A Map of Betrayal (6 page)

Summer in Okinawa was sultry in spite of the cool breeze coming from the ocean at night, but this year Gary didn’t have to put up with the heat and humidity of the dog days again. In late July he was dispatched to Pusan to help interrogate the POWs held by the UN side. He was pleased about the assignment, believing that once in Korea, he might be able to find a way to contact his superiors back in China. Also, he was eager for a change. The armistice had just been signed, and no more large-scale fighting would be likely, because every party involved seemed too exhausted to continue. The war had reached its tail end. Gary boarded a C-119 one early-August morning and landed in Pusan four hours later.

There were too many POWs for the UN personnel to interrogate. From the Chinese army alone, more than twenty-one thousand men were held prisoner, mostly captured in the spring of 1951. The Chinese had been mangled severely in their fifth-phase offense, and a whole division, the 180th, was liquidated. That forced North Korea and China back to the negotiation table with the UN. But the talks dragged on and on owing to the thorny issue of the POWs. Many of the Chinese prisoners had served in the Nationalist army before (they’d been caught and then recruited by the Communists) and dreaded returning to the mainland because they’d been instructed never to surrender in Korea, even at the cost of their lives. Fearful of punishment, they wanted to go to Taiwan and rejoin the Nationalist army there. Chiang Kai-shek was badly short of soldiers, so he welcomed these men, whose return to their former ranks would also make the Communists lose a battle on the propaganda front. So some Nationalist officials flew in to persuade more Chinese prisoners to sail for Taiwan.

Gary served as the interpreter when the top U.S. prison officers received the Nationalist emissaries, who were not allowed to enter the jail compounds. At most they could meet the POW representatives
with barbed-wire fences between them. Nevertheless, they managed to deliver to the prisoners Chiang Kai-shek’s personal presents: cigarettes, playing cards, toffees, books, musical instruments, and a wool overcoat for every man willing to go to Taiwan. Though Gary was not a POW, the Nationalist delegates gave him some presents as well, including a trench coat and a canvas rucksack.

Gary stayed in a makeshift cottage in the POW collection center on the outskirts of Pusan. The ocean was within view, and large ships in the harbor loomed like little hills in the morning mist. On a fine day fishing boats would bob on the distant swells. The water was uneven in color, some areas yellow and some green. To the north, outside the immense prison camp, spread endless rice paddies, some unsown, choked by algae and weeds. The bustling city was full of refugees. All kinds of Korean civilians had swarmed here and put up temporary shelters; even the nearby slopes were dappled with patches of tents and shacks built of straw, plywood, and corrugated iron. Gary could see that the soil here was rich and the climate congenial. He saw giant apples and pears for sale, much bigger than those in China, and he couldn’t help but imagine how good this place could be in peace. Fluent in both English and Mandarin, he was appreciated by his superiors and peers. He also mixed well with the officers from Taiwan who were here to help the UN with the prison’s administrative work. Most of these officers would stay just a few months. Gary often sat at their tables at mealtimes and also shared cigarettes and beer with them.

One day at lunch, as Gary was eating a Salisbury steak with a dill pickle, Meng, a broad-shouldered Taiwanese officer in his mid-thirties, came and sat down across from him. The man’s bold eyes shone with excitement while he gave a cockeyed grin. He said to Gary under his breath, “Mind you, I’m having low back pain.”

That sounded familiar. Then it hit Gary that those words were part of a code for initiating contact. He responded according to the script, “Your kidneys must be weak. Herbal medicine might help.”

“What kind would you recommend?” Meng asked calmly.

“Six-flavor boluses.”

“How many should I take?”

“Two a day, one in the morning and one in the evening.”

A knowing smile emerged on Meng’s face. Gary’s heart began thumping as he was convinced that this man in the Nationalist army’s uniform was an agent working for the mainland. With practiced casualness Gary looked around and saw two American officers eating a few tables away, but they didn’t understand Mandarin.

“Brother”—Meng leaned in—“I know you meet prisoners every day. The boss wants you to get hold of the photos of the die-hard anti-Communists among them.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but they all go by aliases,” Gary said.

“We know that. That’s why we need their pictures.”

“When should I give you the goods?”

“I’ll return to Taipei soon. You should contact Hong Kong to see how to deliver them.”

“Using the old communication channel?”

“Correct.”

That was their only meeting, and Meng left Pusan three days later. Gary continued to join the U.S. officers in interrogating the Chinese POWs. He was respected by his colleagues for knowing some of the prisoners’ dialects and for understanding their psychology. In the beginning he had sympathized with those POWs who still had unhealed wounds, but he was jaded by now. Some prisoners would weep wretchedly like small boys and beg the UN officers to send them to Generalissimo Chiang’s army in Taiwan. Some kept complaining about being bullied by others, particularly by their prison-compound leaders, handpicked by their captors. Some remained reticent, only repeating, “I want to go home.” A few, the minute they sat down, would curse their interrogators and even call Gary “the Americans’ running dog.” There was a fellow, his face and limbs burned by napalm, who would make a strange noise in response to the interrogators’ questions, and Gary couldn’t tell
whether he was giggling or hissing or crying. One of his eyes never blinked; maybe it was already sightless. The files on the POWs were messy because the prisoners would frequently change their names, also because they were often regrouped in different prison units. And no staffer would take the trouble to set the files in order, everybody being overwhelmed with the work he had to do.

A number of POWs were leaders within the prison compounds and worked hard to persuade others to desert the Communist ranks. These men were quite obedient to the Americans and eager to curry favor with the prison administration. Whenever possible, Gary would strike up conversations with them, sharing cigarettes or candy or peanuts. He learned from them the calisthenics that the Chinese army had designed for its soldiers. He found many of these men using names different from those in their files. The prison administration wouldn’t bother to straighten this out, or perhaps even encouraged them to adopt aliases as a disguise. Occasionally Gary would take a photo with one of those men as “a keepsake.” Whenever it was possible, he’d bring their files back to his room, which he shared with an officer who’d always go out in the evenings. With his German camera Gary shot photos of some anti-Communists’ files and kept a list of their names with cross-references to their current aliases.

When his Pusan stint was over, in late October, he returned to Okinawa with six films of the prisoners’ files and resumed his work as a translator at the agency. He could have had the photos developed, but that might be too risky, so he put the films into a cloth pouch and tied its neck with a shoelace. He wrote to Hong Kong, to the old address, a Baptist seminary, which he’d been told to use in case of emergency.

To Gary’s delight, Bingwen Chu wrote back two weeks later, saying in the voice of a fake cousin that Gary’s family in the countryside was well and missed him, and the two of them should spend some time together in Hong Kong in February. As for the “medicine,” Gary should go to Tokyo as soon as possible and deliver it to
“a friend” there, who was an overseas Chinese. Bingwen provided the man’s address in Shibuya district and described him as “a short, thickset fellow with a balding head and a Sichuan accent.” Gary wondered why Bingwen and he couldn’t meet somewhere in Japan. Then he realized that few Chinese agents, unable to speak a foreign tongue and unfamiliar with the life and customs of another country, would dare to undertake a mission in an environment where they had little control. This realization made him smile with a modicum of complacence, feeling he must be quite outstanding compared to his comrades back home, perhaps one in a thousand. Like his American colleagues who often went to the capital on weekends, he took a three-day leave, flew to Tokyo, and delivered the intelligence without incident.

Minmin and I started out for Maijia Village early the next morning. Once we got out of Linmin Town, I was amazed to see that most of the country roads were well paved, some new. The villages and small towns in this area seemed all connected by decent roads, though the asphalt was often littered with animal droppings. The drive was pleasant; there was little traffic at this early hour. We passed an immense reservoir fringed with reeds and sparkling in the sunlight, and then some wheat fields appeared, the stalks, their heads just developing, swaying a little in the breeze. Approaching Maijia Village, we saw a pond to our right, in which flocks of white ducks and geese were paddling. An old woman, a short sickle in her hand, was sitting on the bank, tending the fowl. We pulled up. As we stepped out of the car, she cackled, “Goosey, goosey, qua qua qua.” We went over and asked her where the village chief’s home was.

She pointed to the slanting columns of cooking smoke in the east and said, “There, beyond those houses. His home has red tiles on top.”

We thanked her and drove over.

The village head was a man around fifty, with a strong build and large smiling eyes. He introduced himself as Mai after I said I was Weimin Shang’s daughter and Minmin was my student. He seemed pleased to see us and asked his wife to serve tea. Seated on a drum-like stool in his sitting room with his ankle rested on his opposite knee, he told me that there were still more than a dozen Shang households in the village, but none of them was my father’s immediate family. “Weimin Shang’s parents died and his wife moved away,” Mai said. “Nobody’s here anymore.”

For a moment I was too flummoxed to continue, my nose
became blocked, and I had difficulty breathing. Mai went on to say that because of a famine, Yufeng had left the village in the early 1960s for the northeast, where her younger brother had emigrated.

“Who knows?” Mai resumed. “Perhaps it was smart of her to leave. After the three years of famine came all the political movements, one after another, endless like all the bastards in the world. Your father’s situation was a mystery to us. There were some rumors that said he’d taken off to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek, and some people heard he had died in a labor camp somewhere near Siberia. So if Yufeng hadn’t left, she might’ve become a target of the revolution. There was no telling what might happen to her.”

“Is there a way I can find her contact information?” I asked.

“Matter of fact, a cousin of your dad’s is still around. He must know something about her whereabouts.”

“Can you show me where he lives?”

“Sure thing, let’s go.”

Mai stood and we followed him out. Without extinguishing his cigarette butt, he dropped it on a manure pile in his yard. He said we could leave the car behind because we were going to walk just a few steps. I was unsure about that, but Minmin felt it was all right. “It’s an old car anyway,” she said. Together we headed toward the southern side of the village. It was quiet everywhere, and on the way all I saw were two dogs slinking around; they were so underfed that their ribs showed and their fur was patchy. The street was muddy, dotted with puddles of rainwater, some of them steaming and bubbling a little as if about to boil. There was trash scattered everywhere—instant noodle containers, glass bits, shattered pottery, rotten cabbage roots, candy wrappers, walnut shells, paper flecks from firecrackers that looked like the remnants of a wedding or funeral. A whiff of burning wood or grass was in the air and a few chimneys were spewing smoke.

We stopped at a black brick house behind an iron-barred gate, which Mai, without announcement, pushed open and led us in. The instant we entered, two bronze-colored chickens took off. One
landed on a straw stack while the other caught a top rail of the pigpen, both clucking and fluttering their feathers. An old man was weaving a mat with the skins of sorghum stalks in the cement-paved yard. At the sight of us he tottered to his feet, his gray beard scanty but almost six inches long. Mai explained that I was Weimin Shang’s daughter from Beijing. At that, the old man’s eyes lit up and his mouth hung open. He turned away and whispered something to his wife, a large-framed woman with a knot of hair at the back of her head. He then said to me, “This is my wife, Ning.”

“Very glad to meet you, Aunt Ning. I’m Lilian.” I held out my hand, but she drew back a bit, then gingerly shook my hand, her palm rough and callused.

“Welcome,” she mumbled.

“Come on, Weiren,” Mai said to the old man. “Don’t keep us standing like this.”