lie that we were all treated humanely. Also, the success of this operation would help our negotiators at Panmunjom as well. Chaolin promised that he would brief our headquarters about their plan and that we would help them in any way we could. When we were leaving, Mr. Park embraced us and said we would definitely meet again, very soon.
Seeing us off, Colonel Choi told me in English that Mr. Park had studied in Moscow and had been the governor of the North Yellow Sea Province in Korea. Here in the camp he was their commander. We asked Choi how Mr. Park had been taken prisoner if he was such an important official. Choi wouldn’t explain, just smiling mysteriously. I had the impression that Mr. Park still lived and functioned like a provincial governor here, well preserved and thoroughly protected. He had an air of serene confidence, as if he were the boss in this camp, not the Americans.
That evening our headquarters held a meeting, over which Commissar Pei presided. He sat at a “table” built of eight upturned cardboard cases covered with a blanket. Now and again he tapped the tip of his cigarette over a rusty enamel bowl. The veins on the back of his hand stood out; a healed scar marked the end of his thumb. He didn’t seem enthusiastic about the Korean comrades’ plan and looked thoughtful, his face a little wrinkled. Whenever his brown eyes gazed at me, I felt as if he could see through me. He didn’t express his opinion, though before the meeting he had said about the Koreans to Chaolin and me, “They’re so bold. I hope they know how to deal with the consequences.” I was puzzled but dared not ask him what he meant exactly.
People got excited about our report on the Koreans’ plan. The commissar instructed us to demonstrate the next day and then go on a hunger strike. Meanwhile, the Secretariat must gather evidence for the crimes committed by our captors so that we could charge General Bell when he fell into the Koreans’ hands. After the meeting, Ming went about writing two letters, one addressed to our delegates at the Panmunjom talks and the other to the International Red Cross, exposing the maltreatment the POWs had suffered and demanding that the Americans return all the bodies of our comrades killed on the battleground, that they stop backing the pro-Nationalist force in the prison camp, and that they take measures to stamp out violence and bring the murderers to justice. The first of the demands surprised me, because I remembered the dead our former division had buried along our way to the front in the spring of 1951. Hundreds of men had been killed in air raids and left in the wilderness, and I was sure none of their bodies would ever be shipped back to our homeland.
Ming and I both worked as translators in the compound. I spoke English better, so I was present most of the time when we met with the Americans. He was a Party member and attended their secret meetings, for which I wasn’t qualified. We two got along well and often compared notes, so I knew quite a bit about the happenings within the Party.
16. MEETING WITH GENERAL BELL
The next afternoon we presented to Lieutenant East, the officer in charge of guarding our compound, a formal
letter that demanded the improvement of our living conditions and also a face-to-face talk with General Bell. I had spent a whole morning putting the letter into English. Ming, who seemed to have infinite connections, had bartered an American army overcoat with a South Korean officer for an English-Japanese dictionary. Since in many cases we could guess the meanings of Japanese words without knowing the language, this dictionary was quite handy. Without it I couldn’t have rendered any document accurately into English.
Having gotten no response to our letter, we demonstrated in the compound the following day. Three groups of men, each six hundred strong, by turns went to the area close to the southern fence, shouted slogans, and raised pieces of hardboard that carried words in both English and Chinese, such as “Uphold the Geneva Convention!,” “Treat Us Like Human Beings!,” “Stop Violence in the Prison!,” “Punish the Murderers!” The guards were nervous, but some of them mocked us and gave us the finger. One shouted, “Okay, if you want us to treat you better, tell Chairman Mao to sign the Geneva Convention first.”
I didn’t translate those words for my comrades. I had read in Stars and Stripes some time ago that neither China nor North Korea had signed the convention, and that the United States had signed it, but its Congress hadn’t ratified it yet. On Capitol Hill there had been a debate over whether the U.S. Army should actually abide by the convention. Few of the Chinese prisoners knew the truth, which would be hard to explain to them, and which our leaders, believing ignorance was strength that could enable their men to fight bravely, wouldn’t want us to know.