I found a place in the tent reserved for the representatives and went right to bed. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, and I'd better rest well for it.
For breakfast all the representatives had jook, a Korean dish, which was somewhat like porridge but with meat and diced turnip in the rice. The word jook, I thought, must be derived from the Chinese word zhou, which means porridge. Every one of us was served a full bowl of it, and a plate of kimchee sat in the center of each table for everybody to share. The Koreans couldn't live without kimchee, which was obviously a rarity here. We ate almost ceremoniously; everyone seemed to make an effort not to rush. Chaolin and I didn't care for kimchee; the chili was too hot for us. But I liked the smell of the cabbage and ate a few cloves of garlic pickled in the sauce. The jook, however, was tender and tasty; the meat was from canned beef stew. Again I was impressed by the Koreans' resources.
The conference started at 9:00 a.m. in a large tent. In the middle of the room stood eight long tables grouped together and covered with blankets; chairs were arranged around the tables. At the end near the entrance was the defendant's seat, and at the opposite end was a chair for the head of the conference. On the wall behind this seat spread a Chinese and a Korean national flag. The enlarged committee meeting of the previous night had elected Colonel Choi the chairman and Hao Chaolin and another man the vice chairmen. So Choi took his seat at the head of the table; on his left Chaolin and I sat together. The three Korean women were seated next to me. In all, there were forty-two representatives and witnesses from seventeen compounds.
After everybody sat down, we began to discuss the agenda of the conference, which was approved unanimously. Then we sent for General Bell.
Bell came in with a ponderous gait and sat down in the defendant's seat. Colonel Choi announced that the conference had begun, and that the first major item on the agenda was to allow Bell to listen to the representatives' accusations and condemnations. He told the general in English, "You can defend yourself, but you must respect facts."
Then the representatives began to speak by turns. The Koreans had prepared a good deal of evidence for the abuse and violence they had suffered, and even claimed that some of their comrades had been coerced into joining the South Korean army. They described how their men had been tortured and killed just because they wanted to return to the North. A number of them had vanished, nobody knowing their whereabouts; had they been shipped away by our captors to some remote place as guinea pigs for the experiments in biochemical weapons? General Bell sat vacantly, perhaps because he couldn't understand much of what they were saying despite the joint effort of two interpreters, who spoke English with abrupt inflections and misplaced accents like beginners.
A tall man stood up and spoke in a hoarse voice, tears streaming down his face. He pointed his forefinger at the defendant and kept shouting. The left side of his face was scarred, burned, he said, by hot irons when he had refused to betray his comrades. He pulled up his shirt to display some dark wounds on his chest, which he kept slapping. He said these scars had been inflicted on him by South Korean guards and GIs. There was also a healed knife gash on his stomach in the shape of a horseshoe, which looked at least ten years old. The Korean interpreter was rendering his accusations into broken English that was hard to follow, but the main drift was clear. He was saying how he had been refused medical treatment because he wouldn't speak into a tape recorder.
After him, a squat man spoke. He said an American officer had given him a steel bar and ordered him to murder Mr. Park. He wouldn't do that, so they hung him up on a beam in the torture chamber and thrashed him almost to death. A South Korean sergeant even threatened to cut his anus and feed it to a dog. After this a willowy boy, about eighteen years old, stood up and spoke in a thin voice. He claimed that a GI often groped him when searching him at the gate to his compound.
As the accusers continued speaking, many representatives became enraged and couldn't help but shout at General Bell, who avoided looking at their scowling faces. Every once in a while Bell seemed so absentminded that Colonel Choi would order him to "Pay attention!"
One of the three female representatives, Shunji by name, could speak English. She was a high-cheeked woman of about twenty-five and must have been stout once, but now she looked rawboned with a sunburned face. She stood up and began speaking with emotion. Her voice was clear, though her accent muffled her words somewhat. She said many of the women inmates had been abused by the prison guards, who would beat and curse them at will. Some South Korean men had even burned their faces and chests with cigarettes in the presence of American officers, who had always shut their eyes to all lands of physical abuse. Shunji lifted her foot, put it on the table, and pulled up the baggy leg of her pants all the way to her thigh, which was rather skinny compared with her large body. Indeed, about a dozen brownish burns dotted her leg, each the size of a kidney bean. She also said that a girl of eighteen in their compound had been raped by four American soldiers before she was delivered to the prison camp, and that later she had given birth to a fair-skinned boy with green eyes. The malnourished mother died of heart disease afterward; now the baby was still in their barracks, as the youngest prisoner.
While she was speaking, the small woman seated beside me started sobbing. Shunji pointed at her and said, "She's been paraded through the streets of Seoul for two days, together with more than thirty sisters. The American imperialists and their Korean running dogs ride in jeeps and on big horses, whip them, and order them to take off their clothes, so all people can see them naked. They call them whores and spit on them. Some throw stones at them and beat them with canes and sticks. One of the sisters is five months pregnant, but no matter how she begs them, they go on whacking her, force her to take off her pajamas and carry an A-frame on her back, so all the passersby can make fun of her. Here's my comrade, she's living evidence of your crimes. Look at her back!" She helped the small, moon-faced woman to her feet, made her turn around, and pulled up her shirt from behind. The woman's back was a mess, marked by scars and blood-encrusted welts.
"Look at her face," said Shunji, pointing to the other woman still in her seat. All eyes turned to that face, spotted with scabs. She was quite young, under twenty, with tender, healthy skin on her neck; her blemished face must have been quite pretty once. She got up too and began speaking through Shunji as her interpreter. She said she had been a guerrilla and had been caught by Americans, who then handed her over to the South Korean police along with twenty of her comrades. They beat her, beheaded several male guerrillas in front of a large crowd, and even forced her to hold her elder brother's decapitated head so that they could take a photo of her. To this day she still had nightmares and often screamed and writhed in bed at night, wrestling ghosts. Why did the police treat human beings worse than animals? Why did the Americans encourage and connive with them? Why did GIs cross the Pacific Ocean and come to this land to ruin their lives? Her voice was growing shriller and shriller as she continued. She was so choked with emotion that her words gradually became incoherent, hard for Shunji to interpret. Finally she stopped in midsentence, then the three women held one another and broke out wailing.