Chapter 16
Return to Prisoners of Liberation: Four Years in a Chinese Communist Prison
Chapter 16
Rick: By the spring of 1954 the detention quarters seemed almost empty in comparison with former years. The occupants of our cell had been reduced to Liao, Han, and myself, Ma having been transferred a couple of months earlier. One day in June, Liao, too, was told to pack and prepare to move.
For a moment as I watched him excitedly collecting his few things I felt a little sad and envious, but at the same time I was glad to see him moving one step closer to release. When he had gone Han and I expected that we would either be put in another cell or someone else would come in with us. However, as the days rolled by and nothing happened we began to settle down to a new routine. Part of the day we studied by ourselves and the remaining time was spent either in working over our books together or discussing problems in the cell.
Han was a short, chunky man of exactly my age, but after our monthly haircut, with his head and face clipped clean, he looked more like a high school student. He came from a large, relatively well-to-do family of frugal, hardworking peasants, but his own character showed little trace of this. Born the last of a large brood, when his parents were approaching fifty, he had been a sickly child, doted on and spoiled by all the older members of the family.
At the age of fourteen he had been married to a girl five years his senior. This was not an uncommon occurrence in old China, where marriages were often arranged between families before the children were even born. As might be expected, the arrangement ended in bitterness for both Han and his wife. They had nothing in common, and while he was still out playing with other children she was either laboring out in the fields or in the house. To make matters worse, in Han’s eyes her partly-bound feet made her old-fashioned and repulsive. From then on his ambition in life was to get away from her and acquire a “good-looking” concubine.
Because of his insistent demands to leave his wife, Han was finally apprenticed to a big silk merchant in Peking, where he soon acquired the city taste for flashy clothes and ready money. He remained in Peking all through the Japanese war, gradually working his way up to a small business of his own. After failing in several attempts at speculation, he had entered the Nationalist Youth Army in 1947 and eventually was drawn into their intelligence service.
In late 1948, as the Communists approached the area in which he was operating, he deserted and fled south to Nanking, Hangchow, and finally Canton. With no money to escape to Hong Kong or Formosa there was nothing left for him but to return to his home outside Peking. Terror-stricken at the thought that the Communists would certainly exact vengeance against him for the bloody suppression his unit had carried on against dissident peasants under the Nationalists, Han had remained in hiding on his family’s farm for many months. But wearing peasant’s clothes, eating coarse food, and not being able to attend a movie were more than he could stand for very long. Moreover, because of his unwillingness to take part in the work of the farm and clear himself with the new government, his welcome at home began to wear thin.
He finally returned to Peking to go back into business. But it was not long before he became involved with a gang of Nationalist agents and was eventually arrested.
From the time he arrived in prison in late 1952 Han was convinced that he would be executed. For months he went around in a semi-stupor, his mind turning to hypochondria as a mechanism for escape from the fear of death. By the time Liao left in June, 1954, much of this fear had been dispelled and along with it had disappeared most of his real and imagined illnesses. His actions were still those of a scared rabbit, however, and he avoided all possible contact with the authorities. He was never so happy as when the door was bolted and locked. To him it seemed to keep the government out as well as him in.
But with only two of us left in the cell a new problem arose to plague Han. We had no cell leader, and since my Americanized Chinese often proved unintelligible to the guards and supervisors, especially when I became excited, the burden of spokesman fell on him.
That summer I was told to rewrite my confession. In the midst of writing my pen point became so scratchy it tore holes in the thin paper. I asked Han to report the matter to the supervisor and ask for a new one. His face portrayed his reluctance, but that evening when we went out for latrine call he cautiously approached the supervisor, an older cadre named Hsi who had a rather abrupt manner, mumbled his request, and then dashed back to the cell again.
I waited all evening and the next day, but no pen point arrived. In answer to my impatient prodding to ask again, Han offered every kind of excuse imaginable, and it was only on the second day that he would consent to ask the supervisor once more. On our return to the cell from latrine call that afternoon, before the door had been closed, Han stuck his head out and asked timidly, as if expecting a blow, “Could Li Ko have a pen point, please?”
Supervisor Hsi’s only answer was to slam the door so hard that Han barely withdrew his face in time.
“I guess they don’t want to give us a pen point,” he said, sulkily.
“That’s nonsense,” I snorted. “It’s not the pen point. It’s your attitude. You always go around acting as if someone were going to hit you. You may think you’re being deferential, but all it does is reveal how antagonistic you are. How do you ever expect to get along in the new society if you spend all your time running away from the government?”
Just then, as if to prove my assertion, the pen point arrived. I began writing while Han paced up and down the floor, lost in thought.
Suddenly he announced decisively, “I’m going to write a criticism of myself and hand it in. I can’t keep going on this way— always afraid of even my own shadow.”
For almost a week he labored over that document, writing and rewriting, until he had poured out his whole past outlook on life— his petty selfishness and determination to have his own way, his disdain for his wife and desire for a concubine, and his feeling that people, especially the government, were always “out to get him.” By the time he had finished and turned the statement in to the supervisor, he had come to realize that it was his own way of looking at life which had been his worst enemy. It was his own hostility which had been the root of his fear and which had created the barrier between himself and the new society.
Han’s attitude toward the government improved steadily from then on and the supervisors responded with marked friendliness. They went out of their way to keep him supplied with toothpaste and soap, and even gave him a badly needed pair of shoes which he had formerly been afraid to ask for. However, it was some time before this new desire to reform was to bring about any real change in the rapidly degenerating state of our personal relations in the cell.
With Liao gone and no one to act as a balance between us, our widely differing temperaments began to clash almost at once. Being small of build and fastidious in nature, he was repelled by my lumbering clumsiness and general disorderliness. I never put things away neatly; I ate too much, too slowly, and too noisily; I washed my clothes just any old way, preferring to expend soap rather than muscle. Then when I showed my contempt for what I felt were his petty conceits, mincing ways, and lack of education, he was irked even more.
Under such circumstances blowups were unavoidable and sometimes we would stand red-faced glaring at each other over the most trivial matter. He would accuse me of being clumsy deliberately to annoy him, and I would take out my fury by calling him an “old woman.”
Another bone of contention was my refusal to talk over with him problems which were obviously weighing on my mind. The lesson I had learned from my attempt to retract my confession had made me determined that come what might I would stick to the truth from then on, but still, all during 1954, I was plagued by momentary fits of depression. What was going to happen to me when I returned home? What would the Navy do? Would I be able to find a job? Perhaps I could slip through Hong Kong without attracting any notice.
At such times Han could tell immediately that something was troubling me and would insist on hearing about it. My reaction was usually one of impatience. “I know I’m wrong,” I would think. “But there is no sense in talking about it. I’ll just have to work it out myself. What’s the use of listening to a long speech from you? You don’t know anything about it, anyway.”
I would deny that I was troubled and this would lead to further bitter arguments. By the fall of 1954 we were both disgusted with our attitudes. How could this be considered reform? We began then to hold a regular Monday evening self-criticism meeting to clear the air before starting the next week.
We soon became conscious of what we called the direction of our thinking. We found that almost invariably if a serious problem, either individual or collective, had arisen, it was because we were thinking inwardly and negatively instead of outwardly and positively. By making a conscious effort to set our minds working in the right direction, problems which had seemed insoluble simply ceased to exist. In our relations with each other, this change in direction usually involved an attempt to look at our differing points of view in the detached manner of solving a problem instead of each trying to force the other to accept his own ideas and win an argument.
I found, too, that by using the same technique of consciously trying to think outwardly and positively about my own personal problems I was able to shake off completely the fits of depression which had plagued me all during prison and, in fact, throughout most of my life.
In the ensuing months Han’s progress was phenomenal. He put himself completely outside any disagreement which arose. Concentrating his energies on solving the problem, his entire attitude bespoke a desire to convince rather than batter me down. No matter how insulting I became he would not lose his temper. If I were not prepared to talk, he was willing to wait. When I ranted and raved he would ignore me. He kept plodding away with the determination of a small bulldog, only one thing in his mind, to help me reach the root of my trouble.
I, too, was learning a great deal. I could not help but respect Han’s honest attempt to reform and I felt a desire to help him.
Han lacked education but he was by no means stupid, and as he saw the modernization of China progressing so rapidly he was fired by a desire to increase his knowledge about everything. Several times I offered to teach him mathematics, geography, history, or Chinese grammar, but he evinced little interest. I soon realized that it was my superior attitude which stung his pride and caused him to refuse my help.
One Sunday while we were resting between games of chess I hit on a plan. “Let’s play something else,” I said, “a problem game. If I wanted two and two-thirds wo-tou for dinner and you wanted one and one-quarter, how many would you bring back?”
He tried to figure it out in his head, but with no success.
“I could do it well enough if I had the wo-tou in my hands,” he said, looking a little sheepish.
“But if you were out in a factory working with tons of cement, you wouldn’t be able to pick that up in your hands. Write it down and figure it out that way.”
The mere task of putting the sums down on paper in a workable form was a difficult problem for Han. Instead of using the simple Arabic numerals which the Chinese use the same as we in mathematics, he tried writing the fractions out in full Chinese characters— san-fen-jr-erh and ssu-fen-jr-i— and the common denominator was something he had never heard of.
It seemed strange that Han should be stuck by such a simple problem. For, though he had no schooling other than memorizing a few of the Confucian classics, when it came to juggling stock market quotations or figuring discounts on bolts of silk at black-market prices, nothing was too difficult for him. But now, faced with simple fourth grade fractions, he was at a loss. At first I was afraid his pride might be offended again and he would refuse to go on, but by the time I had finished showing him how to work a common denominator he was so interested in the problem he had forgotten all about his pride and we spent the rest of the day working fractions.
The next evening, instead of bringing out the chessboard, he produced pencil and paper and we started to work again. In the weeks that followed, after going through addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions, we went on to decimals, and then to simple algebra. He was an eager student, and within a couple of months had exhausted my knowledge and was doing the problems in algebra and geometry much faster than I.
We also spent a great deal of time discussing agriculture, and I learned much about farming in China from him.
“Farming will be a lot better life when our new dams are built and we can start irrigating,” he said seriously one day. “But now you never know how a crop will be. If Heaven is against you and there’s no rain, you’re finished.”
“What about using wells to irrigate?” I asked.
“There are a lot of wells where I come from, especially since liberation, but they have to go down deep, and with no electricity, pumping the water by hand or animal power is killing work both for men and mules.”
“The wind blows regularly here in north China. Why don’t you use windmills?” I asked.
He looked puzzled and asked what a windmill was. I sketched a rough picture of those I had seen in our own Midwest. The idea fascinated him and he wanted me to explain every detail down to the last shaft and gear. I soon found myself far over my depth, but we spent several days drafting plans for a windmill which he hoped to use on the wells in his village when he returned home.
We talked at great length about our dreams of the future. If the government did not give him a job in a factory, he wanted to return to his village. Perhaps the people there would let him join their new agricultural cooperative.
He smiled as he said, “It seems as if all my life has been spent in trying to get away from the farm and acquire an automobile and concubine. Now I feel that the most wonderful place of all would be back in the village at work with my family and neighbors. And if someday I could have a bicycle, I’d be more than satisfied. I can see it now—my friends and I cycling down the road—”
His eyes sparkled as he spoke.
“What about your wife?” I interposed.
He paused a moment, perplexed. “What about her?”
“Aren’t you going to take her along? The best fun of all is being able to share your pleasures with your wife.”
“Take her along?” he repeated. “I’d never thought of such a thing.”
“That’s probably been one of your troubles. You thought you had a bad deal being forced to marry a girl five years older than yourself. But how do you think she felt about it?”
For a while he sat silent. “She had a bad time, all right,” he said at last. “My family arranged the marriage only because they wanted some extra cheap help around the farm. That’s the way it was in the old days. My mother wasn’t really harsh with her, but she never gave her a minute’s peace. She had the old idea of mother-daughter-in-law relations. My wife was her slave. To make matters worse, it was seven years before we had a child. For a woman to be childless in old China was a terrible thing, you know, and she was the object of ridicule. I remember so well, often at night after all of us had gone to bed, she would sit there in the dark smoking her little pipe and the tears rolling down her face. I just ignored her, but she cried even worse whenever I went away. She was afraid I wouldn’t come back, and then she would be left with nothing at all.
“Even after our son was born things didn’t improve much. I could have helped her but I never did. One night after liberation we were sitting around with some of the neighbors learning a few of the new songs. We were to stop at the end of each stanza to see how we were making out, but my wife forgot to stop and in the silence her voice sounded loud and clear as she went on alone. Everyone turned to look at her, and I’m sure that if she could, she would have died on the spot. One word of encouragement from me would have solved everything, but I just glared at her. She jumped up and ran back home in tears. I never heard her sing again. She’s no dumb bunny, you know, and she’s one of the best workers on the farm, but she never had a chance—” His voice trailed off.
Finally, he brightened, “I’m going to have a lot to make up for when I get back home.”