The frail boy Richard had saved hadn't stayed in the same cabin with me, but he caught sight of me on the beach. Wordlessly he came over as if to claim a special relationship. His long-lashed eyes were still intense, fastened on me. I patted his shoulder and asked, "What's your name?"
"Shanmin," came his clear voice.
"Have they put you into a squad yet?"
He shook his head. I said, "Then stay with me."
He nodded eagerly.
Our procession walked a long distance around the fence to reach the front gate. When we had entered the camp, I saw why there were so many barbed-wire fences in here. Within the enclosure were ten compounds, each containing about ten sheds and surrounded by barbed wire almost fifteen feet high. These compounds, arranged in two unequal rows and guarded individually by GIs at the gates, were divided by a large open field, to the west of which were four compounds, about one hundred yards apart from one another, and to the east of which lay six compounds, a shorter distance separating them, about eighty yards. This layout made it impossible for any barracks to have direct contact with its neighbors. In addition, there was a small prison, a stone house at the edge of the sea, over a thousand feet from the northern fence of the camp. The enemy seemed to have learned from the abduction of General Bell the importance of dispersing the POW leaders, so they meant to keep us in smaller groups from now on.
We were divided into ten units, each having about six hundred men. Shanmin and I were put into Compound 6, whose conditions were not as bad as I had feared, its facilities new and adequate on the whole. The compound was at the northeastern end of the camp. In it, eight long sheds stood in parallel, all built of dark volcanic rocks with asphalt-felt roofs. At its southeastern corner stood the kitchen, with a dwarf chimney, and at the southwestern end was the latrine, similar to the residential sheds in shape, though smaller in size. What made the privy unusual was that its urinal had been installed outside, a long concrete trough slanting alongside the fence at an angle of fifteen degrees. In between the kitchen and the outhouse was the recreation area, a small playing field as large as four basketball courts placed together. All the other nine compounds basically had the same layout.
Although each shed here held more than seventy men, it was much less crowded than the tents in the camp on Koje Island. In it two long plank beds had been installed along the walls; on either bed forty people could sleep. This was not bad at all. Shanmin and I were assigned to the first shed, near the kitchen. The moment I unpacked my bedroll, a commotion rose from outside. I went out to take a look. Oddly enough, Commissar Pei strolled into our barracks, smiling and waving at the men around. At once people broke out shouting, "Long live Chairman Mao!," "Long live the Communist Party!," "Fight the American imperialists to death!" Those slogans were their way of expressing their joy. About two thousand men were still waiting in the field to be assigned to their compounds; they saw our top leader and began shouting too. Immediately the commissar gestured for them to hush for fear of attracting the enemy's attention. The guards must have forgotten General Smarts instructions that Pei must be kept separate from us. How else could they have let him come back like this? A GI walked over and handed two cans of Spam through the barbed wire to a prisoner in our compound, saying, "Those guys over there asked me to give you these for the brass." He was referring to
Pei and the inmates outside Compound 7 waiting to be led into their quarters. Evidently Commissar Pei 's appearance had boosted the prisoners' morale. Some men even shed tears, as though a god, or a guardian angel, had suddenly appeared among us. They regarded Pei as the embodiment of the Communist Party here. These men had no gods to worship, so they could only project their religious feelings on a leader, a human being, whose return to us might have been a fluke. And even Commissar Pei himself said to me, "I don't know why the Americans let me come back."
When he had settled in, he sat down beside me, and putting his large hand on my knee, praised me for speaking to General Smart on his behalf. "You're a brave man, Yuan," he said, and slapped at a horsefly landing on his face. "If you hadn't intervened yesterday, they would've kept me on Koje Island for sure. Then heaven knows what would have happened to me."
"It was Zhao Teng who told me to deliver the message," I admitted.
"But you spoke well to Smart. I was impressed by your composure. You made me realize our Party needs many more intellectuals like you. Don't you think you're a tough soldier now?" He tossed his head back and laughed heartily.
"Maybe. I feel I've developed a little."
"More than a little. It's remarkable that adversities have toughened you so much. To be honest, I used to consider intellectuals unreliable, but you've made me think differently."
I was pleased by his praise, but didn't know how to respond. He then told me that the Party had awarded me another merit citation, first class this time, in addition to the one I had earned for stealing the pistol. I felt proud of myself. Actually I could see that people respected me more than before. By now I had been imprisoned for almost a year and had indeed become a stronger man, though sometimes I still felt isolated and lonely.
Toward midafternoon, a squad of GIs came in and took Commissar Pei away to the prison house on the beach, into which the camp authorities had originally intended to put him. That was the top jail on Cheju Island, where Pei was to be confined from now on.
21. COMMUNICATION AND STUDY
In mid-July a GI on a guard tower was struck in the head by "a message stone" hurled by an inmate from our compound. A gun was fired in response, but the fellow dashed into a shed nearby and was not hit. The stone, with a message tied to it, had been aimed at Compound 7, which was eighty yards away. Because of the long distance, such a stone could be hurled only with a string attached to it, whirling it first, and as a result it often flew astray. Yet since our arrival at Cheju Island, this sling-a-stone method had been the main channel of communication between most compounds.
Now that the enemy had a message of ours in their hands, our leaders were afraid that they might crack our self-made code. Fortunately, our code men, following the rule of changing the code monthly, had altered it a week ago by partly substituting three numerals with alphabetic letters, which made the code more irregular and harder to break. Unable to identify the slinger of the message stone, the guards took away Zhang Wanren, the chief of our compound, and interrogated him for a whole day, but Wanren played the fool and insisted he was unaware of any attempt to contact another compound. He kept wagging his head at the message they showed him and saying he didn't know what to make of it. In the end, the Americans told him that from now on they'd view stone hurling as an act of provocation and would react with gunfire. So we had to abandon the sling-a-stone method and rely more on signaling by semaphore.