We had all written home as soon as we arrived at the Repatriates Center, but not many of us received mail. I was anxious. So was Ming, whose fiancee was in Canton and should have been able to get his letters within three or four days.
From the fifth week on the real study sessions began. By now we had been left in the charge of the Northeastern Military Command; in other words, the leaders in Beijing had washed their hands of us. We were all ordered to confess the crimes we had committed in the enemy's prisons and to contrast ourselves with the hero Huang Jiguang, who had hurled himself on an American machine gun at the embrasure of a bunker after he ran out of grenades. The people running the study sessions announced to us these three principles, which we must follow from now on:
1) The very fact that you became captives is shameful. You could have fought the enemy to your last breath but you did not. Therefore you are cowards.
2) How could cowards carry on the struggle against our enemy? Even if there were some resistance activities in the prisons, they mainly originated from your need for survival. So you have no merit to talk about and must confess your wrongdoings and crimes.
3) You must blame yourselves for your captivity and must not attribute it to any external cause.
The study sessions terrified us. Whoever had served as a leader in the prison camps was now labeled a collaborator, and whoever had told his captors his true name and his unit's serial number was classified as someone who "betrayed state secrets." The fact that you had smoked American cigarettes meant that you had succumbed to the enemy; it was forgivable that you had eaten their food, but your acceptance of the luxury of tobacco was submission. My four merit citations were gone like smoke, not to mention those special ones Pei Shan had issued to the dead men buried on Cheju Island. Many returnees were outraged by this sudden development and often buttonholed Commissar Pei, complaining about the unfair treatment and begging him to protect them and get the citations back for them. In their eyes he was still a demigod who embodied the Communist Party, so they wanted him to confirm their awards, which might have proved their loyalty to our country. He promised to have the citations validated, though by now he must have known that his superiors would never acknowledge them.
The commissar too was under investigation and was having trouble saving his own skin. It was rumored that the Americans at Camp 8 had once drugged him and made him give a reactionary speech, which later had been broadcast on the radio. He himself had been unaware of this. Now he might not be able to clear himself from the charge of collaboration. Furthermore, his superiors believed that at least five thousand people of our former division had been taken prisoner, and that the large number indicated that the division's leaders hadn't organized their men to fight determinedly. Therefore, as one of our top officers, Pei was held responsible for our defeat. To avoid being confronted by his men, he stopped coming out of the guesthouse. But fortunately he stuck to his word in my case, asserting that it was he who had sent me to Pusan to get reregistered in place of Ming, and that I had landed in the pro-Nationalist camp while serving the Party's cause. So I wasn't classified as a traitor, though the leaders wouldn't let me off without many rounds of denunciation.
Besides Shanmin, who insisted I had saved him from the pro-Nationalists' clutches, Ming also stood up for me. When I was ordered to confess what I had done in Camp 13, I said I had spent most of my time learning English. They asked me what I had read; I dared not say the Bible and instead mentioned some newspapers and magazines. Every day I was ordered to recall something new about my helping Father Woodworth teach the hymns and about my serving Wang Yong as his interpreter and henchman. I couldn't remember all the details, so they wouldn't let me go.
Then one afternoon Ming rose to his feet and spoke on my behalf. With a red face and a bulging neck, he said to the officers presiding over the mutual criticism session, "Look, Comrade Yu Yuan did make a mistake in mixing with Priest Woodworth. But he got stationery from him and passed it on to me. Unlike most graduates from the Huangpu Military Academy who paid only lip service to our Communist cause, Yu Yuan helped us and participated in our struggle constantly. He saved Commissar Pei by speaking to the American commander Smart before our comrades boarded the ships bound for Cheju Island. Nobody among us could do that, could we?" A few men shook their chins. Ming went on, "When he was jailed in the troublemakers' cell, he led two comrades in creating the Pei Code, without which communication between Commissar Pei and the camp would have been impossible. Later he helped his battalion chief get a falsely signed document back so that the enemy officer couldn't use it to clear himself of his crime. Some comrades here saw with their own eyes what kind of role he played in that struggle. Without his negotiating with the American officer, we couldn't possibly have gotten the signature back. Last spring he was ordered to go to Pusan in my place, to get reregistered there. He went without a murmur. We all thought he wouldn't come back because the Americans might dispose of the four officers they had summoned. Many comrades shed tears when seeing him off. Tell me, what else do you need to prove a comrade's loyalty to the Party? The Party told him to die, and he went to die. It was a pure miracle that he returned. Let me tell you this: on our way back from Korea, Commissar Pei and I decided to recommend him for Party membership. There isn't another comrade here who deserves it more – "
"Sit down, Chang Ming!" barked one of the officers in charge of the session. "You don't even know if you yourself will remain in the Party while you think of inducting others. You must be out of your mind.
Have you forgotten who you are, just like Pei Shan who gave merit citations right and left? Ridiculous, as if every one of you were a big hero. From now on, you must first regard yourself as a criminal."
That stunned and silenced Ming, whose record in the war had been impeccable. But his speech did help me, and since then I was pressed less often and less forcefully.
Then they began interrogating those who couldn't pass the self-criticism sessions. It was said that there were a large number of American and Nationalist spies among us, and the higher-ups vowed to ferret them out. Every week some men got arrested and sent to a prison in Fushun, a coal-mining city about a hundred miles to the south. This frightened us and made us more obedient. Many of the repatriates tried hard to please the authorities by "exposing" others and criticizing themselves more severely. Some even admitted that they were cowards and had helped the enemy, though they couldn't come up with any convincing evidence for their crimes. A few even claimed that they would have cracked if they'd been imprisoned longer, if the Party hadn't rescued them in time. I was puzzled why they reviled themselves like this, as if they had been real traitors. Probably their guilt was too deep and too convoluted for them to find a more appropriate way to express it. They often wept like wretched little boys.