by Ha Jin
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 fiancée’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.
In 1965 Ming came to my home and begged me to find him a job in the city, because he no longer had work to do in his hometown. He wore a black overcoat whose padded cotton stuck out all over its ragged cloth as if he were besprinkled with snowflakes. He walked with bandy legs now, which reminded me of the Harry Truman he had impersonated on Koje Island thirtee
n years before. It was impossible for me to help him find employment. I was merely a schoolteacher with the weight of a problematic past on my back. How could I possibly get him a job? He stayed four or five days and then left, deeply disappointed. I bought him the return train ticket and gave him thirty yuan, more than half of my monthly salary. That was all I could do for him. Afterward I never heard from him, though I was told that he had become an adopted son of an old woman in his hometown, so that he could have a roof to sleep under at night. In the summer of 1972, when again questioning me about the activities of some former POWs, one of the interrogators told me, “Chang Ming has gone to another planet.” Hearing of his death, I almost broke into tears in front of the officials.
At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, one morning about two hundred Red Guards came to my home and took me away to my school for a struggle session. They made me stand on a platform; then a girl stepped over and pulled up my shirt to show the audience the tattoo on my belly. They said I dreamed of the United States all the time. The truth was that the word “fuck” had been expunged from all their English-Chinese dictionaries, so they didn’t know its meaning. I told them plainly, pressing my forefinger on the word, “This means ‘screw.’ If I really worshiped the United States, I wouldn’t say ‘screw it,’ would I?” The audience exploded with laughter. That helped save my neck.
In every aspect I’m very fortunate compared with the other repatriates. After my fiancée broke up with me, I swore I would avoid women and remain a bachelor for the rest of my life. But life continues despite our personal misfortunes, and my frozen heart thawed within two years. I fell in love with a colleague of mine, a chemistry teacher, a woman of remarkable beauty, to whom few men would pay attention because her father had been a rich merchant in Shanghai before the new China. We got married a few months later. We had two children, a boy and a girl; both of them have graduated from college. My son managed to come to the States and get a master’s degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech. I even have two American grandchildren, and I love them dearly and wish I could stay with them longer. To my knowledge, few children of the returnees from the U.N. prison camp went to college. For twenty-seven years, before the final rehabilitation of the repatriates in 1980, their fathers’ tainted past made it impossible for them to get a decent education. In contrast, my wife and I taught our son and daughter so well that they excelled in the entrance exams when colleges were reopened after the Cultural Revolution.
One summer evening in 1986, soon after China had begun to open itself to foreigners, by chance I saw Bai Dajian appear on the Northeastern TV. He had come back from Taipei to visit his hometown in Liaoning Province and was received as an honored guest because he hadn’t forgotten his birthplace and had donated an elementary school to his home village. He had also promised to build a middle school for the local county. Apparently he was a wealthy man who must have had a successful career after he reached Taiwan. At a glance I recognized him, his left hand having only three fingers. He was robust now, with a full head of graying hair, and could easily pass for forty. He smiled with dimmed eyes, but all the diffidence that had once shadowed him had vanished from his animated face.
Several of the former POWs I knew had also seen the news and often talked about those men who had refused to repatriate. They would sigh and regret, only in private, that they had risked so much to come home so as to pursue and fulfill their illusion of loyalty. It was true that most of those prisoners who went to Taiwan lived a decent life. Some of them attended college and a few rose to senior positions in the army. Having retired recently, some even returned to the mainland to live, where they were well received; some were even appointed local officials. Indeed, China generously embraced them as patriots in spite of their belated love. Even some former POWs who had returned in 1953 wrote to their local governments to express their support for the new policy of welcoming these nonrepatriates home, because it would help bring about the unification of Taiwan and the mainland.
But the reappearance of the nonrepatriates in their hometowns didn’t always bring joy. Some of them found that few of their family members were still alive. Some saw that their home villages remained in the grip of dire poverty and ignorance. A few shocked their parents and siblings, who had been informed three decades ago that they had perished in Korea as Revolutionary Martyrs—their families had visited and swept their empty graves every spring ever since.
I wondered how Wang Yong was faring. I still had his niece’s photograph in my album.
Bai Dajian’s appearance on the TV threw my mind into turmoil for a few days, because I felt I was at least as capable as he, though I understood that a wealthy businessman like him must be a rarity among those POWs who had gone to Taiwan. But soon I recovered my equilibrium. No matter how awful one’s life is, there are always others who get it worse. In contrast to Chang Ming, Hao Chaolin, and Pei Shan, I was fortunate, with a happy family and two good children and three grandchildren. There should be no reason for me to indulge in lamenting my personal losses. One must never regret one’s fate.
These days I often watch The Simpsons, which I like very much. Last week I saw Bart, the mischievous boy, get a tattoo removed from his arm. This gave me the idea of having mine erased. I asked my son about the possibility. He called around in Atlanta and found out that Dr. Stone at Emory Hospital often performed the procedure. He told the doctor that I had an anti-American slogan tattooed on my belly by the Communists. I guess there was no way he could explain my case clearly. My monthly pension is less than $120, so Dr. Stone agreed to consider a discount. He said the procedure would take just a few minutes and the laser would cause little pain. I’m glad I will see him next Thursday.
I never saw Pei Shan after I left the Repatriates Center in 1954, but I was in touch with Chaolin, who died of a massive heart attack four years ago. In 1995 he told me that recently he had gone to Tianjin to see Pei, whose lung cancer had reached an advanced stage and whose sister had gotten him to come to the city for chemotherapy. Painfully, our former commissar blamed himself for having ruined his only son’s life. The son, already in his late forties, was still unmarried; when he was in his twenties, no young woman wanted to enter his home, darkened by his father’s past, and later he somehow lost interest in women and preferred to remain a bachelor despite his parents’ urging him to marry and have children. Pei had another regret: he had forgotten his former bodyguard Tiger’s home address; the boy had saved his life forty-four years before, but Pei had only remembered he was from Gansu Province. If only he had been able to do something for Tiger’s parents, who must have died long ago. Pei said to Chaolin, “Tiger was a good comrade. I still meet him in my dreams.”
Chaolin had also told me that some weeks later he had paid a last visit to Pei Shan, who was now on the point of dying. The final words our former leader gave him were “Please write our story!”
Chaolin had said to me, twisting his withered lips, “Yuan, my mind’s no good anymore. What can I write about? There’s only loss and grief—the heavy feeling weighs down my heart like a millstone. All the memories are messed up in my head, no way to sort them out.” He still had a few teeth, but couldn’t help dropping crumbs of a walnut cookie while chewing it over a cup of hot tea. Indeed, he had aged so much that I could tell he didn’t have many years left. Shriveled, almost skeletal, he was half a foot shorter than four decades ago.
Now I must conclude this memoir, which is my first attempt at writing and also my last. Almost seventy-four years old, I suffer from gout and glaucoma; I don’t have the strength to write anymore. But do not take this to be an “our story.” In the depths of my being I have never been one of them. I have just written what I experienced.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction and all the main characters are fictional. Most of the events and details, however, are factual. For information on them I am indebted to the following authors and their works:
Bradbury, William, Samuel M
eyers, and Albert Biderman. Mass Behavior in Battle and Captivity: The Communist Soldier in the Korean War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Burchett, Wilfred, and Alan Winnington. Koje Unscreened. Beijing: Published by the authors, 1953.
Da Ying. “Zhiyuanjun Zhanfu Jishi” (Records of the POWs among the People’s Volunteers). Kun Lun, no. 1 (1987): 157–238.
Dean, William F. General Dean’s Story. New YorK: Viking, 1954.
Dvorchak, Robert. Battle for Korea. Conshohocken, Pa.: Combined Books, 1993.
Forty, George. At War in Korea. Addlestone, England: Ian Allan, 1982.
Goldstein, Donald, and Harry Maihafer. The Korean War. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2000.
Halliday, Jon, and Bruce Cumings. Korea: The Unknown War. New York: Viking, 1988.
Hastings, Max. The Korean War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
He, Kongde. Yige Huajia Yan Zhong de Chaoxian Zhanzheng (The Korean War in a painter’s eyes). Beijing: People’s Liberation Army Arts Press, 2000.