"Come on," she said. "Don't you Communists believe in equality between men and women? At this moment I'm your student."
Her words embarrassed me, so I held her hand. Together we began writing the strokes. Her hair and her clothes exuded a whiff of tobacco; she must have been quite a smoker. I had noticed that the tips of her index and middle fingers were slightly yellow. Although her hand had silky skin and slim fingers, it was quite strong, its muscles tight and its bones sturdy. I was surprised to find her fingernails rather stubby. Her hand felt more like a male laborers. This put me somewhat at ease, and we concentrated on the hook and the right-falling stroke. In a way I was moved by her letting me hold her hand to practice. I smelled of DDT, which had just been sprayed on me for delousing.
After half an hour's practice, she could do most of the strokes decently. She was happy about the progress.
When we stopped for the day, she asked me to write some words she could take back and copy in her spare time, since she couldn't come every day. I thought for a few seconds, then carefully wrote down this ancient poem:
Sand dunes are glimmering like snow Beyond our camping ground. Behind us, moonlight Is frosting a frontier town.
Whence comes the tootling pipe? For a whole night The soldiers think alike Of the distant fireside.
She read the lines silently, her lips opening and closing, revealing her strong teeth. Then she told me, "Actually I studied this poem in middle school. But it means more to me now."
Lifting her head, she said to the patients around, "You should all take good care of yourselves. When the Panmunjom negotiations are over, you can all go back to rejoin your families." A few men sighed. She glanced at a man's handless arm and added, "I hope this is the last war of mankind."
I wanted to say something, but words deserted me.
From that day on Dr. Greene came to see me once a week, handed in her homework for me to correct, and took back a page of sample characters I had inscribed for her. When she was here, she also checked my wound, which was healing fast. The inmates would gather around to see her homework and often praised her progress. Gushu was quite attached to her, saying she was a saint, because she had managed to stop his wound from suppurating.
Although our ward accommodated over seventy patients, most beds were unoccupied during the day. I found that a good number of the men were ambulatory and were actually fairly healthy; they were probably remaining here because the hospital offered better board and lodging than the regular prison camps. I wondered why the doctors didn't discharge them. There was so much deliberate confusion of identities among the POWs, who often destroyed their ID tags and changed their names randomly, that the doctors could hardly keep track of all the patients. Beyond question, some of these men were malingerers, good at faking illness. The hospital seemed to have become a vacation place for many POWs.
Now that I was able to move around with the aid of crutches, I often left the tent. It was already early winter and most trees had shed their leaves. Naked branches made the yellowish land appear more drab; even the sea to the south had turned gray. But in the north the hills were still green, scattered with patches of junipers and cypresses. I often watched seagulls flying in the sky draped with ragged clouds. The birds had no walls or fences to confine them. How precious the idea of freedom was to a prisoner! I couldn't help but compare myself with almost every creature my eyes fell upon. Even my worms-eye view of American airplanes often set me imagining how free the pilots must feel up in the air.
One day I heard some women singing a Russian song, "The Evening of Moscow Suburbs," which had also been popular in China; afterward Captain Yoon told me that that compound, number 12, contained only female prisoners. I could see a corner of their barracks, which must have held hundreds of Korean women. The reason we had mistaken them for civilians was that some of them had been guerrillas and still wore long-sleeved white dresses, black skirts, or baggy slacks. Later I heard that there was only one Chinese woman in that compound. I had known her, Zheng Dongmei. She had served in our division's song-and-dance ensemble and worn a pair of short braids. She was full of life and so cheerful that wherever she was, you could hear her singing and laughing. But she wasn't a good soldier and could pitch a grenade only fourteen yards; in a live throw she got one of her front teeth cut in half by a splinter of shrapnel from a grenade she herself had flung.
From where we were, I could see only a small portion of the women's quarters across a broad dirt road. Beyond their compound was the TB ward, which housed hundreds of consumptives. Somehow tuberculosis was still endemic to Koreans. In the evenings I would stand by the barbed wire and listen to the women singing. Though far away, I could hear their songs clearly because they always sang in chorus. Their voices transported me into reveries. They chanted all kinds of songs, sometimes passionately and sometimes lightheartedly, such as "Spring Is Coming," "Marshal Kim Il Sung," "The Anthem of the Korean People's Army," and "The Anthem of the Chinese People's Volunteers." Later I heard them sing "Defending the Yellow River!," "Solidarity Is Power,"
"The East Is Red," and some other Chinese revolutionary songs, which Dongmei must have taught them. They also chorused Korean folk songs, whose names and words I couldn't know. I liked those songs best. Contrary to the strident fighting airs, the folk songs sounded gentle and nostalgic, at times almost angelic. One morning I caught sight of two toddlers, a boy and a girl, playing with tin cans and wooden sticks in the women's compound. They looked dirty and wore rags, but they laughed and ran about nimbly. With their mothers jailed here, they too had become POWs.
Not far away from our compound was the First Closure's admission center, where the prisoners were registered and processed. In front of that hut there were dozens of corpses stacked together like firewood. I wondered why the Americans didn't immediately get rid of those nameless bodies, which gave out a fetid odor – made even worse as it combined with the smell of the open-air public latrine. The latrine was fenced with a tarpaulin wall and had four hundred pits in it.
One afternoon as I was limping along the fence, I saw a tall man in the adjacent compound whose large, bony body and shoulders, viewed from the side, looked familiar. He was smoking beyond the four rows of barbed wire. I walked over. His hair was disheveled and his face emaciated, marred by a curved scar; his right forearm was bandaged. My heart began kicking as I recognized him – Commissar Pei!
He turned to face me. His eyes brightened, but he didn't say a word, just smiled. Quietly I stopped before him and said, "How are you, Commi – "
"Shh, I'm Wei Hailong now and used to be a cook. Call me Old Wei."
"Sure, I'll do that in front of others." I had to raise my voice a little because we were about fifteen feet apart.
"Always say you didn't know me until we met here," he said.
"I'll remember that. My name is Feng Yan now. I told them I was a secretary in an infantry company."
"Good."
While we were talking, we both kept glancing right and left to make sure we were alone. He had been captured a month ago, together with the only three men left with him. To date his identity hadn't been disclosed, though he jokingly said this was just temporary. He was certain somebody would betray him soon, because there were so many prisoners who had seen him as their commissar. I reported to him on my situation. To my surprise, he had heard of my association with Dr. Greene and encouraged me to get along with her so as to obtain information on the outside world. I told him about the Panmunjom talks, of which he had also learned. Though in disguise, he was apparently still a leader here, well informed and full of plans. He wanted me to remain loyal to our country and to pass on to him any news I heard.