Gary stayed in a makeshift cottage in the POW collection center on the outskirts of Pusan. The ocean was within view, and large ships in the harbor loomed like little hills in the morning mist. On a fine day fishing boats would bob on the distant swells. The water was uneven in color, some areas yellow and some green. To the north, outside the immense prison camp, spread endless rice paddies, some unsown, choked by algae and weeds. The bustling city was full of refugees. All kinds of Korean civilians had swarmed here and put up temporary shelters; even the nearby slopes were dappled with patches of tents and shacks built of straw, plywood, and corrugated iron. Gary could see that the soil here was rich and the climate congenial. He saw giant apples and pears for sale, much bigger than those in China, and he couldn’t help but imagine how good this place could be in peace. Fluent in both English and Mandarin, he was appreciated by his superiors and peers. He also mixed well with the officers from Taiwan who were here to help the UN with the prison’s administrative work. Most of these officers would stay just a few months. Gary often sat at their tables at mealtimes and also shared cigarettes and beer with them.
One day at lunch, as Gary was eating a Salisbury steak with a dill pickle, Meng, a broad-shouldered Taiwanese officer in his mid-thirties, came and sat down across from him. The man’s bold eyes shone with excitement while he gave a cockeyed grin. He said to Gary under his breath, “Mind you, I’m having low back pain.”
That sounded familiar. Then it hit Gary that those words were part of a code for initiating contact. He responded according to the script, “Your kidneys must be weak. Herbal medicine might help.”
“What kind would you recommend?” Meng asked calmly.
“Six-flavor boluses.”
“How many should I take?”
“Two a day, one in the morning and one in the evening.”
A knowing smile emerged on Meng’s face. Gary’s heart began thumping as he was convinced that this man in the Nationalist army’s uniform was an agent working for the mainland. With practiced casualness Gary looked around and saw two American officers eating a few tables away, but they didn’t understand Mandarin.
“Brother”—Meng leaned in—“I know you meet prisoners every day. The boss wants you to get hold of the photos of the die-hard anti-Communists among them.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but they all go by aliases,” Gary said.
“We know that. That’s why we need their pictures.”
“When should I give you the goods?”
“I’ll return to Taipei soon. You should contact Hong Kong to see how to deliver them.”
“Using the old communication channel?”
“Correct.”
That was their only meeting, and Meng left Pusan three days later. Gary continued to join the U.S. officers in interrogating the Chinese POWs. He was respected by his colleagues for knowing some of the prisoners’ dialects and for understanding their psychology. In the beginning he had sympathized with those POWs who still had unhealed wounds, but he was jaded by now. Some prisoners would weep wretchedly like small boys and beg the UN officers to send them to Generalissimo Chiang’s army in Taiwan. Some kept complaining about being bullied by others, particularly by their prison-compound leaders, handpicked by their captors. Some remained reticent, only repeating, “I want to go home.” A few, the minute they sat down, would curse their interrogators and even call Gary “the Americans’ running dog.” There was a fellow, his face and limbs burned by napalm, who would make a strange noise in response to the interrogators’ questions, and Gary couldn’t tell whether he was giggling or hissing or crying. One of his eyes never blinked; maybe it was already sightless. The files on the POWs were messy because the prisoners would frequently change their names, also because they were often regrouped in different prison units. And no staffer would take the trouble to set the files in order, everybody being overwhelmed with the work he had to do.
A number of POWs were leaders within the prison compounds and worked hard to persuade others to desert the Communist ranks. These men were quite obedient to the Americans and eager to curry favor with the prison administration. Whenever possible, Gary would strike up conversations with them, sharing cigarettes or candy or peanuts. He learned from them the calisthenics that the Chinese army had designed for its soldiers. He found many of these men using names different from those in their files. The prison administration wouldn’t bother to straighten this out, or perhaps even encouraged them to adopt aliases as a disguise. Occasionally Gary would take a photo with one of those men as “a keepsake.” Whenever it was possible, he’d bring their files back to his room, which he shared with an officer who’d always go out in the evenings. With his German camera Gary shot photos of some anti-Communists’ files and kept a list of their names with cross-references to their current aliases.
When his Pusan stint was over, in late October, he returned to Okinawa with six films of the prisoners’ files and resumed his work as a translator at the agency. He could have had the photos developed, but that might be too risky, so he put the films into a cloth pouch and tied its neck with a shoelace. He wrote to Hong Kong, to the old address, a Baptist seminary, which he’d been told to use in case of emergency.
To Gary’s delight, Bingwen Chu wrote back two weeks later, saying in the voice of a fake cousin that Gary’s family in the countryside was well and missed him, and the two of them should spend some time together in Hong Kong in February. As for the “medicine,” Gary should go to Tokyo as soon as possible and deliver it to “a friend” there, who was an overseas Chinese. Bingwen provided the man’s address in Shibuya district and described him as “a short, thickset fellow with a balding head and a Sichuan accent.” Gary wondered why Bingwen and he couldn’t meet somewhere in Japan. Then he realized that few Chinese agents, unable to speak a foreign tongue and unfamiliar with the life and customs of another country, would dare to undertake a mission in an environment where they had little control. This realization made him smile with a modicum of complacence, feeling he must be quite outstanding compared to his comrades back home, perhaps one in a thousand. Like his American colleagues who often went to the capital on weekends, he took a three-day leave, flew to Tokyo, and delivered the intelligence without incident.
Minmin and I started out for Maijia Village early the next morning. Once we got out of Linmin Town, I was amazed to see that most of the country roads were well paved, some new. The villages and small towns in this area seemed all connected by decent roads, though the asphalt was often littered with animal droppings. The drive was pleasant; there was little traffic at this early hour. We passed an immense reservoir fringed with reeds and sparkling in the sunlight, and then some wheat fields appeared, the stalks, their heads just developing, swaying a little in the breeze. Approaching Maijia Village, we saw a pond to our right, in which flocks of white ducks and geese were paddling. An old woman, a short sickle in her hand, was sitting on the bank, tending the fowl. We pulled up. As we stepped out of the car, she cackled, “Goosey, goosey, qua qua qua.” We went over and asked her where the village chief’s home was.
She pointed to the slanting columns of cooking smoke in the east and said, “There, beyond those houses. His home has red tiles on top.”
We thanked her and drove over.
The village head was a man around fifty, with a strong build and large smiling eyes. He introduced himself as Mai after I said I was Weimin Shang’s daughter and Minmin was my student. He seemed pleased to see us and asked his wife to serve tea. Seated on a drum-like stool in his sitting room with his ankle rested on his opposite knee, he told me that there were still more than a dozen Shang households in the village, but none of them was my father’s immediate family. “Weimin Shang’s parents died and his wife moved away,” Mai said. “Nobody’s here anymore.”