CHAPTER XXXI

It turned out that Liu had no need to use the scissors Chiao had given him. Not long after Chiao left, a series of fights and beatings among the prisoners under cover of night precipitated the decision of the hospital authorities. to separate the pro-Communist and anti-Communist patents. A discharged patient who had stayed on to act as orderly had tried to set fire to the kitchen. There had also been several cases of attempted poisoning.
The patients were now labeled as "these who want to be repatriated" and "those who do not want to be repatriated." This was the first Liu had heard of it - that they would not have to go home if they did not want to. It made a great difference in everything. It was like, being promised a share in a new world,
By the time he got to the camp it was no longer the paradise of anti-Communist avengers which he had looked forward to, not without a, certain dread. The separation of those for and against repatriation had also been completed here. Liu was taken by boat to Koje Island where there was a large new camp for POWs who were not going back.
They had always said that Korea was a barren-looking place. But nowhere was as bare as the POW camp. Not a tree grew on the newly leveled land, a vast stretch of cream-colored flatness, always a bit blurred by windblown dust. All around rose the bare hills, faded to sandy pallor in the noon light. The camp officer was showing Liu around. The officer was a prisoner elected by the others. They stopped by one of the stone huts to join a small crowd gathered under the eaves watching a man playing a hu-ch'ing. The familiar melody was like a cobweb thread drifting in the air with no place to stick.
"He made the hu-ch'ing himself," the officer said. "Made it from a beer can."
There was an explosion of laughter. As the prisoners stood around listening, exposing the white letters "POW" painted on the backs of their khaki blouses, a prankster had drawn with a bit of chalk six little lines radiating from the 0 at the center of a man's back. The lines, one up, one down and two on each side, made a head and tail and four feet. And the 0 became a tortoise, the sign of a cuckold. The abused man did, not know at first what the joke was. When he had found out he chased after the culprit, shouting threats and curses.
"Hey," somebody said, and put a hand on Liu's shoulder. He turned and saw that it was Chiao-
"Flow are you? I was just going to look for you," 'Liu said.
"I was wondering when you'd be coming- Look, you got boots instead of shoes.," Chiao observed. He himself had leather shoes several sizes too large- "There's a piece of steel in the instep of your boots," he told Liu. "You can take it out and make a knife with it. That's what they all do — those, who draw boots."
After that Chiao cook him around the grounds. It was like boarding school again. Only he was too old for school. They all were. They were old enough to worry about. what was going to happen to them. And. they could not forget the barbed wire around them-
It was like school. too, to hear the complaints about food- They had rice cooked together with small pieces of meat and vegetables. "Just like cat food," a man grumbled_ It did not look like a respectable meal and all the taste was gone from the meat. All the POWs gained weight when they weighed in every week- Still, everyone. complained.
It was humiliating to be repeatedly warned by the UN authorities that eventually they would have to shift for themselves if they did not want to go home- As if they had refused to go back home just for a meal ticket from these foreigners. Liu rather thought there were ground's for suspecting that the dependence forced on them was habit-forming, like all dependence- While they found it irksome, it could be that there was also a reluctance for it to end.
"If the UN army won't bother about us any more,- we'll just go and till the land," a soldier declared heatedly. They had been -planting 'cabbages in camp with considerable success.- Most of them had done farm work before.
Go and till the land where? What country in the world today would have room for a newly introduced Chinese minority? The only conceivable place they could' go to was Taiwan, which might take them as soldiers. Most of the men were willing, even fervent. But with one rumour after another floating through camp, Liu did not. know what to believe."
"What's this about peace talks?" Liu asked Chian one evening when they were taking a walk after supper, smoking a cigarette. "if they're talking peace, they might. send us back to the mainland after all. The easiest way for them."

"Some people say they can't be talking peace. Say it's impossible," Chiao answered-
"Why impossible? That's just wishful thinking."
Chiao sighed and shook his head. "You don't know whom to believe- This stuff about the peace talks might be a rumour spread by spies."
"Spies? You mean there are Communists here too?"
"You never can tell- For instance, when we were being divided up, there were fourteen or fifteen men who went with those that wanted to go home- Then they escaped back to us."
He stopped, so Liu asked, "Why, what made them change their minds?"
"They said as soon as the camp door was shut, the Communists called a Mass Meeting. Everybody had to make a Self-Criticism,. They were going to Settle Accounts with Reactionary Elements, Running Dogs of the Imperialists. So these men just ran, and climbed over the barbed wire fence."
"And they got away — just like that?" Liu asked. "Yes- That's why we wouldn't take them in at first.
But they begged and begged- Said they couldn't go back.
Most of them had their backs tattooed like mine."
"But what made them risk it in the first place? They
,ought to know they could never get away with it."
Chiao did not say anything for a while.
"Guess they're homesick," Liu said.
"Well, who isn't? It's this pien- Diu, living in foreign parts." Chiao, repeated the word "pien-niu" a little petulantly. It is one of the untranslatable words. It means more than uncomfortable. It is the kind of unhappy feeling you get when you try to do everything with your left hand.
The bugler was blowing taps in the barracks nearby. The muscular, naked hills, too much like hills in old Chinese paintings to look real, stood greenish white in the moonlight.
"Back home," Chia°, asked, "have you got a lover?" He used the term loosely in the Communist sense, covering wife, fiancee and girl friend..
The question was surprising, coming from Chiao who was very shy on the subject of woman in spite of his hill songs. Liu hesitated before he answered; "No." With this denial his entire past seemed to rise screaming around him, a hurt and angry sea. For a long while he was quite lost in it. He thought of the familiar line written by a captive king a thousand years ago, "The old country does not bear being looked back on, in the light of the moon."
He realized afterwards that Chiao had probably asked the question just so that he could tell him about his own experience. He knew that Chiao was not married but he could have been engaged or there might have been a girl he used to bandy songs with across the river, as they often do in the country. Liu was sorry he never thought of asking. He noticed Chiao looked: a little dispirited at his prolonged silence.
He meant to ask him some other time but he kept forgetting. And Chiao never got around to the subject again.