War Trash (30 page)

Toward daybreak we dropped anchor at a wharf on the northern side of Cheju Island. We were let out of the cabins and then disembarked. Four men, seriously trampled, were left on our ship, accompanied only by an orderly. For the moment few of us gave a thought to them, because everyone was desperate to breathe fresh air and stretch his limbs. After we stayed long enough on the shore, some men were sent back to carry the injured off the ship. The beach here was sandy and the sea was much less yellow, almost aquamarine. One by one they laid the injured men on the sand. "Water, who has water?" a man shouted through his hands cupped around his mouth. Soon a half-filled canteen was passed on to the spot where the four fellows were lying and groaning.

About half an hour later an ambulance came to carry them to the hospital. The shore was still wrapped in fog. A macadam road stretched along the whitish beach and faded into the milky clouds. Through the haze we could see a few bulldozers parked at a construction site nearby, motionless and dark like miniature reefs. By now Commissar Pei had gotten off the other ship too, but two GIs were guarding him. After we all assembled on the beach, the sun finally came out, dissipating the fog in the southeast, where a few miles away rose some rugged hills. In front of us the contour of the prison, Camp 8, was growing clear on a gentle incline. It was an immense enclosure, encircled by three rows of barbed wire. We were told that this place had been specially built for us, the would-be repatriates. Within the camp numerous barbed-wire fences surrounded clusters of sheds that were the barracks for the prisoners. Along the exterior fence of the camp stood some guard towers on wooden pillars braced by slanting battens as thick as beams, a pair of searchlights mounted on the handrails of each tower. At the middle of the other end of the camp, near the main entrance, sat a brick house, which was the guards' office. Unlike on Koje Island, here such a house was within the enclosure. The Americans seemed to have a different way of running this place.

The frail boy Richard had saved hadn't stayed in the same cabin with me, but he caught sight of me on the beach. Wordlessly he came over as if to claim a special relationship. His long-lashed eyes were still intense, fastened on me. I patted his shoulder and asked, "What's your name?"

"Shanmin," came his clear voice.

"Have they put you into a squad yet?"

He shook his head. I said, "Then stay with me."

He nodded eagerly.

Our procession walked a long distance around the fence to reach the front gate. When we had entered the camp, I saw why there were so many barbed-wire fences in here. Within the enclosure were ten compounds, each containing about ten sheds and surrounded by barbed wire almost fifteen feet high. These compounds, arranged in two unequal rows and guarded individually by GIs at the gates, were divided by a large open field, to the west of which were four compounds, about one hundred yards apart from one another, and to the east of which lay six compounds, a shorter distance separating them, about eighty yards. This layout made it impossible for any barracks to have direct contact with its neighbors. In addition, there was a small prison, a stone house at the edge of the sea, over a thousand feet from the northern fence of the camp. The enemy seemed to have learned from the abduction of General Bell the importance of dispersing the POW leaders, so they meant to keep us in smaller groups from now on.

We were divided into ten units, each having about six hundred men. Shanmin and I were put into Compound 6, whose conditions were not as bad as I had feared, its facilities new and adequate on the whole. The compound was at the northeastern end of the camp. In it, eight long sheds stood in parallel, all built of dark volcanic rocks with asphalt-felt roofs. At its southeastern corner stood the kitchen, with a dwarf chimney, and at the southwestern end was the latrine, similar to the residential sheds in shape, though smaller in size. What made the privy unusual was that its urinal had been installed outside, a long concrete trough slanting alongside the fence at an angle of fifteen degrees. In between the kitchen and the outhouse was the recreation area, a small playing field as large as four basketball courts placed together. All the other nine compounds basically had the same layout.

Although each shed here held more than seventy men, it was much less crowded than the tents in the camp on Koje Island. In it two long plank beds had been installed along the walls; on either bed forty people could sleep. This was not bad at all. Shanmin and I were assigned to the first shed, near the kitchen. The moment I unpacked my bedroll, a commotion rose from outside. I went out to take a look. Oddly enough, Commissar Pei strolled into our barracks, smiling and waving at the men around. At once people broke out shouting, "Long live Chairman Mao!," "Long live the Communist Party!," "Fight the American imperialists to death!" Those slogans were their way of expressing their joy. About two thousand men were still waiting in the field to be assigned to their compounds; they saw our top leader and began shouting too. Immediately the commissar gestured for them to hush for fear of attracting the enemy's attention. The guards must have forgotten General Smarts instructions that Pei must be kept separate from us. How else could they have let him come back like this? A GI walked over and handed two cans of Spam through the barbed wire to a prisoner in our compound, saying, "Those guys over there asked me to give you these for the brass." He was referring to

Pei and the inmates outside Compound 7 waiting to be led into their quarters. Evidently Commissar Pei 's appearance had boosted the prisoners' morale. Some men even shed tears, as though a god, or a guardian angel, had suddenly appeared among us. They regarded Pei as the embodiment of the Communist Party here. These men had no gods to worship, so they could only project their religious feelings on a leader, a human being, whose return to us might have been a fluke. And even Commissar Pei himself said to me, "I don't know why the Americans let me come back."

When he had settled in, he sat down beside me, and putting his large hand on my knee, praised me for speaking to General Smart on his behalf. "You're a brave man, Yuan," he said, and slapped at a horsefly landing on his face. "If you hadn't intervened yesterday, they would've kept me on Koje Island for sure. Then heaven knows what would have happened to me."

"It was Zhao Teng who told me to deliver the message," I admitted.

"But you spoke well to Smart. I was impressed by your composure. You made me realize our Party needs many more intellectuals like you. Don't you think you're a tough soldier now?" He tossed his head back and laughed heartily.

"Maybe. I feel I've developed a little."

"More than a little. It's remarkable that adversities have toughened you so much. To be honest, I used to consider intellectuals unreliable, but you've made me think differently."

I was pleased by his praise, but didn't know how to respond. He then told me that the Party had awarded me another merit citation, first class this time, in addition to the one I had earned for stealing the pistol. I felt proud of myself. Actually I could see that people respected me more than before. By now I had been imprisoned for almost a year and had indeed become a stronger man, though sometimes I still felt isolated and lonely.

Toward midafternoon, a squad of GIs came in and took Commissar Pei away to the prison house on the beach, into which the camp authorities had originally intended to put him. That was the top jail on Cheju Island, where Pei was to be confined from now on.

21. COMMUNICATION AND STUDY

In mid-July a GI on a guard tower was struck in the head by "a message stone" hurled by an inmate from our compound. A gun was fired in response, but the fellow dashed into a shed nearby and was not hit. The stone, with a message tied to it, had been aimed at Compound 7, which was eighty yards away. Because of the long distance, such a stone could be hurled only with a string attached to it, whirling it first, and as a result it often flew astray. Yet since our arrival at Cheju Island, this sling-a-stone method had been the main channel of communication between most compounds.

Now that the enemy had a message of ours in their hands, our leaders were afraid that they might crack our self-made code. Fortunately, our code men, following the rule of changing the code monthly, had altered it a week ago by partly substituting three numerals with alphabetic letters, which made the code more irregular and harder to break. Unable to identify the slinger of the message stone, the guards took away Zhang Wanren, the chief of our compound, and interrogated him for a whole day, but Wanren played the fool and insisted he was unaware of any attempt to contact another compound. He kept wagging his head at the message they showed him and saying he didn't know what to make of it. In the end, the Americans told him that from now on they'd view stone hurling as an act of provocation and would react with gunfire. So we had to abandon the sling-a-stone method and rely more on signaling by semaphore.

Each compound had two or three signalmen who could perform the semaphore, so all the battalions could communicate with their neighbors. A system of hand signals had been invented recently, corresponding to numbers, which worked as follows: right hand on the chest meant 1, left hand on the chest – 2, both hands on the chest – 3, right arm akimbo – 4, left arm akimbo – 5, both arms akimbo – 6, right hand touching the ear – 7, left hand touching the ear – 8, both hands touching the ears – 9, and both hands covering the face – o. After a set of numerals was transmitted, both hands would fall down to mark a pause; if there was a mistake, the sender would shake his right foot to indicate a restart. Four numerals always formed a unit standing for a word, which could be deciphered through the code.

Though the semaphore was ingeniously designed, it was too slow, too arduous, to handle long messages. Besides, it couldn't be used between the compounds divided by the central field, the distance in between being too far for the signalmen to read the gestures. Soon another semaphore system was invented, called the Large Gesture Telegraph, which required more extended movement of the limbs and was used only between the east and the west sides of the field, though it tended to draw the guards' attention.

Whenever there was a long message to send, the night soil teams were employed. Those latrine men were allowed to go to the seaside only one group at a time, but they dumped the excrement at the same spot. On the way they'd take a breather at a patch of wattle bushes and could leave a message for another team under a rock or some other object there. The secret spot had been specified beforehand to the other barracks through the semaphore, so the message could be picked up smoothly most of the time.

Although there had always been communications among the compounds, we couldn't find an effective way to contact Commissar Pei. He wasn't far away, in the prison house on the beach, and we could see him whenever he was let out for exercise or was basking in the sun in the afternoon. He usually stayed in the open air for twenty minutes, walking by a long sandbar, against which nestled a shack that served as several Chinese men's living quarters. Those men were also POWs but willing to collaborate with the Americans, so they had been detailed there to maintain the prison house and keep watch on the special prisoners jailed in it. In addition to confining "the war criminal," the prison also took in "troublemakers." At times Commissar Pei and we waved at each other, but the long distance prevented him from hearing our voices. If only we could have communicated with him more.

This absence of communication with Pei also meant that there was no paramount leader in the camp. Zhao Teng, designated as Pei 's successor long ago, was now in the Fifth Battalion, at the southwestern corner of the camp, beyond the reach of the men in the compounds east of the field. Owing to the absence of the Party's central leadership and any rival pro-Nationalist force, for weeks the camp was peaceful, though many prisoners had grown restless, as if they'd lost their bearings.

Zhao Teng, who was a good warrior but a poor strategist, just ordered us to carry on the three tasks stipulated three months ago in Compound 602 on Koje Island: unite, struggle, and study. Now that we had been isolated into groups, the first task was out of the question. Nor had we any clue how to "struggle," since there was no pro-Nationalist force here. So the only feasible task was "study," to which the inmates devoted themselves earnestly. A slogan began circulating among the battalions: "We must make ourselves more useful for the revolution."

Somehow in early August both Hao Chaolin and Chang Ming were shipped to Camp 8 too. I was delighted to learn of their arrival. I didn't see Ming in person, but Chaolin went to Compound 7, adjacent to ours, so we waved at each other from time to time. He wrote a message in uncoded words and had it passed on to us by the night soil teams. From it I learned that Ming had been sent to the Fourth Battalion, west of the field. With both of them in the camp now, the leadership would become effective again. They were much more capable than the rest of us. Since it was difficult for Zhao Teng to communicate directly with every one of the six compounds east of the field, Chaolin assumed the leadership of this side of the camp while Zhao Teng was in charge of the four western compounds. The two leaders would communicate first, and then if necessary each would contact the other battalions on his side. Chaolin fully supported the study movement, knowing we might have to stay here for a long time.

More than half of the prisoners in my compound were illiterate, and several educated men, like myself, began teaching them how to read and write. There was no paper, but this problem was easy to solve. Some construction was still in progress outside the camp, so whenever we went out to work, we brought back scraps of cement bags, which we could use in class. Pens were hard to come by, but some men made nibs out of strips of tinplate cut from cans. For ink they used diluted tobacco tar or juice squeezed out of grass. Rain cloths were nailed to walls as blackboards, on which you could write with a toothbrush soaked with the solution of tooth powder. Without enough kraft paper, some men practiced their writing in a layer of sand spread in cardboard boxes. We, the instructors, set a basic goal: every one of the illiterate men should know at least five hundred written characters in three months. This seemed implausible at first, but to our amazement, most of these men were bright and eager to learn. Intuitively they understood literacy would improve their lives, so they applied themselves avidly. In our battalion there was a copy of James Yen's Thousand Character Lessons distributed by the U.N. Civil Information and Education Center on Koje Island. This Chinese primer, intelligently compiled, was very handy and served as the basis of the lessons we prepared for the illiterates. James Yen was a Yale graduate and a leading expert in mass education. He had taught Chinese coolies in Europe in the early 1920s and obtained funding from the United Nations for his education project. In fact, Mao Zedong once briefly attended his class in Changsha City, but Yen was barred from entering China after the Communists came to power. In addition to the literacy class, we also offered courses in arithmetic, geography, history, calligraphy, and general knowledge.