Unlike Compound 602 on Koje Island, in this camp any large-scale cultural project, such as a full-length play or an art show, was out of the question. The singers, actors, painters, composers, and calligraphers had been scattered among the battalions, and there was no way to assemble them. At first this state of isolation caused us some difficulties, but soon every compound formed its own cultural staff. As a result, there were ten groups of "artists" in the camp, around whom many prisoners gathered.
Among the ten groups, the one in Compound 9 had more talents than the others and was most active. Meng Feihan, the composer and stage director who had lost a foot, was there. Besides him, the chief of that battalion had a fondness for cultural work, having once led a song-and-dance ensemble in an artillery division. Every evening you could hear music and songs rising from their barracks. Throughout the camp many inmates took part in musical activities of this kind. I participated too, though briefly. I tried to teach others how to read music, but my voice was so tuneless that whenever I sang to illustrate musical notes, some men would chuckle or cackle. So I gave up.
The POWs also contrived several kinds of instruments, including drums, flutes, violins, and horns. The first bugle was fashioned out of tinplate. A bugler by chance had brought into the camp his mouthpiece, which later served as a casting model for the lead mouthpieces on all the wind instruments here. Drums were relatively easy to produce, and there were several sizes of them; all were made out of sawed oil drums, water pails, and gas cans, covered with rain cloth fastened by rope. My friend Weiming, the short Cantonese man who was very protective of Shanmin, was an expert in making stringed instruments, which were more difficult to create than the wind ones. He was tone-deaf, however, and couldn't read musical notes or play any instrument; but he was more inventive than others. He turned a tin can into the resonator for an erhu, a two-stringed Chinese violin; he also used wooden boards, bamboo pipes, rat skins, and other materials. Ignorant of music, he had to have helpers and testers, of whom he had many, since others had lined up to join him. In fact, every instrument the prisoners made was a result of teamwork. There were dozens of instrument-making groups in the camp. They even produced several guitars that had three or four strings. They also created various kinds of violins: resin was obtained from steeped pine chips; the bows were mostly thin iron rods bent on both ends; as for the hair, they unraveled pieces of rope, soaked the hemp in warm water, combed it straight, then picked the sturdy strands to be tied to the sticks. Most "silk strings" came from the jackets and boots they wore, whereas all the metal strings had one source – electric wires, which could be found at the construction sites. By far the Western violin was the hardest to make, because it had four different metal strings that were difficult to come by. Nevertheless, one group managed to come up with a kind of strings, which were entwined with threads to make them sound close to the standard G, D, A, and E strings. It took a great deal of experimentation to create a Western violin.
Throughout the summer, our compound was like an instrument factory, and some sort of manufacturing was under way in most of the sheds. The prisoners took the work as seriously as if it were their livelihood. In addition, many men had begun to learn how to play the instruments and formed small bands. I often wondered why they were so earnest about such activities. I guessed they were probably bored and just meant to have some fun, frittering away the time that hung heavy on their hands. But I was mistaken. I soon realized that for them this was serious business, a matter of survival. Usually four or five men worked together at one instrument, so the product embodied a kind of collective will and effort. Likewise, a band always belonged to a platoon or company as "a special weapon in fighting the enemy." That was the language the leaders used. I wondered why they applied such hyperbole to a mere band. Perhaps they believed music could bolster the comrades' courage and kindle their hatred and thus turn them into better fighting machines.
On occasion, a skit or a comic talk accompanied by bamboo clappers was enacted in our compound, though none of the pieces was exceptional. Some prisoners tried to write short scripts for the stage and some composed songs, but few of these efforts resulted in passable work. Once in a while they would draw cartoons to ridicule the Americans, who would be given cucumber noses or bloated midriffs. The blackboards in our compound always carried jokes, drawings, and poems. Yet by far the most popular form of entertainment was the songfest.
Whenever a satisfactory song was composed, it began circulating briskly among the inmates, and within two weeks all the ten battalions could sing it. Meng Feihan in Compound 9 was the major composer; in general his music was solemn, strenuous, and high-minded. Two of his disciples were good at singing folk songs, so they blended light melodies into some satirical airs, which became immensely popular, such as "The Loudspeaker Always Lies, Don't Listen to It," "God, I'm Scared," and "Truman Is Done For." The prisoners enjoyed these erratic, uncanny tunes so much that they would croon them even when they were alone, whereas they would sing the serious songs only in groups. The leaders made good use of the musical talents. Whenever something important happened, they would have a song composed to mark the occasion. For instance, to commemorate the fight for raising our national flag, a song was made a week after the massacre. It went as follows:
Red flags fly high on October 1. Our comrades' blood bears out The American imperialists' crimes. However brutal the enemies are, We shall be more resolute. Our hands can stop their bayonets
And stones can block their bullets.
Shoulder to shoulder we form a bastion
To defend our national flag
And fight the savage foe.
Our hatred is redoubled -
The debt of blood must be paid in blood.
The evil American imperialists
Cannot escape the hands of justice.
We sons of the new China
Shall make our deeds known to the world
And keep our flags flying for good.
Best in peace, our brave martyrs.
You will always live in our hearts.
Despite its simpleminded boastfulness, this song became quite popular and served as a fighting anthem for some POWs. I disliked it and never learned to sing it. Yet I was amazed by my comrades' great zeal for songs. Every day there was so much singing in the camp that even some GIs picked up the tunes. One of them, a skinny fellow with red sideburns, would chant at us the line "March, march, follow Mao Zedong" as a kind of greeting.
Gradually I came to understand that singing was a cathartic experience for the prisoners. A song's contents didn't really matter; as long as the men could sing something together, they felt better. Many of them were depressed and cantankerous, so a songfest was an expedient for releasing their grief and anguish and for restoring their emotional balance. We missed home and our former ways of life terribly. This mental state disposed many of us to be sentimental. I saw men weep all of a sudden for no apparent reason, perhaps just touched by a happy thought or by a surge of self-pity. Without question, singing together assuaged their misery and cheered their hearts. More importantly, songfests enabled them to identify with one another emotionally so as to increase their feeling of solidarity, though the affection they felt for their fellow inmates could be momentary.
The singing also eased the prisoners' tremendous dread of loneliness. The inmates were very gregarious, as most Chinese are. Some of them feared loneliness more than incarceration. As long as they stayed together and organized, they felt they had a better chance of survival. Singing provided them with a kind of socialization that not only soothed their aching hearts but also suspended their individual isolation. Frankly, sometimes I wished I were more like them, capable of chanting whatever came to mind with total abandon.
Another question troubled me for some time. Were the arts groups' creative activities truly artistic, as they claimed? In the beginning I had respected the composers and the painters immensely. Unable to play any instrument, I'd look up to whoever could saw a tune out on a fiddle even if he played with assumed bravura. But before too long I noticed that there was a crudeness in whatever they did, as though the idea of perfection had never entered their minds. I daresay this crudeness originated from their utilitarian conception of the arts. They created every piece of work merely for its usefulness, like that of a weapon: each was made simply for the purpose of rousing people and boosting the fighting spirit. These creations had an instantaneous feel, a dash of spontaneity, but invariably ended in a slipshod fashion. Most of the time a man would finish writing a song or a poem at one go, and he'd be proud of completing it "without changing a single word," and even brag about it, as though to assert that the work had come purely from inspiration, which was a mark of genius. Patience and refinement were alien to these young men, who couldn't see that art didn't have to be useful or serve a purpose other than entertainment. Their works could be powerful at times, but never beautiful. So I began to have deep reservations about their efforts and sometimes felt they were just wasting their energy and time. No doubt these men were talented, ingenious, and passionate, but they always stopped at the point to which their cleverness led them, not going beyond into complexity and subtlety, not to mention depth. As a result, however extravagantly they used their talent, they remained like smart hacks, blind to their own shoddiness. There was no way to explain my thoughts to them without risking my neck, so I kept quiet.
Unless I had to, I didn't sing with others. My young friend Shanmin enjoyed singing, and I didn't discourage him. I spent more time reading English-language newspapers. It was my job to glean information for our leaders, so nobody interfered with my reading. Often tired of news articles, I craved a good book, a long novel or biography. This mental deprivation was more painful to me than hunger. Sometimes I sat alone with an old issue of Stars and Stripes on my lap, but my eyes couldn't register the meanings of the words as I sank into thought. This manner of sitting, however, was a safe way to indulge in my own thinking. I felt that when I was alone, my mind would be clearer and more alert. I didn't have to join the inmates in the morning exercises; instead, I would read loudly for an hour to practice my spoken English, which was also my job.
Barely having enough to eat, I couldn't run as often as I wished. Sometimes I did dozens of squats inside the shed, deliberately putting more weight on my injured leg; once in a while I ran a few laps along the fence of our compound. If I had been given enough food, I would have been happy to labor like a coolie every day, because I believed that physical work and fresh air could keep me from rotting away in jail. I wanted to return home healthy and strong. I was not yet twenty-five and should have a long life ahead.
But I wasn't well fit for hard labor. I once left the camp with fifty men to dig ditches in the South Korean army's training base, where recruits were drilled before they were shipped to the Korean mainland. The work was exhausting, though once in a while you could be lucky enough to find a turnip or a sweet potato left in the fields. That morning we set off at eight and dug away for a whole day with only a half-hour break for the midday meal. It drizzled in the afternoon; few of us had brought our rain ponchos, and by the time we returned in the evening, most of us were drenched. I couldn't get up the next morning, aching all over, and remained sick for several days. The doctor forbade me to join the ditch diggers again. My bad leg, not having fully recovered from the injury yet, couldn't stand the long hours of work. Oddly enough, this experience made me see that some of the "artists" stayed in the barracks for artistic creation perhaps because they wanted to shun physical labor, from which only officers and the disabled could be exempted. This realization instilled into me some contempt for those able-bodied shirkers.
Being an interpreter, I was regarded as an officer by the Americans and the prisoners, who literally called me "Officer Interpreter." So the inmates didn't like my joining them in their work, as if I was a nuisance to them. My bad leg wasn't strong enough for me to carry anything heavier than sixty pounds; this made me a poor hand when we unloaded a ship or truck. Some men often poked fun at me, though good-naturedly, saying they didn't need a scholar around when they were slaving away. But I wasn't a total weakling in their eyes. We had arm-wrestled several times, and I could beat many of them.
The work I liked best was shoveling, which could tone my muscles without overstraining my injured leg. At first, when I used a shovel, I would drip with sweat and have a sore back and hot, swollen hands in the evening. But gradually I adopted a rhythm when shoveling dirt or sand or gravel. I could apply a shovel with a swing of my upper body like a skilled laborer. Whenever there was shoveling to do, I would volunteer to go. Sometimes they took me and sometimes they didn't. Wet mud was much harder to shovel, but because so many hands were available, we would tie a rope to the shaft of a shovel, just above its scoop, and have two men pull at both ends of the rope to help the shoveler lift a pile of mud. This rhythmical group shoveling could be fun if you were teamed with the right men, with whom you could swap jokes.
Behind our kitchen sat a grinding stone, at which we often crushed grain to groats. I would volunteer to rotate the stone by pushing a long rod attached to it. I liked this work very much because it could exercise both of my legs and, working alone, I didn't have to hurry. Most people wouldn't toil at the grinding stone and some called it a donkey's job, so I often did the grinding. At times when I was done, the cooks would give me something to eat, a bowl of pea soup or a piece of dried fish, which made the work more rewarding. Gradually I could see that some men thought of me as an eccentric – they wondered why an officer, a college graduate, would condescend to labor like themselves. I never explained why, just saying I enjoyed it.
There was another advantage in doing some physical work. An educated man like me tended to be accused of having deliberately separated himself from others. If I often worked with my hands, few people could say I had put on airs. In fact, the battalion leaders praised me several times for my integration with our men. They mistook my voluntary labor for an educational task I had imposed on myself, like the kind of education the Party had always called on intellectuals to undergo conscientiously.
One evening my friends Shanmin and Weiming returned from the GIs' quarters, where they had been detailed to plant grass. They told me excitedly that they had eaten their fill in that barracks, where they had come upon a trash can stuffed with cartons that still contained half-eaten bread, roast beef, carrots, and sliced cucumber. "What's this, do you know? Lard or soap?" Weiming showed me a yellowish chunk, the size of a matchbox.
"Cheese," I said. "It's very nutritious, made from milk."
"Damn, we should've taken all the leftovers back," he said to Shanmin. He stroked his belly, on which slanted a scar like a giant centipede. His navel was huge and cavernous.
Shanmin told me, "There were many cubes of this cheese in the trash can. We weren't sure if it was edible."
"We tried it," said Weiming, "but couldn't swallow it, so we didn't bring the rest with us."
"Men, you left behind the best stuff." I was salivating a little.
So he gave me the cheese, which I put into my mouth, chewing with relish, though it was stale. They were both amazed. "You have a diplomat's stomach and can eat anything," said Weiming, smiling and shaking his round head.