Chapter 14
Return to Prisoners of Liberation: Four Years in a Chinese Communist Prison
Chapter 14
Rick: During the summer of 1953, while Dell was going through her crisis in cell No. 9 with Jeng Ai-ling and Mei Chi-yün, I was rapidly approaching one of my own. Ever since my arrest I had clung to the hope that as soon as the war was over the Americans in the detention quarters would be released. With the signing of the agreement for the exchange of Korean war prisoners in June, 1953, it seemed as if the long-awaited day was at hand.
My hopes were given an added boost when I was asked to rewrite my confession on a special red-lined form. A few days later I was called out to have my picture taken. Surely the government was preparing to let me go home, but the days passed with interminable slowness all through the ups and downs of the final negotiations in Panmunjom.
My cell mates, knowing what I was thinking, tried to warn me that the Korean war had nothing to do with me. I was not a prisoner of war, but a criminal convicted of espionage. However, their words fell on deaf ears. July 25 would mark the end of two years in prison. Probably I would be allowed to go then, I thought. The 25th came and nothing happened. Maybe it would take another month. But when the end of August rolled around I seemed no closer to my goal.
I was now becoming desperate, especially since I had seen no other foreigners for several months. Perhaps they had all been allowed to leave, and only I remained— only I and Dell, that is. I had never been told officially, but I knew from the spring of 1953 that she had been arrested because in April the authorities had informed me our house was to be returned to the owners and the government would store our belongings for us. It seemed as if all I had achieved by confessing was to bring on her arrest, too. But why had they kept just the two of us? There could be only one answer, my connection with Naval Intelligence.
In the midst of this mental turmoil, I chanced to read one day about supposedly brainwashed G. I’s from North Korean prison camps being sent off to Valley Forge mental hospital, and my mind jumped immediately to my own case. Would not Naval Intelligence do the same to me if I held to my confession and implicated them on my return home? Since I was in the Reserves they could simply call me to active duty and then do as they pleased. It looked as if I might be leaving a prison in China merely to spend the rest of my life in an insane asylum in the United States.
I began to wish I had never mentioned that interview with Naval Intelligence in Seattle. After all, what difference did it make? I had had no direct contact with them after coming to China and my arrest had prevented me from sending them any reports. Perhaps I could rewrite my confession in such a way that my connection with Naval Intelligence would be rendered meaningless.
I tossed this around in my mind for several days and finally broached the subject to Liao. “I made a mistake in writing my confession,” I said. “I wonder if the government would let me correct it.”
“Sure,” replied Liao, “if you really made a mistake. The government only wants the truth. But you had better get things straight in your own mind before you start making any major revisions.”
At a conference that night with one of the supervisors, Liao raised the question of my rewriting my confession. He returned with the order for me to go ahead. For the next week I spent my time alone in one corner of the cell writing a new statement. I sweated over the ignominious and knotty task of trying to admit the facts and yet deny them, but finally I had triumphantly succeeded in removing the significance of my connection with Naval Intelligence almost entirely from the picture. I claimed that after arriving in China, I had never planned to carry out their instructions. After turning in this new confession, I settled down to wait.
October came and went but I heard no word from the interrogation office. A new idea began forming: If I could write Naval Intelligence out of my confession why could I not go one step further and claim I had never consciously intended to commit espionage but had merely drifted into it as a reaction to the deterioration of Sino-American relations? This would not only clear me with the Navy at home but, at the same time, by evading the stigma of criminal intent, it might reduce the seriousness of my crime in the eyes of the Chinese.
I therefore decided to bring up the matter of writing a third confession. Before I had an opportunity to do so, however, I was called, one day in late November, to the interrogation office. After the judge had finished questioning me about another matter, I decided that this was the time to raise my point.
“There is a question I would like to bring up,” I said confidently. “It’s about my confession. I don’t think the one I have just written is quite right. I still did not bring out clearly why I started giving information to the Consulate. Could I rewrite it again?”
The investigating judge stared at me in cold hostility and for a minute I thought he was going to bite the bit off the end of his pipe. Then, “Go back to your cell!” came his curt reply. The loathing and disgust in his voice cut deeper than any whiplash. Shaken to the core, I walked blindly back to the cell.
Taking one look at my dazed expression, Liao asked, “What happened?”
“I guess I made a mistake,” was my fumbling reply.
“Well, that’s not surprising. We could all see you were heading for trouble, but there was no point in trying to talk to you. You wouldn’t listen to anyone.”
This time there was no need for the others to insist on my making a self-criticism. On the one hand, I was really frightened. Making a false confession was a serious matter. On the other, I was brutally struck by the realization of my own dishonesty. Gone was the former hollow, academic approach to the understanding of my character. The whole sordid rottenness of it was exposed in a flash of revulsion and fear.
For a while I wondered if I had any principles at all, and my whole body burned red hot with shame. I expected a fierce tongue lashing from my cell mates, but this time they were surprisingly gentle.
“You should have learned your lesson this time,” said Liao. “A selfish mind will go to any lengths to fulfill its desires. Now maybe you can see just being an American doesn’t lessen your need for reform. The kind of unprincipled thinking you’ve displayed here could get you into trouble anywhere.”
This time I agreed with him. But this was only the beginning. In the following months I began for the first time to question the very foundations of my character, not as a matter of form because someone else insisted upon it but because I myself felt that unless I could determine the causes for my developing the way I had I would never have any confidence in myself again. On this basis I was able to speak freely about things in my past which I had never mentioned to anyone before. My childhood dreams, relations with my family, friends, and schoolmates, my attitude toward women, sex, and what I wanted out of life were all discussed in the most minute detail.
I remembered most vividly my early years in Spokane. As we were one of the poorer families in the neighborhood, my parents were seldom able to provide me with the luxuries the other children enjoyed. As a result, I always felt left out of their play. To my childish mind it seemed that if our family only had a car so that my father could take all of us fishing, or if I could only have lots of toys, I would be able to win the respect of my playmates. Since this was impossible, I had taken to boasting and making up stories about nonexistent rich and important relatives. Several times I stole toy cars from the 5-and- 10¢ store so that I would have something which would make the other children want to come and play with me.
When, in the most bitter years of the depression, my father had resorted to making jigsaw puzzles to eke out our existence, I had tried to peddle them from door to door. I remembered the terrified feeling which engulfed me each time I approached a door as I anticipated how it would be slammed in my face.
The experience of those early years made a deep impression upon me, and as I grew up my greatest fear was that I might have to suffer as my mother and father had in those long years of unemployment. My father’s often repeated words, “A man who works only with his hands is nothing but a slave,” stuck in my mind and I was determined to escape from that. Going to the university was my first big step. Then, when I became the only member of my family to hold a commission in the armed services during the war, I felt I was on the way up.
My decision to become a professor was a logical outgrowth of this background, for no other field seemed to provide the same combination of security and prestige. My hatred of the Communists after reaching China was partly inspired by the fact that as I watched the deterioration of Sino-American relations, and with it a dwindling in numbers of prospective students, missionaries, businessmen, and State Department people in the field of Chinese, I could see my chances of becoming a successful professor gradually disappearing. Thus, my connections with the American Consulate had become even more important to me, for, though there might not be jobs open for a professor, if I could maintain an “in” with the State Department I still had nothing to fear.
As I continued my analysis I realized even more how my egotism had slowly developed to where I was incapable of seeing anything which was not to my advantage and where I was oblivious to the plights of others. I remembered how Dell and I had looked with revulsion on the poverty around us when we arrived in China. One morning in November, 1948, we had stepped out of the gate of a friend’s house where we had spent the night, to find a man stretched out dead on the doorstep, obviously starved to death. It was a shock to both of us and had brought an ugly note into a bright morning. Reflecting on my attitude that day, I realized now that the little sympathy I had felt for the man had been more than overshadowed by annoyance over my day being spoiled in such a way. My attitude toward the Korean war had shown the same brutal disregard for the lives of others on a much larger scale.
In discussions with my cell mates, I also began to reconsider the attitude I had previously displayed toward my own crime. I recalled a conversation I had had with the investigating judge in the spring of 1953, when I had been called in one day to clarify some of the points in my confession.
“How do you feel about all this?” he had asked.
I had told him quite frankly that I was sorry that I had broken the Chinese law, but that I had no feeling of having done anything criminal.
“Well,” he had asked, “did you or did you not give information to the American Consulate with the idea that it would be used to harm the People’s Government?”
“Yes,” I had replied, “there’s no question about that and never was.”
“Then, how would you feel if someone were to go to your country and do the same things that you did here?”
“I wouldn’t like it,” I had answered, as I thought how angry I had been about the activities of Nazi and Japanese agents in the United States during the war.
“Well, how can you maintain that there is nothing wrong and criminal in what you have done?”
When I returned to the cell I had had to admit that what he said was right, but when I began to think about the ten years I might be spending in prison it still seemed to me a terrible price to pay. Preoccupied as I was only with a desire for release, my mind sought refuge in the excuse that I had only been trying to serve my country, with no desire to harm anyone.
The dishonesty of this rationalization was now clear to me. Not wanting to harm others was no excuse at all, since a person totally blinded by his own self-interest is incapable of thinking of others, to begin with. If I had not been so blind, I would have been able to see long ago the fallacy in my supposition that my espionage activities had been of service to my country. Actually, by contributing to the widening gulf between our people and the Chinese, I had been doing the United States a great disservice. I was now convinced that no country has the right to try to force its will and social system upon the people of another, as we had tried to do back in 1949-50. Such a course was immoral, and could lead only to resentment, hatred, and the threat of war.
Having one’s innermost self-brought out and dissected under the glaring light of self-criticism was a shattering experience, but the resulting recognition of myself made me determined to overcome the weaknesses in my character which had been the cause of those former mistakes. Thus began the struggle with myself which was to last throughout the rest of my stay in prison, and, indeed, goes on even today.