The Yellow Papers (30 page)

He lost three of his toes to frostbite. The first was cut off with gardening shears at the camp hospital. When those on his other foot also turned black, he cut them off himself rather than go back.

Change came suddenly with the arrival of new Chinese officers who spoke better English than the grunts. The dried millet that had been their staple diet was replaced with rice, though not enough to feed them all, and meat appeared in the camp occasionally – a box of pig livers one day, then some weeks later one small pig to feed 200 men for a week.

Attempts at getting prisoners to confess lessened and Peace Committees were set up. Prisoners were asked to sign peace appeals to send to the UN.
Don't you want peace? Are you really a warmonger? No? Then sign, if you really want peace
.

One day the prisoners were given clean new clothes and posed in front of tables laden with food. Photographs were taken, then the food was removed.

Then came the lectures. POWs were now ‘students' – victims of the Western ruling classes who needed to be educated to the truth. Daily propaganda lectures, hours at a time, day in, day out. Study groups.
Discuss Communism. Discuss Marxism. Explain the dangers of Capitalism
. And the Geneva Convention? An instrument of bourgeois idealism, impossible to carry out.

Reduced to mere skeletons, suffering from beriberi and dysentery and lacking any strength, many gave in so as to get better food and better treatment. Others, shackled by their own impotence, simply broke under pressure and died within days.

Few tried to escape, and those that did were soon brought back and punished, and as the Chinese believed in collective responsibility, many that had not tried to escape were punished as well.

Some time later the men of Camp 5 decided to hold ‘crazy weeks' to relieve the boredom of the camps. During one such week they rode imaginary bicycles – until the guards ‘confiscated' these bikes. Another week each man walked around with an imaginary girlfriend on his arm, and approached the guards to politely introduce them to their partner. Many of the guards bowed respectfully to the imaginary women, until a Chinese officer ordered that all of these foreign women were to leave the camp immediately. The men complained, then stood by the gates waving goodbye to their imaginary sweethearts.

They had to be careful when exactly to holds such weeks – it had to be when the Chinese were emphasising their leniency – for if things were not going well for the Korean or Chinese forces such behaviour resulted in severe punishment. When things were going well, however, the Chinese guards not only tolerated this behaviour, but went along with it.

But if things were relatively better for most of the men, for Edward nothing changed. He'd been captured in a Chinese uniform. Wore no dog tags, and unlike most of the men, carried no wallet with photos and personal effects. He had befriended no one in the camp, and none would – or could – come forward to identify him or his rank. He had to be a spy. While the peace talks dragged on month after month then stalled, and summer turned to autumn then winter again, Edward's interrogations continued.

Edward sat with his feet in the backwater of the Yalu River, mechanically digging out maggots from a wound in his leg and chewing their soft fat bodies. He knew he should leave them to clean out the wound, but they multiplied quickly enough, and getting enough protein into his body to survive just a little longer was more important to him.

Since getting frostbite all those months ago, his feet remained numb and water running over them felt like pins and needles, but that, at least, was a feeling. And though he walked with a stick and at times lost his balance, he had noticed, these past few weeks, a small but definite improvement.

It was summer again and around him flies and mosquitoes hovered, drank his blood and sucked up his sweat. The stench of the camp – tolerable in sub-zero temperatures – was nauseating in this heat.

Occasionally he glanced at the small square of soap on the ground beside him – the first he'd seen in the two-and-a-half years he'd been here – but then looked away, quickly, before it registered and forced him to think of everything it represented. In the water further out, skeletal prisoners laughed and soaped each other and dared to talk of home.

That morning the prisoners had been told they were going home, then handed the first Red Cross parcels the men had seen since being here. An exchange of POWs, known as Operation Big Switch, would begin the next day.

Edward didn't trust this Operation Big Switch – it had to be a trick. Some time ago – was it four, five weeks ago? – they'd been told the war was finally over. Not peace, but an armistice. But what proof did they have? A few men – the ones most ill – had been placed on trucks and driven out of camp. Operation Little Switch, they'd called it. Everyone believed the war really was over then, and that the men of Little Switch were lucky to be going home, but Edward knew otherwise. He knew of the gas chambers in Germany during the last war, where prisoners had been told they were going for a shower, except that gas had replaced water. Couldn't anyone see this was the same thing? A way of easing pressure on the overcrowded camp? Surely the soaps should have rung alarm bells. This was even more sadistic because here they were allowed to get clean first. Allowed to hope and believe. How very Chinese to want the corpses to be clean!

But they couldn't fool him. He didn't trust anything or anyone anymore. He'd survived so far by becoming an automaton – a shadow – and no little square of soap was going change that. He was close to no man because closeness meant weakness. Closeness opened you up to manipulation. He watched and listened and ate rats and weeds and flies and maggots and watched some more, but he gave nothing away. Nothing. No one knew who or what he was, no letters came from home to betray him, no yellow bastard got into his brain, no matter what they tried. There was nothing but this instant. This minute. This second. One second at the time.

24

Ming Li paused beside the water's edge and pulled her coat tighter around her thin body; it didn't do much to keep her warm, but at least it kept the wind off. Across the waters of Victoria Harbour, nineteenth-century European mansions and new high-rise buildings glowed beneath the stormy skies shrouding Victoria Peak. Tied up at black buoys, American aircraft carriers and British destroyers disgorged their crew for R & R leave. The war in Korea may be over but these ships still patrolled the Yellow Sea, and when finally off duty headed straight for Hong Kong. There, the men would spend in just a few days what had taken them months to earn, unaware that their money eventually filtered through the Communistowned Bank of China, back to the very people they had fought.

Ming Li watched a young Tanka girl, with a baby asleep in a sling on her back, pole a sampan along a watery laneway. From across the harbour on Hong Kong Island the noonday gun went off. The first time she'd heard the cannon, she'd only been in Hong Kong a couple of days and had panicked, thinking the war had followed them to Kowloon. She didn't know, then, that this cannon fire was a tradition.

But Ming Li didn't care about tradition anymore. Today, she didn't care about anything; everything that had kept her going, that had helped her endure being a ‘street sleeper' for more than three years, was gone.

MeiMei and the child were dead.

‘I'm sure!' the old woman had said. ‘They came for them during the night. Woke me up. Woke up the whole building with their banging and shouting. Dragged them off to be shot. Counter-revolutionaries! Against the Three Antis, they were.'

For Ming Li, not knowing what was happening to MeiMei, not knowing when the child had been born or whether it was a girl or a boy, had only been made bearable by the thought that one day, somehow, they would be together again. It hadn't mattered that she'd been reduced to selling cigarettes, one at the time, in the streets of Hong Kong. That she could only afford to rent ‘nail-space', and the tiny square of pavement beneath it, in a dank alleyway in Hak Nam or, as the Westerners still called it, the Walled City, even though its wall had been demolished during the war.

And although it hurt terribly at first, in the end it hadn't even mattered that Edward hadn't answered her letter telling him of her escape to Hong Kong. She'd always feared he would eventually tire of her; he'd probably found another woman in Australia, someone he could show off without embarrassment. She knew, deep down, that relationships such as theirs never lasted. Yet for a long time she'd pretended it would be different in their case, that their feelings for each other could overcome any obstacles. It had given her hope when there seemed to be no hope anywhere else.

But even Edward's rejection had not totally destroyed her because she'd always been able to tell herself that one day, somehow, she and MeiMei and the child would be together again. That they would sleep in proper beds once more, in a proper house. Or if not in a house, then maybe just in one of the new multi-storey apartments the government had been forced to build in the Shek Kip Mei area, after it had burnt down last December.

When she felt cockroaches crawling over her at night, when she spent yet another day not even eating a small bowl of rice because she had not sold enough cigarettes to pay for both her nail-space and food, then she'd tell herself that MeiMei would eventually leave her husband and come to Hong Kong. That together they would build a new life for themselves and the child. And with that thought came the strength to endure yet another day.

And so she questioned every refugee she met in the hope that they'd have news of MeiMei, and last night, the old mother of a new family camped beside her on the pavement provided this news. MeiMei and the child were dead. She had nothing left.

She gazed at the waters of the harbour. It would be so easy to step off the quay. To allow herself to sink below its oily surface. She'd read somewhere that drowning was a pleasant way to die. That the trick was not to fight it, to allow yourself to fall deeper and deeper into the gloom and when you could no longer hold your breath to inhale a deep lungful of the peace-giving waters …

‘Careful there, little lady! You don't want to fall in.'

He towered over her, smiling, oozing health and cleanliness. His uniform beneath his regulation coat was spotless. The name of his ship was on the band of his hat, and a few pimples on his chin belied his postured maturity. English? American? But what did it matter …

‘Ma'am? Are you all right?'

Ming Li didn't answer. She didn't want to talk to this boy, didn't want to talk to anyone. She turned her back to him but still could feel him there. Hoped he'd go away.

Seconds passed.

The sailor stamped his feet and rubbed his arms.

‘Sure is cold, standing here …'

Ming Li didn't comment.

‘Yes Ma'am,
real
cold …'

He was like a puppy that refused to be ignored, and Ming Li knew he would not simply leave.