In contrast, most of the time when I was with others, including my comrades, I couldn't help but grow vigilant, because there was always some ulterior motive behind every activity and every statement, and I had to take care not to be victimized. Here among my fellow countrymen I felt lonesome and often sat outside the tent alone. If only I could have had a book to read. With nothing to do and without friends, I had become more gloomy. Soon the inmates nicknamed me Stargazer, because I watched the sky a lot and could identify some stars by name.
Depressed and bored, many men in our tent gambled every day. They had no money, so they used cheap cigarettes as stakes. The Americans issued each of us one pack a week, at times two packs a week, which was generous. By comparison, on average an enlisted man in the People's Volunteer Army had barely gotten one pack of cigarettes a month. It was during the first days in Compound 72 that I started to smoke. Initially, after a few puffs I felt woozy, but two packs later I began to enjoy smoking, though it aggravated my coughing. In the daytime our small tent was full of hubbub, so I sat outside whenever it was possible. These men unnerved me and I grew more withdrawn. How I wished Wanlin were here.
The men in the large tents were no better. They too gambled, with even more clamor and fierce squabbles. Some of them had lost everything they had, even their caps, shoes, and underwear. I wasn't sure who had provided them with mah-jongg, perhaps the prison authorities, or perhaps Father Hu, who preached here on Sundays. The gamblers had made card tables themselves, which were just slapdash pieces of carpentry. Without work and with too much free time, the prisoners simply had no other outlet for their energy and distress. The gambling had reduced some of them to insolent louts. Fights broke out time and again. How idleness could foster vices and bring out the worst in a man! If only they had been put to hard labor. Then at least they would have been too tired to behave aggressively.
Another thing upset me: the prisoners often fought over food in the mess lines. The men living in the large tents would eat before those of us from the small tents. The rule was that the daily ration for every prisoner should be 1.15 pounds of grain, but the leaders at all levels in the compound would take the lion's share first. For example, the regimental chief, Han Shu, a fluent English speaker who had been a platoon leader in the Communist army and had capitulated to the Americans without firing a single shot, would eat four dishes and soup at every meal, prepared by his personal cook, who had been seized from a fishing boat on the Yellow Sea. All the company and battalion leaders enjoyed special mess too. As a result, the prisoners who wanted to be repatriated to China could have, at most, half rations. Many men would hurl abuse randomly at the mess lines and wouldn't think twice about using brute force on others. I noticed that the illiterate ones among us were particularly quick-tempered at mealtimes. For a bowl of boiled barley, some of them wouldn't hesitate to knock a tooth out of another man's mouth or to give him a bloody nose. Every day there were at least two fights; sometimes half a dozen. Once the North Korean prisoners in the compound across the front road went on a hunger strike; the Americans left barrels of food at their front gate, but nobody would come out to pick up the rice and stewed radish. Then the camp's executive officer, Captain Lennon, came to ask us to show the Koreans how good this meal tasted. Shamelessly, two hundred Chinese POWs flocked there, gorging themselves on the lunch, grinning and grunting like animals. I often wondered if some of these men would kill their siblings just for a ladle of boiled soybeans.
I still remember a fight I witnessed one day. At dinner, two men before me in the waiting line suddenly started yelling at each other. "You're behind me!" said a squat man with a Cantonese accent, baring his broad teeth.
"No, I'm in front of you," countered a tall fellow.
"Don't butt in again!"
"Damn it, when did I do that?"
"Right now!"
"Fuck off, okay?" The tall man poked the other in the chest with his fist.
"If you touch me again I'll kill you!"
"So." He poked him once more.
The short fellow lunged forward with his bowl raised in the air to hit the other man's skull. A few men stepped out of the line, restrained him, and pulled him away.
The scene saddened me. Why had they been so pugnacious? There was enough barley for everyone to have half a bowl, and they were not busy and had time to wait. Why did they act like such hoodlums? In private I shared my dismay with a fellow in my platoon, Bai Dajian, and he explained that they had feared the battalion chief, Liu Tai-an, would show up and ruin the meal, so they had wanted to reach the food barrels as quickly as possible.
Bai Dajian told me more about Liu Tai-an. Liu had once been a sergeant in the Nationalist army, but the Communists had captured him in a battle and put him into a logistic unit after a month's reindoctrination. Because he could drive, they gave him a truck. After his division crossed the Yalu River, at the first opportunity he drove three tons of salt fish to the American position and surrendered. Rumor had it that he was sent to Guam for two months' training and then returned to Korea. That was why he was appointed a battalion commander as well as the vice chief of the regiment – to help Han Shu keep order in the compound, since Han was a man of mild disposition and seemed indecisive. Liu Tai-an hated the Communists so much that he often publicly flogged men who wanted to return to Red China. The Americans had adopted a let-alone policy and didn't care what happened in the compounds as long as the POWs remained behind the barbed wire, so Liu ruled this regiment like a police state. Even some GIs called him Little Caesar. Sometimes he would show up at the kitchen at mealtimes with a batch of bodyguards and throw a fistful of sand into a barrel of boiled barley, then snarl at the men in the waiting line, "You're not even worth the food you eat!" Once he even peed into a cauldron of turnip soup in front of everybody. With Liu Tai-an looming in their minds, the inmates here would struggle to get their meals as soon as possible.
Whatever their reasons, the men's fighting upset me. They had once been comrades-in-arms, and many of them would again be comrades after they returned to our homeland. Why should they behave like brutes? When led by the Communists, they had been good soldiers and seemed high-minded and their lives had possessed a purpose, but now they were on the verge of becoming animals. How easily could humanity deteriorate in wretched conditions? How low could an ordinary man fall when he didn't serve a goal larger than himself? Unorganized for honest work or for a meaningful cause, these men were just a mob ruled by the instinct for survival. Sometimes I wondered if there was a Communist cell among us, because I was positive that some of the prisoners were Party members and supposed to lead these desperate men. Yet all the Communists here kept a low profile, hardly distinguishable from others.
One morning, about three weeks after my arrival at Koje Island, I ran into Chang Ming, the editor of our division's bulletin. At first I wasn't sure if it was he, but then, spotting his bushy eyebrows and catfish mouth, I almost cried out with joy. He saw me too, but we pretended we didn't know each other because there were people around.
He was on the other side of the barbed-wire fences, in Compound 71. I squatted down to retie my shoelaces while he stopped to do calisthenics. When everyone had gone out of earshot, we rushed to the fences and started talking excitedly. The first thing he asked me was whether I had signed up to go to Taiwan. "Of course not," I said proudly. He looked four or five years older now, though still robust. His thick lips were cracked. Miraculously, he hadn't been wounded.