War Trash (19 page)

"How close?" another man asked.

"Yes, what did she give you?" chipped in a third voice.

"Chocolate bars?"

"Condensed milk?"

"Cereals?"

Some of them chuckled. Chang Ming stepped in, saying with a solemn face, "We shouldn't spend too much time on this. Commissar Pei did want him to keep a friendly relationship with that woman. Comrade Yu Yuan also got some good paper from her for Commissar Pei."

A few cooks hee-hawed. But Ming's words saved my neck, and I couldn't help looking at him gratefully. Though a college graduate, he knew how to deal with these men, who liked and respected him. So his words quieted them down. I noticed a dark shadow cross Chaolin's scabbed face, but he let them move on to the next man.

We had to wrap up the meeting earlier than the other groups because the cooks started working at 3:30 p.m. Before we ended the session, Chaolin proposed a motion – I should turn in my Bible to the higher-ups – which was voted for overwhelmingly. I was the only one who didn't raise his hand, and I couldn't disobey. So my Bible became the source of writing paper at the headquarters.

I was angry at heart. The Communists were good only at maltreating their own people and people close to them. Some of their men had just been murdered in other compounds, but nobody here had bothered to examine the Communists' negligence in organizing opposition to the screening. Instead, they'd begun to discipline their own ranks. In my mind echoed the words of Han Shu, the chief of Compound 72: "History has shown that the Communists always treat their enemies more leniently than their own people. Only by becoming their significant enemies can you survive decently."

12. STAGING A PLAY

Despite the leaders' efforts to organize and inspire the prisoners, the initial enthusiasm for our union in Compound 602 soon faded away and a lot of men turned moody again. Clearly the Communists had lost the battle of the screening – out of twenty thousand Chinese POWs more than fourteen thousand had refused to repatriate, most of them voluntarily but some against their will. To rebuild the comrades' confidence and revive their spirit, a performing arts troupe was formed, a couple of songs were composed, and several entertainments were provided, including poems, cartoons, and music (played mainly on self-made instruments). Then a group of men collaborated on the script for a play, entitled The Dream on Wall Street; it was about how the American capitalists controlled the White House and the Congress, and how they were behind the Korean War, striving to rule the globe. The play consisted of three acts and five scenes. Having read the script, the compound leaders decided to have it staged. To do this, the troupe needed a platform, props, and costumes. But how could they come by those things here?

To my surprise, some men began building an "open-air theater." In front of the barracks was an open field with bumps and sunken areas in it; toward its northern end the ground bulged a little, a foot or two higher than the rest of the field. Each battalion sent over sixty men to level the ground and heap up earth to make a stage, so that all of the audience sitting in the field could see the performance. Within three days a large platform was built out of oil drums, rocks, crates, tent poles, water pipes, and canvas. In spite of the mishmash, the "theater" looked quite impressive, as good as most stages improvised in the countryside back in China, where after the fall harvest villagers would hire troupes to perform for them. I wasn't interested in the play, which was more like a propaganda skit, but I was impressed by the men's ingenuity in staging it. They overcame one difficulty after another and created all the structures and props needed for the performance. They undid flour sacks, washed them clean, dyed them with tincture of Mercurochrome or that of gentian violet, basted them together, and hung the pieces up as curtains. They also used olive green blankets to make Western suits and American officers' uniforms. The battalions sent over some electricians to install lamps. To adjust the intensity of the light to the drama, they managed to control the electric current with an ad hoc resistor – salt water in a junked porcelain sink. Most of the props were made of wood and burlap sacks, variously painted. Drums were improvised out of bottomless oil cans tightly sealed with rain cloth at both ends. Two violins were created as well – the makers used bamboo and wooden boards and unraveled some nylon shoelaces to get the sturdy strands, then twisted them into strings.

The director of the play was Meng Feihan, a man who had lost his right foot. Before joining the Communist army, he had been a college student in Hong Kong. A talented musician and also a composer, he taught the prisoners how to sing more effectively and how to read music. He never seemed to tire of teaching others; three men were busy learning how to compose from him. Though crippled, he was more active than anybody else. Whenever he finished working on a scene, he would be bathed in perspiration. I guessed he hadn't fully recuperated from his injury yet. He was very strict about rehearsals – if one thing wasn't right he would make the actors repeat it again and again until he was satisfied. He insisted that every one of them learn his lines by heart. Yet however stern he was with them, the inmates respected him.

After a week's preparation, the play was ready for the stage. Ming took the role of Harry Truman. He was good at acting and often made people howl with laughter at the rehearsals. Since most of the characters were Caucasians, the actors would have to put on makeup to transform their Asiatic features, but there was no eyebrow pencil or putty or paint available. From Dr. Wang, Ming got some aspirins and exchanged them for makeup with two South Korean guards. They gave him powdered dyestuff, chewing gum, vanishing cream, paraffin wax, and an eyebrow pencil. To prepare the makeup, the actors mixed the colored powder with Vaseline given them by a medic. The gum was used to enlarge their Chinese noses. Two men were assigned to chew it, then to wash the lumps clean; it was not only pliable but also stickier, much better than putty, the conventional material used for this purpose in the theater.

On the evening of April 21, The Dream on Wall Street was shown to the six thousand POWs of Compound 602. Among the main characters were Harry Truman, the special envoy John Foster Dulles, two senators, and a corpulent banker on Wall Street. The play was quite amusing, though on occasion marred by propagandistic gibes. The music, played on the shabby self-made instruments, wasn't very effective, but it helped enliven the performance, especially the washbasins used as gongs and the two pot covers, one bigger than the other, serving as a pair of cymbals. Even the lights were managed well, going brighter or dimmer according to the development of the drama. Most amazing was the talent of the actors, particularly Ming, impersonating Truman, and Jin Shang, who played a fat billionaire. Their manners and dialogue were funny, at times slapstick, but always potent enough to bring out a roar of laughter from the audience. Even the GIs watched the play from the guard tower, and some of them were apparently entertained.

Ming, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, was too tall for the role of Harry Truman, so he kept his legs bowed all the while, his feet fanning out to form a V. This made him clownish. He said to the banker, "Paul, we need another billion dollars."

The capitalist, in a top hat and a tailcoat, answered with one hand on his potbelly, "Mr. President, we don't have much left in our bank. We gave you two billion last year." He twirled a walking stick while speaking.

"That wasn't a gift, it was a loan."

"But we've already shared the cost of the war, haven't we?"

"Come on, we're talking about this year. Can't you give us another loan?"

"At this rate, the war will soon bankrupt us, sir."

"Give me a break! You guys always make tons of money whenever there's a war."

"But we have to reserve a certain amount of capital to make profits."

"Darn it! I'm your capital, I'm your investment, I am the president of the United States!"

"But a billion dollars is astronomical to us."

"Of course it's a huge sum. We have to maintain a large army on the Korean Peninsula."

Their exchange was interrupted by the unannounced appearance of two senators, one mustachioed and the other partly bald. Then the conversation resumed, and after another round of argument, the billionaire yielded and granted the loan at high interest.

As the scene proceeded, suddenly a GI shouted from the guard tower, "Hey, Officer Feng, you goddamned buffoon! Stop making fun of our president!"

That startled me because I thought he was yelling at me. Then I realized he knew Ming only by his alias, which was Feng Wen, close to mine. Another GI thundered, "Get your ass off the stage, Truman!"

A third cried in a joking tone, "Hey, Truman, you're fired! If you don't get off of the stage, I'm going to open up on you."

But to their credit, they didn't interfere further with the performance other than a few shouts, and remained a good audience for the rest of the play. More earnest than the Americans, the South Korean guards gathered outside the fence, along the barbed wire, watching attentively. Some of them even applauded when the curtain fell.

During the next few days, a number of Americans mentioned the performance to me. They wondered how it had been possible for the prisoners to stage a full-length play and where we had gotten all the theatrical props and costumes. I told them that some of the prisoners had been professionals, specifically the director, Meng Feihan, who had specialized in the performing arts. They were more impressed. One said, "Never thought there were artists among you." I was surprised that they would use the term "artist" so loosely. To us Chinese, only a maestro should be called that.

The Americans had taken us to be an army of peasants, more like cattle than men. The play seemed to have changed their perception of us a little. Later I noticed that the guards would treat the few actors somewhat differently from the regular prisoners, with more respect. They would no longer curse them. This amazed me, because to most Chinese an actor was just an entertainer, and however talented he was, he still belonged to the lower strata of society. His job was only to please others, so he wasn't as important as an officer or an official.

13. AN UNUSUAL REQUEST

Since we had moved into the new compound, the GIs guarding it had treated us less harshly. This was mainly because we kept our tents clean and were not as belligerent as the Korean prisoners. A group of U.N. inspectors visited our barracks and was satisfied with its order and sanitary conditions. As the inmates got to know the American guards better, some of them often went to the front entrance to bum a cigarette off the GIs or watch them taking coffee ladled out of a large cauldron on a kerosene stove set behind a shack. A few men asked me what coffee tasted like. "Bitter. You can't drink it without sugar," I told them. By regulation the GIs were forbidden to talk with us, but many of them did anyway.

I often went to chat with them, because I had been assigned to do so. Although our headquarters had access to Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper, we couldn't get it regularly enough to follow events outside the camp. A number of our men were in charge of cleaning and maintaining the GIs' quarters, so whenever possible, they'd secretly bring back the newspaper. My job was to read the news and translate the useful information for Commissar Pei and his staff. This was a good, rewarding job, which I enjoyed. My role as a translator enabled me to read a lot and made me feel important. From the newspaper we learned more about the Panmunjom peace talks, at which the issue of the POWs had been raised. An article reported that China had its own air force now, which often engaged American planes over North Korea, though not effectively, because our pilots were inexperienced. There were about a dozen air force divisions in our country, all equipped with MiG-15s. But we had no idea how many planes made up a division, so the prisoners often argued about the exact number – some said one hundred while others insisted on seventy-two. I also read that the American soldiers were eager to go home and that normally they stayed in Korea for no more than one winter, whose harshness intimidated them. One article implied that desertions among the U.S. troops had increased considerably in recent months, and that some GIs had even invalided themselves out of the front line by inflicting wounds on themselves.

There was some news that might have disheartened our comrades, so I didn't translate everything. For example, it was reported that North Korean and Chinese servicemen had occasionally shot prisoners who were too weak to keep up with the other captives in their march to prison camps. Another report said that a secret investigation was under way in the People's Volunteer Army, intended to "ferret out those disguised counterrevolutionaries," the primary targets of the scrutiny being the new recruits with unclear political backgrounds and the defectors from the former Nationalist army, like myself. I didn't mention this to anyone. But I told Commissar Pei that Chairman Mao's eldest son, Mao Anying, had been killed in an air raid. Pei was stunned and couldn't speak for a long while.

"This doesn't seem like a pure accident," I hazarded. "How could the American bombers be so accurate? He was in a shelter when they went to attack."

"Don't let anyone else know of this," Pei said.

"I won't."

"Our Chairman's other son is demented. This must've been a heavy blow to the old man, who must hate the American imperialists all the more. I'm afraid we won't see the end of this war soon."

My ability to control the flow of information in Compound 602 gave me a sense of power, which, to be honest, I relished. Yet what pleased me most was the opportunity to improve my English and the access to the kind of news regular Chinese publications wouldn't carry. Each issue of the newspaper consisted of more than twenty pages and many photographs, and I read every word of it.

Soon the GIs noticed that our men were pilfering their paper, so they stopped tossing it around. Our supply of Stars and Stripes became more erratic – sometimes we got five or six copies of the same issue, but then we wouldn't have any for an entire week.