Finally I heard from my fiancee's elder brother. He wrote in red ink that my mother had passed away a year ago and that if I really cared about his sister, I mustn't bother her anymore, because she couldn't possibly marry "a disgraced captive." He also said: "Don't think ill of Julan. She was good to your mom and tended to her till her last day. I hope you can sympathize with my sister and see the difficulties she is facing." I felt as though time had played a cruel joke on me. If only I had known about my mother's death when I was in Korea; if only I had foreseen that home was no longer the same place. Then at any cost I would have gone to a third country, where I could have lived as a countryless man, and probably as a lonely drudge for the rest of my life. Or I might have gone to Taiwan and restarted my life there. But now it was too late to change anything. I was crushed and took to my bed for a week. I sent Julan two more letters and also the jade barrette half, but I never got a response from her.
Then disaster befell Ming. In one of his letters to his fiancée, he wrote, "I hate the vastness of our country; otherwise we could see each other sooner, without so many mountains and rivers between us." He had always been a careful man, but he blundered fatefully this time, having forgotten that our mail was monitored. That sentence was distorted by those officers waiting to bear down on him. He was turned into a counterrevolutionary who had maliciously wished the map of our country were smaller. I felt terrible for him but couldn't do anything to help.
As I calmed down, it grew clear to me that for a long time we, the POWs, had already been written off as a loss. The reasons our delegates at Panmunjom had frequently mentioned us were that they could use our suffering to embarrass the enemy and that if they hadn't shown some concern for us, more prisoners would have gone to Taiwan, and mainland China would have lost more face. Now that we were back and couldn't possibly join the Nationalists anymore, we were no longer a concern to the Party, which finally handled us in any way it liked.
What surprised me most was that the top officer, Commissar Pei, didn't fare any better than the rest of us. In other words, he and we had all been chessmen on the Party's board, though Pei had created his own board and placed his men on it as if his game had been identical with the Party's. In fact he too had been a mere pawn, not much different from any of us. He too was war trash.
We were not allowed to leave the Repatriates Center until the next summer. With few exceptions we were all discharged dishonorably, which meant we had become the dregs of society. All the Party members among us lost their membership, because before going to Korea they had taken an oath at Party meetings that they would never surrender under any circumstances. Therefore the Party viewed their captivity as a breach of their pledges. Hundreds of men were imprisoned again, labeled as traitors or spies. From now on we were all placed under special control for the rest of our lives. Ming was sent back to his hometown in Szechuan to carry water for a bathhouse to make a living; his fiancée married another man who had been Ming's classmate at Beijing University. Shanmin was returned to his home village to be a peasant. Commissar Pei went to a state-owned farm in
Panjin, in western Liaoning, to be a rice grower, though nominally he was a vice manager of the farm. Chaolin, who had joined us later at the Repatriates Center, was assigned to a steel plant where he became a foreman in a workshop. We had all thought he'd be able to keep his former rank because of his service on the persuasion team in the Demilitarized Zone, but that operation had foundered miserably – they'd persuaded only about four hundred men to come back. So, like us, he was disciplined and demoted.
Compared with most of them, I was lucky. Because I was not a Party member and had neither broken any promise nor followed the pro-Nationalists to Taiwan despite being a graduate from the Huangpu Military Academy, I was given a job in a middle school, teaching Chinese, geography, and later English. I liked the job, which I held until I retired six years ago. Since the fall of 1954 I have lived in Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province. I have never returned to Szechuan.
In 1965 Ming came to my home and begged me to find him a job in the city, because he no longer had work to do in his hometown. He wore a black overcoat whose padded cotton stuck out all over its ragged cloth as if he were besprinkled with snowflakes. He walked with bandy legs now, which reminded me of the Harry Truman he had impersonated on Koje Island thirteen years before. It was impossible for me to help him find employment. I was merely a schoolteacher with the weight of a problematic past on my back. How could I possibly get him a job? He stayed four or five days and then left, deeply disappointed. I bought him the return train ticket and gave him thirty yuan, more than half of my monthly salary. That was all I could do for him. Afterward I never heard from him, though I was told that he had become an adopted son of an old woman in his hometown, so that he could have a roof to sleep under at night. In the summer of 1972, when again questioning me about the activities of some former POWs, one of the interrogators told me, "Chang Ming has gone to another planet." Hearing of his death, I almost broke into tears in front of the officials.
At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, one morning about two hundred Red Guards came to my home and took me away to my school for a struggle session. They made me stand on a platform; then a girl stepped over and pulled up my shirt to show the audience the tattoo on my belly. They said I dreamed of the United States all the time. The truth was that the word "fuck" had been expunged from all their English-Chinese dictionaries, so they didn't know its meaning. I told them plainly, pressing my forefinger on the word, "This means 'screw.' If I really worshiped the United States, I wouldn't say 'screw it,' would I?" The audience exploded with laughter. That helped save my neck.
In every aspect I'm very fortunate compared with the other repatriates. After my fiancee broke up with, me, I swore I would avoid women and remain a bachelor for the rest of my life. But life continues despite our personal misfortunes, and my frozen heart thawed within two years. I fell in love with a colleague of mine, a chemistry teacher, a woman of remarkable beauty, to whom few men would pay attention because her father had been a rich merchant in Shanghai before the new China. We got married a few months later. We had two children, a boy and a girl; both of them have graduated from college. My son managed to come to the States and get a master's degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech. I even have two American grandchildren, and I love them dearly and wish I could stay with them longer. To my knowledge, few children of the returnees from the U.N. prison camp went to college. For twenty-seven years, before the final rehabilitation of the repatriates in 1980, their fathers' tainted past made it impossible for them to get a decent education. In contrast, my wife and I taught our son and daughter so well that they excelled in the entrance exams when colleges were reopened after the Cultural Revolution.
One summer evening in 1986, soon after China had begun to open itself to foreigners, by chance I saw Bai Dajian appear on the Northeastern TV. He had come back from Taipei to visit his hometown in Liaoning Province and was received as an honored guest because he hadn't forgotten his birthplace and had donated an elementary school to his home village. He had also promised to build a middle school for the local county. Apparently he was a wealthy man who must have had a successful career after he reached Taiwan. At a glance I recognized him, his left hand having only three fingers. He was robust now, with a full head of graying hair, and could easily pass for forty. He smiled with dimmed eyes, but all the diffidence that had once shadowed him had vanished from his animated face.