by Ha Jin
I broke the pencil in half and gave the part without the eraser to Ming when we met the next Tuesday. He was excited to have it and said, “I’ll pass this on to Commissar Pei. We do need stationery badly. He’ll be delighted to see this.”
“How’s he doing?”
“So far he’s okay.”
“Give him my greetings.”
“I will. By the way, I’ve heard you’re busy helping Woodworth, right?”
“Yes, it was he who gave me the pencil. He wanted me to translate some hymns for him.”
Ming knitted his thick eyebrows. “You did that, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re too naive, Yuan. According to our information, Woodworth is also involved in persecuting our comrades, just like Priest Hu. You must be careful.”
“Really? He seems kindhearted.”
“Only in appearance. He’s behind many things. In fact, Commissar Pei wasn’t very happy when he heard you were helping Woodworth.”
“I don’t see why he should be unhappy.” I was surprised that Pei knew so much about my activities.
“Religion is just spiritual opium. Woodworth means to weaken our men’s resolve to fight.”
“Perhaps he can help us.”
“No. Never reveal anything to him. Be careful. He’s not our friend.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to promise me not to tell him anything. This is a matter of principle.”
“All right, I promise.”
Some inmates were strolling nearby and we dared not remain together too long, so we parted company.
Ming’s words made me think a good deal, though I wasn’t convinced that Father Woodworth had been involved in persecuting the prisoners who wanted to repatriate. On Wednesday afternoon, after the singing session, while the audience was filing out of the hall, I went up to Woodworth and asked him about the meaning of “communion” in the line “the new community of love in Christ’s communion.” He explained to me the sacrament at which people drink wine and eat bread. He said he would have included that part in the service on Sundays, but most of us were not Christians, so it was unnecessary. I couldn’t understand the Eucharist fully, never having attended one. Seeing that I was still bemused, he added, “Communion also means fraternity. Put it like that.”
As we walked toward the door, I said again, “Father Woodworth, I have had a question on my mind for a long time.”
“You can let me know it if you wish.”
“You see, according to the teaching of the Bible, all the prisoners here are sinners, so we should be equal. Why are some inmates more privileged than others?”
We were now in the open air, which was warm with the feel of spring. He stopped short and said, “What do you mean exactly? Be more specific. There’s something behind your question.”
I pointed at the large tents and then at the small ones. “People are not treated equally here. The men living at the back are not even given their share of food.”
“And you’re one of them?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, but this is the way things should be done.”
“Why?”
“Because most of you are Communists. To me and to my God, Communism is evil.”
“But most of us are not Communists at all. We stay with them mainly because we want to go home. As sons, we have our duty to our parents. Some men are husbands and fathers and ought to return to their families.”
“I can understand it’s a tough choice, but life is full of choices.”
“For most of us there’s no choice.”
“Mr. Feng, you should know there are different kinds of duties. The highest kind is your duty to God and to your own soul.”
“But we haven’t been converted yet. Do you think those who are going to Taiwan are Christians?” There was an angry edge in my voice now.
“Listen, I’m not just a clergyman but also a soldier. I came with both the book and the sword.”
Realizing the argument was getting nowhere, I muttered, “I thought you might help us because we’re all fellow sufferers.”
“Every man here can choose his own way of suffering.”
He straightened his back and walked away. I had thought of asking him, “Then why do you teach us the hymns that praise the wideness of God’s mercy?” But I didn’t bring that out. Probably he taught us just to earn his salary and to convert a few pagans. My conversation with him upset me profoundly and shattered my illusion that there might be shelter in God’s bosom for every person. Now I was inclined to believe what Ming had told me.
I mentioned to Bai Dajian my exchange of words with Father Woodworth. He and I were very close now, friends. I treated him like a younger brother, because he respected me and was two years my junior. “Woodworth isn’t a kind man,” he assured me, and his large eyes flashed.
“How do you know?” I was surprised by the certainty in his voice.
“The other day when they flogged a man with water-whips in the front yard, Woodworth happened to be passing by. The man cried, ‘Father, Father, help me! Save me!’ But Woodworth gave him a look, then walked away without a word. One of the hooligans told the man, ‘Call him God, then he’ll sure come back and save your hide.’ They all cracked up.”
The water-whip was a punishment invented by the pro-Nationalists here. They would tie a man to a stake and flog him with bands of canvas soaked in a bucket of water. The flogging would continue until the whole bucketful was used up.
Although Woodworth had never punished any inmate publicly, Dajian’s account of his indifference disappointed me. It was rumored that he had even presented a dagger to Liu Tai-an, the chief of our battalion. I had seen the knife with a white jade handle, which Liu often put against an inmate’s throat.
Soon Dajian and I both stopped attending the sermons and the singing sessions, though I still read the Bible every day as a way to improve my English.
7. BETRAYAL
At our next meeting Ming told me that someone had betrayed Commissar Pei. Surprised, I refrained from asking him to inform Pei that I had quit Woodworth’s sermons and singing sessions. “There must be a traitor,” Ming said. “Have you heard of Ding Wanlin, who was the bugler in our division’s Guards Company?”
“Yes. He’s a friend of mine, a good, humble man. He nursed me in the hospital. Why do you ask?”
“The Americans took him away four days ago, interrogated him, and returned him to his tent the day before yesterday. His face was battered, this big.” Ming raised both hands around his head showing a doubled size.
“He’s still going to repatriate, right?” I asked.
“Yes. But two days ago, just an hour after he was sent back, some GIs went to take Commissar Pei away.”
“Where did they take him?”
“First to the Second Battalion’s headquarters in Compound 86. They interrogated him there for a whole night. Afterward they put him into the water jail, and now he’s in solitary confinement.”
“So you think Wanlin informed on him?”
“He’s a suspect.”
“How could he be a traitor? If he betrayed Commissar Pei, why would he still want to go back to China? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m just saying he’s one of the suspects. Don’t worry.” Ming kept clicking the heels of his high-top shoes, which were the same kind worn by GIs. But his pair didn’t look like mates, one with its tongue hanging inside out.
I described my conversation with Woodworth. Ming was pleased to hear that I had no contact with the chaplain anymore.
It was a cold morning, the ragged grass crusted with hoarfrost and the north wind billowing, and nobody basked in the sun outside the tents, so we two talked longer than usual. He told me how the enemy had treated Commissar Pei. Pei had been interrogated by Frederick Johnson, an American colonel known in the camp as the Sinologist, because he spoke standard Mandarin and had a scholarly demeanor, never losing his temper or showing hi
s true emotions. Johnson had been a college professor in Virginia before the war. In this prison camp he often had copies of ancient Chinese classics delivered to important POWs as a gesture of “goodwill.” But we knew all along that he must have a special mission here. Now he had finally come to the forefront, personally interrogating Commissar Pei. Yet no matter how hard they pressed him, Pei refused to admit his true identity, insisting he had been a cook. This was futile because the enemy had a file on him. Owing to his high rank, they didn’t physically abuse him at this point. After the interrogation he was put into a single-room hut. Toward the evening five Chinese men came, pulling a hand truck loaded with a huge earthen vat, and they put the vessel in his room. Then another three men arrived, each carrying two buckets of hot water, which they poured into the vat. Following them was another man, who held a folded towel and a change of underclothes and a shirt. The head of this group told Pei, “Phew, you don’t know how dirty you are. You stink like a wild goat. Colonel Johnson wants you to take a bath.”
“I don’t need a bath,” Pei said.
“You’re ordered to get into the water,” said the leader, a small rotund man.
“Who gave me the order?”
“Colonel Johnson.”
“Tell him I don’t take orders from him.”
“Screw you! You still think you’re a bigwig here, eh?” With a wave of his hand the man told the others, “Dip him into the water and scrub him!”
They hauled Pei to the vat, began tearing off his clothes, and tried to heave him up and drop him into the steaming water. But the commissar gripped the rim of the vessel and wouldn’t let go, shouting, “My soul’s clean, I don’t need a bath!”
They began slapping him, kicking his buttocks, striking him with the shoulder poles, and pulling his hair. Still he wouldn’t give in. In the midst of the scuffle an American sergeant arrived and helped them tear off Commissar Pei’s pants. Pei turned his head and bit the GI’s hand. This brought more blows on him; yet he wouldn’t budge, clasping the rim of the vat like a life ring. He kept shouting, “Even if you kill me, I won’t bathe myself. Hit me, yes come on, see if your granddad will ever use this bath!”
After another round of punching and kicking, they gave up and decided to take the vat away. Two men scooped the water back into the buckets, all the while cursing Pei, saying he was a mean ass, an expert in histrionics. One of them stabbed his finger at him and said, “We spent a whole afternoon preparing this bath for you. We should’ve boiled you alive instead.”
The enemy took Pei’s blustery response to the bath for some kind of hydrophobia, so the next afternoon they put him into the water prison, which was molded after those built by the Japanese army. I had seen a few such cells in China; the one here was a similar type. It was in a cellar set half underground, in which there were two pools, a large one and a small one, both encircled by barbed wire attached to steel bars and containing three feet of murky, foul water. The small pool was for solitary confinement, whereas the large one could hold five people at a time. In either pool you had to remain on your feet constantly. Eventually you were too sleepy to stand up, fell on the barbed wire, and had your flesh torn. In winter the cold water soaked you to the bones and made you shiver with a livid face; in summer insects bit you without cease and your skin began to rot within half a day. Usually a regular POW was put in the larger pool for five or six hours at a stretch, but Commissar Pei was jailed in the small pool for a whole night. They moved him out only after he tried to drown himself. The next day they resumed interrogating him. However hard they pumped him, he wasn’t responsive and often fell asleep, having to be kicked again and again to remain awake. One of the officers threatened to send him to the torture chamber, but Pei replied, “Why not take me to the execution ground? I don’t care, I’ve had enough.” Convinced that they could get nothing from him, they put him away in solitary confinement.
In the art of inflicting pain, the Chinese and the Koreans were much more expert than the Americans. When GIs beat you, they would kick and hit you, and they would break your ribs or smash your face, but they seldom tortured you in an elaborate way. This isn’t to say that they were not cruel. They did burn some inmates with cigarettes and even tied a man up with electric wire and then cranked a generator. But the Chinese prisoners, especially some of the pro-Nationalist men, were masterful in corporal punishment and even took great pleasure in inflicting pain on others. They knocked your anklebones with a special stick that had a knurl on its end; they shoved a water nozzle into an inmate’s anus and then turned on the hydrant (one man was killed this way); they tied your hands up and rubbed chili powder into your eyes; they forced you to kneel on sharp-edged opened cans; they slashed your flesh with a knife and then put salt on the wounds, saying this was a way to prevent infection; they sharpened matches and inserted them under your fingernails, then lit the other ends; they kept you upside down in an empty vat while scratching your soles with brushes; they tied you to a bench and filled your stomach with chili water; they tore off your clothes and put you into an oil drum containing broken beer bottles, then sealed the drum and rolled it around. In contrast to the pro-Nationalists, the Communists were less creative and more blunt. If you were in their way, they either beat you half to death to teach you a lesson or just killed you. They would knock you down and drop a sandbag on the back of your head to smother you. They did everything secretly, perhaps because they were in the minority and had less power in the camp.
One morning, about a week after Commissar Pei’s torture, a party of prisoners was dispatched to load rocks onto trucks at a quarry, which was just a mile to the north. The men of our compound were sometimes detailed to do urgent jobs at the wharf and nearby construction sites, usually at a moment’s notice. Although escorted by South Korean guards, who were rougher with us than the GIs were, we enjoyed leaving the camp to work; it gave us the feeling of a change and some freedom. Though my leg couldn’t stand heavy weight yet, I had begged our company chief, Wang Yong, to let me go out once in a while. By now I felt I was strong enough to do some light work and had grown restless, eager to test my leg. Wang had said there was no job that suited me and that he ought to follow the doctor’s instructions and not to count me as a worker, but today somehow I was included in the group heading out. I was glad for this opportunity. To be fair, Wang had treated me decently, not in the way he handled the other prisoners who wouldn’t follow him to Taiwan. To date I had never been made to do anything against my will, and I didn’t even have to ask permission if I wanted to go to another tent within our compound. Wang allowed me to run slowly in the yard so that I could build up the strength of my injured leg, though with our poor diet I didn’t have the energy to exercise every day. Several times he had invited me to share food (mainly bread, canned fruits, and sausages) and a drink with him. I did join him in his office, but I wouldn’t stay more than half an hour. I would accept only a cigarette or a candy he offered me. I hadn’t touched any of his alcohol or food, though I was very much tempted.
The front gate was opened and we started out for the quarry. It was a warm day, the whitish sky a little overcast. On the roadside, grass sprouted here and there like tiny scissor blades. The rice paddies, deserted by the villagers who had been forced to leave the island to make room for the prison camp, were coated with a layer of algae. Some mallards were busy eating insects and plants in the fields. The air smelled of manure, stinging my nostrils. I was excited, nervous as well, unsure if I could work normally. As we were rounding the southern corner of the prison stockade, the procession suddenly grew disordered; several men turned their heads to the barbed-wire fence and whispered, “Someone’s dead.” A guard shouted “Kasseyo!” (“Move!”), but we stopped to watch.
There on a thick fence post hung a man, bony and bareheaded. His tongue fell out all the way to his chest. One of his sleeves was missing and displayed his bruised arm, whose blood vessels and tendons were visible under the yellow skin. As I lifted my eyes to g
aze at the face closely, I recognized him—Wanlin! I collapsed in a swoon.
Two men helped me to my feet. Heedless of the orders a guard was shouting, I rushed toward the dead man, unable to reach him because of the fence between us. I burst into tears. “He was my friend. He nursed me in the hospital!” I kept telling them.
Nobody tried to hold me back. Instead, they watched in silence, a few men lowered their eyes, and some sighed. They respected anyone who cherished friendship and mourned the dead with abandon, especially in the presence of many people. The four guards reassembled the fifty inmates and the whole team continued on their way, leaving me behind alone. The Korean sergeant in charge had ordered me to rejoin them at the quarry, which was already in sight, about seven hundred yards to the north. The reason I had suddenly given way to my emotions was complicated. I felt betrayed. I knew that the Communists must have masterminded the murder, but I doubted that Wanlin had been a traitor. Even if, under torture, he had revealed Commissar Pei’s true identity, they didn’t have to kill him. He was a good man with a kind, innocent heart and would never hurt anybody on purpose. The Communists must have meant to make an example of him.
I observed Wanlin again. His bluish face was slashed and even his eyelids were swollen. There was no doubt that they had beaten him up before hanging him. His hands were bound from behind, and his bare feet, on which bluebottles were crawling and feeding on blood clots, swayed a little.
