“I don’t know,” I’d reply.
As he asked me this my heart would feel wave after wave of pain. After we crossed the Yangtze, we began to hear the sound of cannons and guns. In the beginning it would echo from far away, but after walking two more days the gunfire grew louder and louder. It was then that we arrived at a small village. There weren’t any animals in that village, let alone people — there wasn’t a living being anywhere in sight. The company commander ordered us to set up the cannons, and I knew that this time we were really going into battle. Someone walked over and asked the commander, “Commander, where are we?”
The commander said, “You’re asking me? Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know? Who the fuck am I supposed to ask?”
The company commander didn’t know where we were, and the peasants had all run away. I looked around in all directions. Other than some bare trees and a few thatched huts, there was nothing. Two days later there were more and more common soldiers in yellow uniforms. They came unit by unit from all directions, and some of the battalions set up camp right beside us. After another two days we still had yet to fire a single cannon when our company commander told us, “We’ve been surrounded.”
We weren’t the only company to be surrounded — there were somewhere around a hundred thousand Nationalist troops that were surrounded within a twenty li square area. Everyone in sight was wearing these yellow uniforms; it looked like a temple fair. Old Quan was really something. He sat on a dirt mound outside a tunnel, smoking and watching the yellow-skinned common soldiers go back and forth. From time to time he’d say hello to one of them — he really knew a lot of people. Old Quan had been all over, having drifted through seven different units. He laughed, told dirty jokes to some old friends and exchanged gossip on some other soldiers. It seemed as if everyone they asked about was either dead or someone had just seen them within the last few days. Old Quan told Chunsheng and me that back in the day all those guys had tried to run away with him. Just as Old Quan was speaking, someone called over in our direction, “Old Quan, you’re still not dead?”
Old Quan bumped into another old friend. Quan laughed. “You little bastard, when did they catch you?”
Before that guy could reply, someone else called Old Quan, who turned his head to look and jumped up to yell, “Hey, where’s Old Liang?”
The guy laughed and yelled back, “Dead.”
Dejected, Old Quan sat back down, cursing, “Fuck, he still owes me a silver piece.”
“You see?” Old Quan proudly continued, telling Chunsheng and me, “Nobody succeeds in deserting.”
In the beginning the Liberation Army just surrounded us, but they didn’t attack right off, so we weren’t really afraid. The company commander wasn’t afraid, either. He said that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would send in tanks to save us. Later, even when the rifle and cannon shots in front of us got louder and louder, we weren’t scared, just bored. The company commander still hadn’t ordered us to start firing the cannons. One veteran soldier thought that sitting idle while our brothers-in-arms were on the front lines shedding their blood and sacrificing their lives was no kind of plan, so he asked the commander, “Shouldn’t we fire a few shots from the cannons?”
At the time the commander was in a tunnel gambling. He furiously snapped back, “Fire the cannons? In which direction should we fire them?”
The company commander had a point: What if our cannons hit our Nationalist brothers-in-arms? The Nationalist troops in front would instantly turn around and teach us a lesson. This wasn’t a game. The commander ordered us to stay in the tunnels. We could do whatever the hell we wanted, as long as we didn’t fire the cannons.
After being surrounded for a while our supplies of food and ammunition were close to empty. Whenever a plane appeared overhead, the Nationalist troops below crowded together like a colony of ants. No one wanted the trunks of ammunition that were thrown out of the plane; everyone piled onto the bags of rice. As soon as the plane left, the soldiers who got their hands on some rice would carry it off to their tunnels. Two men would carry one bag while others beside them would fire shots into the air to protect the carriers. Only then would the crowds start to break up, and everyone would return to their tunnels.
Before long, groups of Nationalist troops surged out of their tunnels toward the houses and leafless trees. Men were climbing on the roofs of thatched houses near and far, tearing down huts and cutting down trees. This was almost like going into battle, and the cacophony that followed almost drowned out the sounds of the gunshots in the forward position. In less than half a day, all the houses and trees were gone. All that was left on the desolate land were soldiers walking around with house beams and tree branches on their shoulders, while others carried planks and stools. After returning to their tunnels they began to cook rice. The smoke rose up, twisting and turning in the sky.
At the time, what we had most of were bullets. No matter where you’d lie down they would press up against you until it hurt. After all of the houses and trees around us had been torn and cut down, soldiers flooded the land, cutting dead grass with their bayonets. The scene was just like the busy season when farmers harvest rice. There were even a few soldiers who, covered in sweat, dug at the roots of some trees. And then there were some who started to dig up graves, using the weathered coffin boards as fuel for fire. As they dug up the coffins they’d just throw the bones of the deceased to one side, not even bothering to rebury them. When you’re in the kind of situation we were in, bones of the deceased are nothing to be afraid of. If you had to sleep pressed up against them you wouldn’t even have a nightmare. There was less and less firewood to cook the rice with, while there was more and more rice. No one fought over the rice anymore. In fact, Old Quan, Chunsheng and I carried a few bags of rice back to our tunnel to use as a bed to sleep on, so we could avoid the discomfort of bullets pressing against us.
It had gotten to the point when all possible sources of cooking fuel were exhausted, yet the Generalissimo still hadn’t come to save us. It was a good thing that the planes stopped air-dropping rice and began sending down flatbread. As soon as the packages of flatbread hit the ground, our brothers dived recklessly on top like animals trying to get their share. The way they piled on top of one another, layer after layer, was exactly how my mom used to weave the soles of my shoes. The way they screamed was no different from a pack of wild wolves.
“Let’s split up and snatch some,” suggested Old Quan.
Splitting up was our only chance of getting our hands on some flatbread. We crawled out of the tunnel, and I chose a direction. There were shots being fired close by, and there would often be stray bullets whizzing past me. One time I was making a run for it when the guy next to me suddenly just fell down. I thought he had passed out from hunger, but when I turned around I saw that half of his head was missing. It scared me so bad that my legs went soft and I almost collapsed. Getting your hands on some flatbread was even harder than it had been to get rice. It was said that the Nationalists were losing more men by the day, but as soon as that plane would appear in the sky, everyone suddenly popped out of the ground, and the barren earth appeared instantly to have grown row after row of grass that moved with the plane. As soon as the flatbread was air-dropped, the soldiers on the ground split up, each person rushing to the parachute he had his eye on. The bread packages weren’t sturdy, either, so as soon as they hit the ground they broke apart. Dozens if not a hundred men would all rush to the same spot. Some of the soldiers collided, knocking each other unconscious before they even got close to the drop point. I tried to get some, but aside from a few measly bread cakes, all I ended up with was a sore body — it was as if someone had tied me up and whipped me with a belt. When I got back to the tunnel, Old Quan was already sitting there. His face was all black-and-blue, yet he hadn’t even ended up with as many bread cakes as I had. Old Quan, who had been in the army eight years, still had a good heart. He put his bread on top of mine and said, “Wait until Chunsheng gets back, and we’ll eat together.” We kneeled down in the tunnel with our heads sticking out, watching for Chunsheng.