War Trash (31 page)

As for the literate prisoners, the instructors taught them mainly through telling heroic stories and explicating lines of ancient poetry. I didn't join them very often in the story sessions, which were usually held between noon and two o'clock, when the guards were relaxing or napping. But I was impressed by the number of talents among us. One man, Yiwen, transcribed from memory chapter after chapter of the Russian novel How the Steel Was Tempered, and also The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; another man, Minshen, could recite most of the pieces from the classical anthology Three

Hundred Tang Poems; another fellow, whose name I cannot recall, knew dozens of folk songs and taught others how to sing them; a man with only one eye left, who had been a political instructor of a machine-gun company, even wrote a booklet on the history of the Chinese Communist Party. But I was most impressed by my young friend Shanmin.

Shanmin was sixteen and had been an artillery fire-direction man before he was captured. Although illiterate, he was quick at learning things and had good eyesight, so his battalion had trained him to observe the enemy's positions. He often climbed to hilltops alone, carrying a twelve-power telescope, a pistol, and a two-watt walkie-talkie that weighed thirty-five pounds. One day a senior officer in the U.S. Twenty-fifth Division announced to his men that he would give a week's leave to anyone who caught an enemy soldier alive. So a lot of GIs went out hunting for Chinese orderlies and stragglers. They would cut a telephone wire, wait for a repairman to appear, and catch him. They also ambushed cooks going to the front to deliver meals and hot water. A black GI spotted Shanmin, who was busy reporting to the commander of a mortar battery from the crest of a hill. The black man knocked him out from behind, threw him on his shoulder, and carried him down to their headquarters to claim his vacation. Because he had left behind Shanmin's pistol and walkie-talkie, his superior at first couldn't believe that this fifteen-year-old was a soldier. But the telescope with a coordinate axis and numerals on it helped them identify him. They didn't beat the petrified boy; instead they tied him to the side of a tank heading for their rear base. He was frozen half dead, unable to speak, when they got there.

Now after a year's imprisonment, Shanmin was bonier than before, like a bundle of firewood, but he had grown taller, to almost five feet four. He looked younger than his age, as though in his early teens, and had a pallid face and large sensitive eyes. Often underfed, he was languid most of the time, lying with his hands clasped behind his head. When he walked he seemed too tired to lift his feet. However, he came to life with the study movement. He was bright and spared no effort in learning how to read. He enjoyed the story sessions immensely and simply worshiped the raconteurs. I liked seeing his enchanted smile, which was innocent and heartfelt, revealing his crowded teeth. From the first day when we became shed mates, he had been fascinated by my reading Stars and Stripes. He once asked me, "Is it hard to learn American words?"

"No, Chinese is harder," I replied.

"How many years have you studied the foreign language?"

"More than ten years."

"Ah, if only I could be so well learned."

"Of course you can. Besides, I'm not as knowledgeable as you think."

"I hope I'll go to school when we're back in our country again."

His words saddened me. At such a tender age, he shouldn't have been here. His parents had lived in the countryside in Henan Province and had been too poor to send him to school, so he had joined the army and ended in Korea. He had three younger brothers and one elder sister, he told me. None of them had any schooling.

Shanmin never asked me to teach him anything, as though such a request would offend me or diminish his respect for me. One day in late July I offered to give him lessons individually. He was overjoyed and said he would be my student all his life. From then on I taught him ten words a day and also the ways phrases and sentences are formed. He had a remarkable memory and never forgot what he had learned. I soon noticed that his appetite for knowledge was quite voracious, though he seldom showed it. One night I overheard him murmur the words "combustion" and "momentum," which I had taught him that afternoon. As I knew him better, I began to add two or three idioms a day. I also taught him multiplication and division. Having served as a fire-direction man, he had a little rudimentary arithmetic, but his knowledge was fragmentary. In just two days he memorized the entire multiplication table. His ability astonished me and made me wonder what he could have accomplished had he had the opportunity to attend school and college. I told him to keep a diary, and he wrote it dutifully every day, sometimes three or four sentences and sometimes a long paragraph. I would check the homework and correct the errors. I also taught him how to use an abacus, which we had made by stringing together some broad beans and then dividing all the strings horizontally with a split chopstick.

He helped me whenever possible. He'd clean mud off my shoes, wash my clothes, and sometimes pour hot water into my mug. He made no secret of his respect and affection for me. He also resoled my shoes with four strips of rubber cut from a discarded tire; he had learned to do this from a prisoner who had been a street cobbler. I enjoyed teaching him; it made me feel like a more useful man.

The other inmates were all fond of Shanmin too, treating him like a younger brother. I don't mean the prisoners were all kindhearted. No, many of them were hardened by the miserable life they had led and were almost unfamiliar and uncomfortable with tender feelings. Quite a few, whose paths I avoided crossing, were plain scoundrels. Yet Shanmin had such a lovable nature that no one could help being brotherly to him. In the beginning his jacket had been too long, almost reaching his knees like an overcoat. A bearded man, whose place on the plank bed was next to Shanmin's, cut the bottom of the jacket with a razor and hemstitched it for him. Weiming, a round-headed fellow from Canton Province, came across a half-filled, soft-covered notebook while cleaning the GIs' quarters, and brought it back for Shanmin. He wrote on the first page, "Little Brother: May wisdom always accompany you!" Another man gave him a used pencil, which the boy cherished so much that he never left it anywhere except in his pocket. When the pencil was worn down to an inch, another man folded a piece of tinplate into a short pipe for him so that Shanmin could insert the stub into "the cap" and continue to use it. During his imprisonment on Cheju, for the progress he achieved in his study he received two medals: a pair of large stars made of iron sheet and coated with red paint.

One day by chance I found him smoking. He stood outside the kitchen and looked silly with a cigarette clamped between his cracked lips, two coils of smoke dangling under his snub nose. Like all the others, he was given a pack of cigarettes a week. I went up to him and said, "Stub it out! You're too young for that."

He obeyed me and lifted his foot, scraping the tip of the cigarette against his rubber sole, but he looked hurt, his eyes misting. I softened and said, "I'm not a meanie, Shanmin. Tobacco will damage your lungs, which are still tender. If you were over eighteen, I wouldn't interfere."

"I understand."

"You don't want to become a consumptive, do you?"

"Uh-uh."

"You still want to study with me?"

"Of course I do."

"Then you mustn't start smoking now."

"I won't light a cigarette again."

He kept his promise. From then on, whenever he was allocated a pack, he would exchange it for food or stationery with others. The inmates all smoked the same kind of cigarettes that had no brand. On one side of the white pack was printed three scarlet words: LIBERTY, JUSTICE, PEACE; on the other side was the moon half hidden in the clouds. Cigarettes were a kind of currency among the prisoners. Sometimes Shanmin gave a few to others, and this made them like him more.

I still remember how amazed I was to see that he could read an article in a Chinese newspaper just three months after he had enrolled in the literacy class. One day he came upon a scrap of Ta Rung Pao, a Hong Kong daily, which must have been subscribed to by the Chinese translators working for the prison administration here. Sitting in a corner, Shanmin was poring over a report on a race of dragon boats. From time to time I glanced at his engrossed face. His lips went on stirring and once in a while a smile flickered on them. When he finished, I asked him, "Any new words?"

He beamed and shook his head. I wanted to congratulate him, but my voice caught. I was so happy for him.

Shanmin even wrote a skit about the South Korean president, Rhee Synman. After a little editorial help from the others, his play was staged in our compound and was well received. It would be inaccurate to say that the war and imprisonment ruined this boy, as they did destroy millions of lives. His was an exceptional case. He flourished in the camp. How mysterious, tenacious, and miraculous life could be! If Shanmin had stayed home, he might not have had an opportunity to learn how to read and do sums, and might have had to work the fields to help his parents raise his siblings, or might have gone begging from town to town. But in this prison he thrived and even got some education, which helped him grow into a capable man eventually.

Many years later he wrote me a beautiful letter, saying he had become the accountant in his home village, where no one but he could use the abacus. He thanked me for having taught him so well and was proud to inform me that he still didn't smoke. His handwriting was clean and handsome.

22. THE PEI CODE

Colonel Kelly, the commander of the guards at Camp 8, informed us that we must provide two men for Commissar Pei, one to be his cook and the other his interpreter. Both of them were to live with the commissar in the same cell inside the prison house. The cook was easy to find; several men volunteered because the work promised better food. A fellow named Hailin was picked for the job. But choosing the interpreter was more difficult. There were a number of men who knew English, and each compound had at least one interpreter as its spokesman. For us, though, the officer about to join Commissar Pei had another task, which was to establish communication between the prison and the compounds. I knew English better than the other interpreters, so I was one of the candidates for the job, which I was not especially keen to take because the interpreter would have to suffer the strict confinement of the prison too. Chang Ming, whose English was second only to mine, was also a candidate. After an exchange of messages among the leaders of the different compounds, mainly between Zhao Teng and Chaolin, Ming was detailed to go there. This was an appropriate choice, because he was more resourceful than me, and besides, he was a Party member, able to assist the commissar in matters other than translation, especially the Party's secret work.

Chief Zhang Wanren, a balding man with carious teeth, was pleased that I remained in Compound 6, saying I was indispensable to him. He often talked with me about the affairs of our compound and sought my opinion. That was why I knew so much about the workings of the leadership in the camp, where most men had no idea what was transpiring, having strictly followed the order "Do not question what you are told, and do not listen to what you are not supposed to hear." I guessed probably Pei and Chaolin had said some good words about me to Wanren, who treated me like a leader of sorts and had kept me at the battalion headquarters. Wanren once even asked me whether I would like to join the United Communist Association, which had been inducting new members ever since we arrived at Cheju Island. I told him that Commissar Pei believed I should go through a longer period of testing. He couldn't check this with Pei, so he didn't press me again. The truth was that after my application had been turned down four months before, I had vowed I would never apply for membership again, unless Pei himself invited me to do it. This was a way to protect myself from being humiliated again. Besides, I didn't believe in Communism. Why should I change just to suit their requirements? I should be loyal at least to my own heart.

There were only two rooms in that prison house near the beach, roughly the same size – twelve by sixteen feet. One jailed troublemakers and the other held the war criminal; the two cells were separated by a stone wall. A number of men had been confined there as troublemakers, usually for two weeks at a stretch, so, through their accounts, we knew the interior layout of that cell. Ming went to the prison charged with the task of digging a hole through the wall between the two rooms. It took him a whole week to fulfill this mission. He found a stone that looked removable in the southern upper corner of the wall. With the help of the cook and Pei, he managed to pry that stone off, and after some digging by turns, they bored a hole, which became the channel of communication. Whenever we wanted to get orders from the commissar, a trustworthy man would be instructed to pick a fight with someone or yell and make obscene gestures at GIs so that he would be sent to the troublemakers' cell, where he could take orders from our top leader through the hole in the wall. When released, he would return with the oral message. However, this method of communication was extremely slow, unreliable, and cumbersome, because usually a troublemaker was imprisoned there for at least five days, sometimes as long as three weeks. Often by the time the messenger came back, the orders no longer applied to the changed situation in the camp. Still, up to early September this method was the only one available.

The Pei Code wasn't created according to a plan; it came about by a stroke of luck. One day toward the end of August, I was sent to the prison house because a guard had found in my pocket a slip of paper that carried "Song of the Three Tasks," composed by some men in another compound. Zhao Teng had asked me to pass it to our battalion chief. Colonel Kelly interrogated me for half an hour, but I insisted that I had copied the song myself from the inmates repairing the road outside the southern fence of the camp. They were mostly from Compound 9 and could sing the song. The colonel didn't believe me, saying I had attempted to relay a secret message, so he had me taken to the prison. I wasn't very upset at this turn of events, because now I could finally communicate directly with Commissar Pei and Ming.