War Trash

by Ha Jin

  “This doesn’t seem like a pure accident,” I hazarded. “How could the American bombers be so accurate? He was in a shelter when they went to attack.”

  “Don’t let anyone else know of this,” Pei said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Our Chairman’s other son is demented. This must’ve been a heavy blow to the old man, who must hate the American imperialists all the more. I’m afraid we won’t see the end of this war soon.”

  My ability to control the flow of information in Compound 602 gave me a sense of power, which, to be honest, I relished. Yet what pleased me most was the opportunity to improve my English and the access to the kind of news regular Chinese publications wouldn’t carry. Each issue of the newspaper consisted of more than twenty pages and many photographs, and I read every word of it.

  Soon the GIs noticed that our men were pilfering their paper, so they stopped tossing it around. Our supply of Stars and Stripes became more erratic—sometimes we got five or six copies of the same issue, but then we wouldn’t have any for an entire week.

  So I was assigned to chat with the guards as often as possible to collect information from them. I found that most of the Americans were quite talkative. Almost without exception they enjoyed being listened to, especially by an enemy soldier who could understand their language. Sometimes after a bout of talk they would return to the sentry post; then a few minutes later they’d stroll back to me and start talking again. They too seemed lonesome and hated this place intensely. So I often listened to them talk, and from them I gathered useful bits of news.

  I wasn’t the only information collector. There were numerous other sources as well. The night soil team did a remarkable job in smuggling newspapers and magazines back into the compound; they stank so repulsively that few GIs would bother searching them. Most often, the guards, holding their breath, just waved the whole group past. Every morning over a dozen inmates cleaned the latrines here, carried buckets of night soil with shoulder poles to the beach, and dumped it all into the ocean. A mild-tempered GI, Jim Baker, a stout, light-skinned Negro, escorted them back and forth; they called him Sergeant, though he was just a private. He treated them kindly and had a soft spot for flattery, which they would lavish on him. They went so far as to say that he was the most handsome black man they had ever met, and that some Chinese girls would be swept off their feet by his big smile. Even when they called him “Turtle Egg” and some other names, he didn’t take offense, always smiling with his bright white teeth. He knew the meanings of those swearwords, since he had been learning Chinese from a member in the night soil squad. Besides collecting information, these latrine men also passed messages on to other compounds, especially to the Korean prisoners, who had their night soil teams too.

  There was a corporal, Richard, who had deep-set blue eyes and freckles on both sides of his prominent nose. His last name was Ran-dell or Randal, if I remember it correctly. He was on guard duty in the morning on weekdays. He looked older than most of his fellow GIs, and had a girlfriend back home. Before coming to Korea he had been a technician in a farm-tool factory in Detroit. One day, he was telling me how he and his girlfriend had camped on a lake, building a fire and frying trout and whitefish in bacon grease. I somehow could no longer control my emotions and squatted down, covering my face with both hands. I wasn’t crying, I just felt miserable, and didn’t want him to see my woeful face.

  “It’s tough, man. I know it’s tough,” he kept saying with some feeling.

  I didn’t know how intimate he had been with his girlfriend. His talk reminded me of Julan, who was more than a fiancée to me. Two days before our division left Szechuan, she had asked me to make love to her, saying she wanted to have my baby. I guessed she was afraid I might never return from the war, so a baby could become something of mine for her to keep. For a whole night we made love again and again, almost desperately; it was as though I meant to pour all of myself into her so that a part of me would remain home. With furious hunger she received me, also with hot tears and silent spasms. The next morning she broke her white jade barrette in two and gave me a half, saying with her eyes lowered, “From this day on I’m your wife. Remember, even if I’m dead, my ghost shall be with you.” I promised her that I would return to her as long as I was alive. Since that day I had carried the broken jade with me. Whenever I was about to be searched, I would hide it behind my belt or in my shoe. I didn’t know if Julan was pregnant, though I had written to her once and alluded to it. I dared not ask her explicitly because I was sure that the mail was monitored. There was a mailbox by the front gate of every compound, into which we dropped our letters once in a while, but nobody among us had ever heard a word from home.

  Little by little I began to become friendlier with Richard. He would give me cigarillos and lemon drops. If he had a newspaper on him, he’d slip it through the barbed wire to me. He seemed quite smart, often smiling cynically. One morning he asked me, “Can you do me a favor, Feng Yan?”

  “Sure, if I can.” I was surprised, wondering how I, a helpless prisoner, could be of use to him.

  He said with a small grin, “If this damn war heats up again, I may see action at the front. Can you help me get a safety certificate?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “I’ve never seen one either. But I’m told it has some Chinese or Korean words on it, saying, ‘Don’t kill this guy, he’s our friend.’ Something like that.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “You Chinese shoot prisoners, you know. I heard that an officer shot more than forty U.S. POWs because he’d lost his regiment on the front. If you get me this piece of paper, I can show it to them if they catch me, and they may not kill me.”

  I was surprised by his candid words, but I made no comment and just promised to help. To some extent, I admired him for speaking about his fear without any shame or embarrassment, so I pulled the bottom of my shirt out of my belt and showed him the tattoo—FUCK COMMUNISM. He laughed and said, “Man, you got that right!”

  His request made me think that my tattoo might serve as a “safety certificate” if need be, depending on how I used it. But on second thought, I was already in the prison camp and my life didn’t seem in danger. Then why did Commissar Pei say my tattoo might help me? How could it do that? I couldn’t imagine.

  I reported Richard’s request to Commissar Pei that afternoon. In the evening an emergency meeting was held at the headquarters, which I attended. The leaders decided to come up with something like the certificate Richard had described, though nobody had ever seen such a thing. They assigned Ming to take care of it. That night Ming set about designing one. He cut a square of white paper, the size of his palm, and with a pencil stub he drew a star at its top, then wrote these words in the official script:

  SAFETY CERTIFICATE

  Dear Comrades-in-Arms—the Chinese People’s Volunteers and the North Korean People’s Army:

  This U.S. soldier surrenders of his own will and is our friend. Please treat him well.

  Revolutionary Salute,

  Comrades on Koje Island

  April 24, 1952

  When I handed the scrap of paper to Richard the next day, he, without looking at it, put it into his shirt pocket beneath his jacket, then raised his hand, his thumb and index finger forming a circle. I guessed it must mean good or excellent. I was surprised that he didn’t even ask me what the words meant. What if the certificate fell into his superiors’ hands? Wouldn’t he be court-martialed? I was sure that if a Chinese soldier was found in possession of such a thing, he would be jailed, if not executed.

  Then one morning Richard wore a long face, as though he had just been crying. I asked him why he looked unhappy. He said, “I got a Dear John from home.”

  “What’s that, a gift?”

  He grimaced. “It’s a good-bye letter from my girlfriend.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It c
ame out of the blue.”

  “Is there another man involved?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I sighed. “A serviceman’s life is unpredictable, and a woman usually wants a stable life.”

  “It’s all because of this damned war!” He shook his head, his nostrils flaring.

  “That’s true.”

  “I don’t see why I’m here. Fighting for what?”

  I wanted to tell him that I knew why I was standing on Korean soil—to defend my country—but I refrained. He was so upset that we couldn’t chat more that day.

  There was another black private, Frank Holeman, a tall angular fellow with a mop of wiry hair, who was from Louisiana, shy and good-natured. He often chuckled with a snorting noise. Like many GIs, he had glassy eyes as a result of smoking marijuana, which grew wild in Korea, also in Manchuria. Neither Chinese nor Koreans liked the weed; we mainly used it to make rope and we preferred tobacco. I chatted with Frank several times and he would answer my questions as though I were not a prisoner. Once I mentioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin; he shook his head and said, “Never heard of it. I don’t read no books.”

  I was surprised. I had wanted to ask him whether the slaves really could eat chicken, turkey, ham, and biscuits, so I said, “The author wrote that the black slaves ate chicken wings and drumsticks and salt pork. Did they eat such good food in the South?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you eat chicken every day if you want?”

  “Chicken’s cheap back home, you know. Most folks can afford it.”

  “What’s expensive food then?”

  “Steak. Rich folks go to restaurants for a steak. Seafood is pricey too.”

  “You mean shrimp?”

  “Yeah, also salmon, crawfish, oyster, and lobster. Man, my mouth is watering.”

  I had no idea what a lobster looked like, though I knew the Chinese meaning of the word—dragon prawn. To my mind it must have been a kind of giant shrimp. But I was a little surprised by his mention of oysters as an expensive food, because I had seen street peddlers selling shucked oysters for five cents a pound in a coastal city back in China. I disliked oysters and wouldn’t touch them even for free. I told Frank that to the Chinese, chicken was the best meat and that in the southern provinces like Canton and Fujian even chicken feet were served as a kind of delicacy in restaurants. He whistled and said, “Man, if it ain’t for this war, I’d be in the chicken business making tons of dough out of you Chinamen.”

  “To be the first black millionaire, eh?”

  “Why not?”

  We both laughed.

  I also mentioned to him the antislavery movie entitled A Shipload of Slaves that I had seen in China, but he hadn’t heard of the film either. His ignorance of books and movies didn’t prevent us from having something to talk about. He often gave me chewing gum, for which I wished I could have given him something in return. Once he offered me a joint, which I inhaled but didn’t like. Later he asked me to help him get a certificate like the one Richard had. Within two days I handed him a similar one, which pleased him a lot.

  Because blank paper was in short supply, we couldn’t produce this kind of certificate every time a request came up. If paper was unavailable, we would give the man a red star, our former cap insignia, which might help him some. During the rest of our imprisonment, including the year we stayed on Cheju Island, altogether we issued over one hundred safety certificates to GIs. No South Korean ever asked us for such a thing.

  14. A TEST

  One evening in the late spring we were sent to unload a ship. Usually we didn’t work at the wharf. The men in Compound 70, nicknamed the Labor Gang, would unload cargoes and transport them to the warehouses. Some of them also repaired roads, felled trees, quarried stones, built barbed-wire fences, dug foundations, and laid bricks. Today was an exception because the work was urgent and the ship would raise anchor the next morning. On the way to the quay we sang “The Guerrillas’ Song.” The guards couldn’t understand the words, so they didn’t interfere.

  There were numerous sentries at the wharf. A pair of searchlights scraped the ground and the sky, while strings of lamps lit almost the entire area. It was a warm night, so warm that you felt drowsy as though drugged. We were divided into four groups, three of which unloaded the ship while the other stacked the cargo on the shore. With my weak leg, I couldn’t tread the quivering planks leading to the ship’s deck, so I worked with the fourth group piling stacks. From time to time we poked a hole in a sack or a box to see what was inside—corn, rice, peanuts, cigarettes, straw paper, medicines. Among the cargo there were also sacks of cement and bundles of used clothing.

  As we slaved away, from the north came some female voices singing ditties that sounded mawkish and lighthearted. We had heard that a number of restaurants and brothels were in that part of town. We couldn’t help but look in that direction now and again. The women’s voices stimulated me. For the first time since my injury I felt a strong sexual stirring. Even the air I breathed seemed to be sharpening my nose, as if from a distance of over three hundred yards I could smell the flesh and scent of women. My temples were tight and my pulse raced. Though a little giddy, I was happy to feel the throbbing of my blood, because this meant I had physically regained my strength. I was amazed that even subsisting on inadequate food, I had recovered miraculously. I was still youthful, still full of vitality.

  In the cabins and on the deck of the ship and among the stacks on shore, the prisoners were busy lifting and shouldering parcels, boxes, and sacks. We were all soaked with sweat and often panted for breath. Yet a GI, a florid-faced man, kept barking at us, “Pahly, pahly!” which means “hurry” in Korean.

  A tall inmate dropped a clothing bundle on a stack and cursed in an undertone, “Son of a bitch!” He then sneaked away, probably to take a breather.

  Curious, I rounded the corner of the stack to see what he was doing. He had opened his fly and was peeing on a roll of canvas, his urine producing a muffled tapping sound. The second he was done, an American officer emerged from the darkness about fifty yards to the north, humming a tune he must have learned from the Korean geishas. He seemed drunk, didn’t notice us, and veered unsteadily toward the rows of houses below a water tower, wearing a pistol at his flank. To my surprise, the tall prisoner came out from the stacks and followed the officer at a distance of about a hundred feet. I wondered what he was up to. Did he want to kill him? Or simply to escape?

  Not daring to stay there for long, I went back to work, taking care to pick lighter items to carry. Busy as I was, I couldn’t stop wondering what the tall man was doing. If only Ming had been here, so that I could ask him. Then I saw Chaolin talk with two men in whispers while the three of them were piling bundles of barbed wire. He was the leader of the two hundred men here. Like me, he wanted to get out of the compound as often as possible, always saying, “I need to stretch my limbs.” He and I had never been close, so I didn’t go up to him and report on the disappearance of that inmate.

  About twenty minutes later the tall man came back, panting hard, his eyes shining. He said to Chaolin that an American officer had gone to sleep without locking his door and that there was a pistol in his room. “Should I go back and take it?” he asked Chaolin.

  “Why didn’t you just snatch it?” a man butted in.

  “I wasn’t sure if it was a right thing to do, so I came back to ask permission.”

  Chaolin said, “We must get the gun, but you shouldn’t go alone. Yuan, why don’t you go with him?”

  “Me?” I was taken aback as several pairs of eyes turned to me.

  “Yes, you go with him. Let him stay outside the house to keep watch while you go in for the gun.”

  “What if the officer wakes up?” I was puzzled why he picked me for the job.

  “Kill him with this!” another man said and handed me an iron bar about two feet long.

  I realized Chaolin meant to give me a test, which I had no choice but to take. So I agreed. Bu
t we couldn’t set about the task right away because the sentries at the wharf were still alert. We had to go on working.

  After ten-thirty the guards began yawning, whereas many prisoners had grown more spirited, gathering around them, asking questions or complaining that we were too hungry to continue. The inmates wanted to share a sack of peanuts, but the duty sergeant wouldn’t let them. While they were begging him, I set off with the tall man, whose name I now knew was Wang Yabing. We sneaked behind the stacks and slunk away, avoiding the lights along the quay. My heart was fluttering as if a rabbit had been trapped in my chest, and my steps were shaky. Within five minutes we reached a low house that looked like a civilian home with a ceramic-tiled roof. Indeed the door wasn’t locked and it opened at a light push. Then came the officer’s soft snoring. Thank heaven, he was sound asleep.

  “You go in now,” Wang Yabing whispered to me. “If someone’s coming, I’ll meow like a horny cat.”

  With the iron bar under my arm I tiptoed into the room. The table lamp was still on, covered by a shade made of fawn paper. The sleeper, a small man with a graying mustache, had his clothes on, his bristly face toward the dark ceiling. He stirred a little, clattering his teeth as though munching something. Suddenly he chuckled, saying, “Oh dear, what a mess. Can you give him another fork, Cathy?” I froze in my tracks. A moment later he resumed snoring. Beside his pillow lay a grimy Colt pistol and a black flashlight. Shivering all over, I picked up the gun and stepped backward until I reached the door. The instant I turned around, the iron bar fell on the stone steps with a clanking noise, but I didn’t stop to retrieve it and just tore away into the darkness.