Among the ten groups, the one in Compound 9 had more talents than the others and was most active. Meng Feihan, the composer and stage director who had lost a foot, was there. Besides him, the chief of that battalion had a fondness for cultural work, having once led a song-and-dance ensemble in an artillery division. Every evening you could hear music and songs rising from their barracks. Throughout the camp many inmates took part in musical activities of this kind. I participated too, though briefly. I tried to teach others how to read music, but my voice was so tuneless that whenever I sang to illustrate musical notes, some men would chuckle or cackle. So I gave up.
The POWs also contrived several kinds of instruments, including drums, flutes, violins, and horns. The first bugle was fashioned out of tinplate. A bugler by chance had brought into the camp his mouthpiece, which later served as a casting model for the lead mouthpieces on all the wind instruments here. Drums were relatively easy to produce, and there were several sizes of them; all were made out of sawed oil drums, water pails, and gas cans, covered with rain cloth fastened by rope. My friend Weiming, the short Cantonese man who was very protective of Shanmin, was an expert in making stringed instruments, which were more difficult to create than the wind ones. He was tone-deaf, however, and couldn't read musical notes or play any instrument; but he was more inventive than others. He turned a tin can into the resonator for an erhu, a two-stringed Chinese violin; he also used wooden boards, bamboo pipes, rat skins, and other materials. Ignorant of music, he had to have helpers and testers, of whom he had many, since others had lined up to join him. In fact, every instrument the prisoners made was a result of teamwork. There were dozens of instrument-making groups in the camp. They even produced several guitars that had three or four strings. They also created various kinds of violins: resin was obtained from steeped pine chips; the bows were mostly thin iron rods bent on both ends; as for the hair, they unraveled pieces of rope, soaked the hemp in warm water, combed it straight, then picked the sturdy strands to be tied to the sticks. Most "silk strings" came from the jackets and boots they wore, whereas all the metal strings had one source – electric wires, which could be found at the construction sites. By far the Western violin was the hardest to make, because it had four different metal strings that were difficult to come by. Nevertheless, one group managed to come up with a kind of strings, which were entwined with threads to make them sound close to the standard G, D, A, and E strings. It took a great deal of experimentation to create a Western violin.
Throughout the summer, our compound was like an instrument factory, and some sort of manufacturing was under way in most of the sheds. The prisoners took the work as seriously as if it were their livelihood. In addition, many men had begun to learn how to play the instruments and formed small bands. I often wondered why they were so earnest about such activities. I guessed they were probably bored and just meant to have some fun, frittering away the time that hung heavy on their hands. But I was mistaken. I soon realized that for them this was serious business, a matter of survival. Usually four or five men worked together at one instrument, so the product embodied a kind of collective will and effort. Likewise, a band always belonged to a platoon or company as "a special weapon in fighting the enemy." That was the language the leaders used. I wondered why they applied such hyperbole to a mere band. Perhaps they believed music could bolster the comrades' courage and kindle their hatred and thus turn them into better fighting machines.
On occasion, a skit or a comic talk accompanied by bamboo clappers was enacted in our compound, though none of the pieces was exceptional. Some prisoners tried to write short scripts for the stage and some composed songs, but few of these efforts resulted in passable work. Once in a while they would draw cartoons to ridicule the Americans, who would be given cucumber noses or bloated midriffs. The blackboards in our compound always carried jokes, drawings, and poems. Yet by far the most popular form of entertainment was the songfest.
Whenever a satisfactory song was composed, it began circulating briskly among the inmates, and within two weeks all the ten battalions could sing it. Meng Feihan in Compound 9 was the major composer; in general his music was solemn, strenuous, and high-minded. Two of his disciples were good at singing folk songs, so they blended light melodies into some satirical airs, which became immensely popular, such as "The Loudspeaker Always Lies, Don't Listen to It," "God, I'm Scared," and "Truman Is Done For." The prisoners enjoyed these erratic, uncanny tunes so much that they would croon them even when they were alone, whereas they would sing the serious songs only in groups. The leaders made good use of the musical talents. Whenever something important happened, they would have a song composed to mark the occasion. For instance, to commemorate the fight for raising our national flag, a song was made a week after the massacre. It went as follows:
Red flags fly high on October 1. Our comrades' blood bears out The American imperialists' crimes. However brutal the enemies are, We shall be more resolute. Our hands can stop their bayonets
And stones can block their bullets.
Shoulder to shoulder we form a bastion
To defend our national flag
And fight the savage foe.
Our hatred is redoubled -
The debt of blood must be paid in blood.
The evil American imperialists
Cannot escape the hands of justice.
We sons of the new China
Shall make our deeds known to the world
And keep our flags flying for good.
Best in peace, our brave martyrs.
You will always live in our hearts.
Despite its simpleminded boastfulness, this song became quite popular and served as a fighting anthem for some POWs. I disliked it and never learned to sing it. Yet I was amazed by my comrades' great zeal for songs. Every day there was so much singing in the camp that even some GIs picked up the tunes. One of them, a skinny fellow with red sideburns, would chant at us the line "March, march, follow Mao Zedong" as a kind of greeting.
Gradually I came to understand that singing was a cathartic experience for the prisoners. A song's contents didn't really matter; as long as the men could sing something together, they felt better. Many of them were depressed and cantankerous, so a songfest was an expedient for releasing their grief and anguish and for restoring their emotional balance. We missed home and our former ways of life terribly. This mental state disposed many of us to be sentimental. I saw men weep all of a sudden for no apparent reason, perhaps just touched by a happy thought or by a surge of self-pity. Without question, singing together assuaged their misery and cheered their hearts. More importantly, songfests enabled them to identify with one another emotionally so as to increase their feeling of solidarity, though the affection they felt for their fellow inmates could be momentary.
The singing also eased the prisoners' tremendous dread of loneliness. The inmates were very gregarious, as most Chinese are. Some of them feared loneliness more than incarceration. As long as they stayed together and organized, they felt they had a better chance of survival. Singing provided them with a kind of socialization that not only soothed their aching hearts but also suspended their individual isolation. Frankly, sometimes I wished I were more like them, capable of chanting whatever came to mind with total abandon.
Another question troubled me for some time. Were the arts groups' creative activities truly artistic, as they claimed? In the beginning I had respected the composers and the painters immensely. Unable to play any instrument, I'd look up to whoever could saw a tune out on a fiddle even if he played with assumed bravura. But before too long I noticed that there was a crudeness in whatever they did, as though the idea of perfection had never entered their minds. I daresay this crudeness originated from their utilitarian conception of the arts. They created every piece of work merely for its usefulness, like that of a weapon: each was made simply for the purpose of rousing people and boosting the fighting spirit. These creations had an instantaneous feel, a dash of spontaneity, but invariably ended in a slipshod fashion. Most of the time a man would finish writing a song or a poem at one go, and he'd be proud of completing it "without changing a single word," and even brag about it, as though to assert that the work had come purely from inspiration, which was a mark of genius. Patience and refinement were alien to these young men, who couldn't see that art didn't have to be useful or serve a purpose other than entertainment. Their works could be powerful at times, but never beautiful. So I began to have deep reservations about their efforts and sometimes felt they were just wasting their energy and time. No doubt these men were talented, ingenious, and passionate, but they always stopped at the point to which their cleverness led them, not going beyond into complexity and subtlety, not to mention depth. As a result, however extravagantly they used their talent, they remained like smart hacks, blind to their own shoddiness. There was no way to explain my thoughts to them without risking my neck, so I kept quiet.