I sat down and raised my head. To my astonishment, I saw a pair of familiar eyes. Hao Chaolin! I almost cried out. He was sitting at the middle of the table, accompanied by two other Chinese officers. They all wore spruce woolen uniforms with a piece of red silk on their chests, which carried the golden words "Staff – Persuasion Work." At one end of the table sat two North Korean officers. To my left were seated five arbitrators from neutral countries, who all had on civvies, while behind me, in a corner, sat three U.N. representatives, one of whom was a Chinese man who must have been an interpreter. I was so astounded to see Chaolin that a surge of vertigo seized me. I reached out for the Indian guard for support.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Sorry, I'm dizzy." I regained my composure and gingerly lifted my eyes to meet Chaolin's.
He stood up, mouth ajar, about to run around the table and rush toward me, then he seemed to change his mind and held out his hand instead. We shook hands while he smiled awkwardly, as if he had a sensitive molar. A fresh dark bruise was on his cheek – probably inflicted by an anti-Communist prisoner. We stared at each other without a word. Then another persuader asked me my name, and by force of habit I told him my alias. He said, "Welcome, Comrade Feng Yan." I could tell Chaolin was unsure whether I was their enemy or friend now. It flashed through my mind that since he had seen me, he would definitely report me to his superiors if I refused to return to the mainland. This meant my mother and Julan would suffer on my account, and ours would become a counterrevolutionary family. What should I do? I felt nauseated, short of breath.
"Comrade Yu Yuan," Hao Chaolin said solemnly, intending to remind me of my true identity, his penetrating eyes riveted on my face, "you should come home, where the Party and the people are waiting for you. I'm glad we finally met at – "
"When did I say I wouldn't go back?" I interrupted him. "You know how I got trapped in the camp controlled by the pro-Nationalists, don't you?"
He looked startled; so did the other two persuaders. A slim red-haired man, who must have been a Swiss, looked at me curiously, then at Chaolin. Chaolin realized the meaning of my question and replied, "I understand you were discovered when they checked your fingerprints."
I remained wordless, surprised he knew what had happened. I felt like crying but restrained myself.
He went on, "We won't mistreat a good comrade like you again, I promise. In fact, Commissar Pei is waiting to see you in Kaesong."
"You mean he was released?"
"Yes, yesterday."
"How about Chang Ming?"
"He's there too. They went back as the last batch of 'war criminals.'"
I gazed at him steadily. His eyes convinced me that he was telling the truth. I said, "To be honest, I've never planned to go to Taiwan, but I'm afraid that even my comrades won't forgive me now. I'm completely trapped between the two sides." As I spoke, it grew clear to me that there was no way I could go elsewhere without implicating my mother and my fiancee.
"Yuan, I shall always stand by you. It was the Party that sent you to Pusan, and you won't be blamed for the consequences." He looked tearful, apparently moved by the memory of our prison life.
I was touched too. I said, "Will you testify that it was only under duress that I stayed with the pro-Nationalists?"
"I shall do that, of course."
"No, I mean I landed among them because I was used to take Chang Ming's place."
He lowered his eyes, then lifted them to face me. "You made a great sacrifice, Yuan. Nobody will blame you."
"In that case, I will come home."
I turned to the arbitrator sitting at the end of the table and said in English, "I want to be repatriated."
"You're supposed to have five minutes to make up your mind," he reminded me.
"I have decided to go home," I said.
The young interpreter looked askance at me, perhaps annoyed that I didn't need his help.
"Your request is granted," the arbitrator said. "Please go to the door in the right corner."
"Thank you, sir." I stood up and bowed.
As I was about to turn away, Chaolin rushed over and stretched out his hand, which I shook, his palm clammy. Then he embraced me, his breath sour and hot. Both of us burst into tears and held each other tightly. He murmured, "Yuan, I thought we'd lost you. Thank heaven, you came back alive. This is a miracle!" I said nothing, weeping for a reason different from his. I felt hurt and helpless. Never had I thought I'd return to their ranks this way.
Together we headed for the door that led me to a different and unexpected fate. The whole thing had happened as if I had been in a trance.
36. A DIFFERENT FATE
That same afternoon with eleven other returnees I arrived at Kaesong, which was about ten miles northwest of the Demilitarized Zone. Before reaching there I dropped my Bible into the roadside brambles. When Commissar Pei and Ming saw me, they both hugged me and wept, apparently happy to see me back. I didn't cry this time, though my eyes misted over and my nose went stuffy. They told me that together we would be on our way back to China the next day. The return had happened so unexpectedly that I could hardly absorb its meaning.
The commissar looked at least ten years older than when I'd last seen him, with graying stubble on his chin and a heavy face that seemed more energetic than before. His hair was grizzled now and his hairline was almost an inch higher than it had been three years earlier; it made his forehead appear quite large. The look in his eyes was sad, but still full of confidence, and he walked with a straight back. I was amazed to see his feet encased in the same pair of rubber sneakers he had worn to cross the Yalu in the spring of 1951, although they were very tattered now, bumpy with stitches and patches (he had always refused to put on American shoes in the prison camp). Despite the affection he showed me, I couldn't but be of two minds about him because he had hurt me deeply. Ming, in contrast, was as convivial as before. He had a slight stoop, though his thick shoulders still looked strong. His catfish mouth smiled a lot as if he couldn't open it without letting out something funny.
A bizarre thing happened that afternoon. Toward four o'clock, an officer came to summon Ming and me to follow him to meet a Korean comrade. He led us into a nearby courtyard. The moment we entered the gate, I saw a middle-aged man in a gray Lenin suit gazing at us. I recognized him. "Mr. Park!" Ming cried, and we hurried up to him. He embraced us, and Ming shed some tears. Mr. Park couldn't speak Chinese, but he talked to us in Korean excitedly. From the look on his face and his gestures I guessed he was wishing us a happy future. He kept patting our shoulders and smiling kindly. He looked the same as the previous year, perhaps even more handsome because of his woolen suit.
Together we attended a reception held in Mr. Park's honor. On a table were some sliced ham, salted eggs, dried duck, kimchee, pickled turnip, and two bottles of Green Bamboo Leaves. When I spoke with Mr. Park through the help of his interpreter, congratulating him on his apparently good health and his achievement as the paramount leader of the Korean POWs, he grimaced. "My future is uncertain," he said, "but I'll be happy to see my family." As a junior officer, I couldn't ask him what he meant exactly. He drank several cups of the Chinese liquor, saying it tasted better than saki, its fragrant aftertaste staying longer in your mouth. After the reception, without delay he departed for Pyongyang. His jeep rolled away, its tailpipe issuing a plume of exhaust and its radio blaring out "The Anthem of the Korean People's Army." (Some years later, to my surprise, I read in a journal that Mr. Park had grown up in Russia and was a citizen of the Soviet Union. He had gone to college in Khabarovsk and was later assigned to supervise a collective farm there. He returned to Korea with the Russian Red Army to fight the Japanese. During his imprisonment in the top jail on Koje Island, for some reason he confessed to the Americans and told them how he had planned and executed the kidnapping of General Bell. The Americans treated him well afterward, but a year later he wanted to undefect, because he missed his family so much that he wished to see them even at the risk of being incarcerated by the North Korean authorities. That must have been why he grimaced and told me that his future was uncertain. Still, I'm puzzled. Why had he acted like a willful child? This is still a conundrum to me. In any case, I hope that his Soviet citizenship did protect him from being punished severely by the North Korean leaders.)