Suddenly Wang Yong bellowed, "I do it to your mother, Bai Dajian! You dare to destroy a document from the top. I talked with the Pusan POW Collection Center before Feng Yan was sent down, and they told me he was coming to join us of his own free will. Everything was done officially, plain like a louse on a bald head. How can you say this was a fabricated letter? What blackened your heart so? Now, you go to the kitchen and stay in there for a week helping the cooks."
The audience rocked with laughter. A few men even applauded. Wang Yong came up to me and pulled up the front end of my shirt to reveal my tattoo. "Look, brothers," he said loudly, "the words we fixed on him are still here. This proves he's been on our side all the time, don't you think?"
"Yeah!" a voice rang out.
More people guffawed. It was lucky that I had shown Wang the tattoo a few days before. He went on, "True, Feng Yan made an awful mistake in leaving us last time, but we should give him a second chance, shouldn't we?"
"Yes, this is benevolence," remarked an older soldier.
"That's the word." The chief took it up. "We're different from the Reds. We must cherish our brotherhood and treat each other unselfishly so that we can unite with one heart and one mind. Brothers, you all know Stalin popped off a few weeks ago. It's time to prepare ourselves for the great cause of toppling the Communist world.
We shouldn't just keep our field of vision within our small compound, biting and barking at each other like mad dogs. We must have the vision of a thousand miles so that we can fight all the way back to Beijing and then to Moscow."
"Yeah!" a few voices cried.
To be honest, I didn't fear this crowd all that much, because these were simpler, weaker men than the Communists. They cared more about personal relationships, especially brotherhood and group loyalty; they didn't share any concrete ideals and their actions had little consistency. I turned to face them and said: "Forgive me, brothers. I left you last year only because I had a sick old mother at home. She's very dear to me, and I'd be happy if I could remain with her till the end of her life. I'm her only child, so nobody will take care of her on the mainland. Now I'm afraid that the Reds will punish her because I'm here and going to Taiwan. Like every one of you, I can no longer fulfill my filial duty."
That silenced the crowd. A few men sighed. Somebody cursed the Communists loudly and the others followed suit.
I stole a glance at Dajian, whose cheeks somehow kept changing color, now pasty, now pinkish, now sallow. I interceded for him. "Chief Wang, please don't make Dajian do KP this time. He just got carried away. He must've been hurt by the Reds badly."
"He's a psycho. If he had an opinion, he could talk and argue, nobody would gag him. But he tore the official letter to bits like a madwoman on the street."
In the end, Dajian didn't have to work in the kitchen. I was grateful to Wang Yong for coming to my rescue, but I also realized that in the long run, if I went to Taiwan, my one year's stay in the pro-Communist camp would remain a hidden reef in my life. There would be no way to free myself from suspicion. Anyone could invoke this problematic period of my past against me.
33. CONFUSION
There were three enclosures at Mosulpo, numbered 1, 2, and 3, which formed Camp 13. Each consisted of ten compounds, held about forty-seven hundred Chinese nonrepatriates, and had the same layout as Camp 8, which was thirty miles away to the northeast. Each compound within an enclosure was now called a battalion instead of a company and contained fewer than five hundred prisoners. That was why Wang Yong had become a battalion chief, though he led the same number of men. However, the gates to the compounds within an enclosure were not strictly guarded, and sometimes an inmate could slip into another battalion, since the GIs couldn't remember everyone's face.
The Americans treated these POWs more leniently than those in Camp 8. They provided them with vegetable seeds and fertilizers, encouraging them to grow sweet potatoes, cabbages, eggplants, tomatoes. The inmates could also gather seaweed and shellfish from the beach. So, though barley and corn were still the basic staples, the food here was better than what I had gotten used to eating in the pro-Communist camp. Some of the prisoners seemed to have gained a little weight. Owing to the absence of the Communists, the enclosures were peaceful on the whole. Classes were offered to illiterate inmates, and over twenty clubs had been formed, such as fellow townsmen's fraternities, mah-jongg leagues, gymnastic teams, a Catholic brotherhood, a calligraphy and painting society, a drivers' association. We had no access to automobiles, but there were a number of former drivers who offered lessons in auto mechanics and in driving skills. For the Chinese, the ability to drive a car was a professional accomplishment. On the battlefield, one headache for our army had been that we couldn't get abandoned American trucks back to our base because few of our men knew how to drive. Very often we ordered the captured GIs to move the vehicles for us, but most of them would say they couldn't handle a truck either. The truth was that they didn't want to be strafed and bombed by their own airplanes on the road.
Sports were popular here. Every company had its basketball and volleyball teams, and every battalion had a gymnastic team. We could go swimming, which I often did after lunch when others were napping. The beach, covered with black sand, was just a few steps from our compound, so when bathing we remained within the guards' view and hearing.
Life was kept as normal as possible here. Each of the three enclosures had its own newspaper, a two-sheet thing folded in the middle, the size of a regular book. It was handwritten, mimeographed, and published once a week; each issue had only some twenty copies for distribution, carrying four or five short articles. Enclosure 1's paper was entitled Liberty Journal, Enclosure 2's, The Vanguard, and Enclosure 3's, Survival. I was invited to contribute to them, but I never wrote anything. Our enclosure also had a theater, which was just a large platform; it regularly staged various local operas and classical dramas. Most of the plays were conventional, though there were propaganda pieces as well. Compared with the prisoners in Camp 8, these men were less enthusiastic about artistic creation, though there was no difficulty in assembling the talents from all the battalions for one project.
There was a madman named Jiafu in Enclosure 1. I had known him in Compound 72 on Koje Island, but at that time he had been sane and docile. Now he would go to the barbed-wire fence every morning, wailing, "I miss my parents. Don't let me die here!" The prisoners used to joke about him, but nowadays few would mention him without sighing. In the summer of 1951 his infantry regiment had moved to the front to fight the Americans. He hadn't seen action before and was scared. One day, his platoon commander rebuked him for carelessly taking off his camouflage, a wreath of tall grass around his head. Then the leader assigned Jiafu to gather firewood in a valley, where he came across a leaflet dropped by an enemy plane. It read: "Friends and Brothers – Please come over to us. We promise to send you to our rear base, where you can rest as long as you wish. We guarantee your personal safety, wholesome food and warm clothing – you will be treated like a U.N. soldier. Please stop wasting your lives for the Soviet Union and Communism. Remember, your families are waiting anxiously to see you back safe and sound."
At those words Jiafu sobbed and then went across to surrender to the Americans, having left behind his raincoat and burp gun. An interpreter came up to help interrogate him, but they couldn't extract much useful information from such a new recruit. He was honest with them, however, and admitted he had capitulated because he was afraid to die and longed for the comfort of their rear base. They said he had to work first. They wanted to send him to the front to broadcast to the Chinese position, but he wouldn't do it, insisting he was gun-shy. So they just shipped him directly to the Pusan POW Collection Center.