To avoid being pursued by the enemy, we moved farther south, deeper into hostile territory. Since most fields had not been sown, we didn't expect to have ripe crops to eat in the fall, but there were orchards and groves of chestnut trees on some hills. We all hoped that our army would launch the sixth-phase offensive soon so that we could rejoin them. We didn't know that from now on there would be no offensives anymore – the war had reached a stalemate.
We settled in a wooded valley where a brook flowed. In the evening frogs croaked in the water. The next day we began to catch frogs, which were a delicacy to us. We would skewer about a dozen of them on a whittled branch and roast them over a fire. But within three days all the frogs had been eaten up, and no croaking rose up at night anymore. Once in a while we heard a wild animal howling, a wolf or a leopard, but we couldn't go hunting them because we dared not fire our guns.
Time and again we sent out men to search for grain. With few exceptions they would run into the enemy, and some of them would get killed. On average every twenty pounds of rice cost one man, so we mainly ate herbs, grass, and mushrooms, waiting for the fall when the wild chestnuts would ripen. Once about two dozen men were poisoned by a whitish fungus, which looked like tree ears and was juicy and crunchy, quite tasty. Half of us ate some, myself included. Afterward we collapsed, and a few men began groaning and rolling around with cramps in their stomachs. Fortunately Dr. Wang didn't eat any. He boiled several cauldrons of water and made us drink our fill so that we could excrete the poison. I was sweating so much that my vision was blurred. It took two days for us to mend, though nobody died this time.
To shelter ourselves from the elements, we fetched crates left by the Americans along the road and used them to prop up sheets of corrugated iron we had dislodged from a dilapidated shack abandoned by charcoal burners. We also spread pieces of cardboard on the ground so that we could sleep on them. I hated to go to the road north of the mountain, because it smelled awful there, the air rife with decomposing bodies, Chinese and Koreans and Americans, all left behind, unburied. Back in China, at the Huangpu Military Academy, we had been instructed that in a battle the dead must be buried quietly, as soon as possible, so that the troops couldn't see them; otherwise the sight of the corpses would weaken their morale. But here, in a real war, nobody cared.
The woods were deep here, providing good cover. During the day we would move about as little as possible; most of the time I just lay in the shade resting. Some calmness settled over me. I had with me a paperback of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the English original, which I often read with the help of the dictionary. Commissar Pei regretted not having brought along a full-length book; in his bag he had only a few booklets that were mere propaganda material. He mixed well with the soldiers, who could endure anything but the silence in the mountains.
Yet they knew how to enjoy themselves. They made playing cards with paperboard and chess pieces with wood chips. During the day they often played for hours on end. I knew the chess moves well but preferred to remain a kibitzer. In addition to the games, every day Pei would tell them a story. A high school graduate, he was quite knowledgeable about ancient legends, and the stories he told fascinated the men. Hao Chaolin, a small sharp-witted man, also offered them stories, mainly those from revolutionary novels. I shared with them some episodes from Uncle Tom's Cabin. Some of the men were touched by the character Cassy, who poisons her baby son with laudanum to prevent him from being sold as a slave. They said that the American slave owners must have been crueler than most of the landowners in the old China, but they were amazed that even the slaves could eat pork belly, beans, biscuits, chicken. I translated the passages in which Aunt Chloe serves the slave Sam a big meal after he tells her the good news that Eliza and her son Harry have fled to the other side of the Ohio River so that the slave trader can't catch them anymore. In the scene Sam eats so many toothsome things – chicken wings and drumsticks, ham, corn cake, turkey legs. Granted that they were leftovers from the masters table, they seemed sumptuous to these starving men.
"What does turkey taste like?" Tiger asked me with his large eyes batting.
"I don't know," I confessed.
"It must be real good," another man put in.
I told them, " Turkeys are very big, almost like a small ostrich."
"My, a lot of meat the bird must have," Tiger said.
"It seems to me that the American slaves ate better than most of the rich families in my home village, tut-tut-tut," said a short fellow with a wide face.
Actually a similar notion had crossed my mind too when I read those pages for the first time. I had thought America must be a bountiful land where nutritious food was available for everybody, even slaves.
The soldiers chatted a great deal among themselves, bragging about their hometowns and their deeds in the battles they had fought in China. They also talked at length about the dishes they had tasted or heard of: Nanking cured duck, Jinhua ham, stewed lamb sold at street food stands in the Northwest, whole fried carp and roast pigs served at dinner parties in the Northeast. A man from the South even boasted how delicious fried rats were. I said he was disgusting and no matter how hungry I was, I wouldn't touch such a thing, though I knew the dish was a delicacy in some coastal areas.
Some of us had picked up American cans left at their deserted campsites, and we couldn't help but wonder what kind of food GIs ate. We were impressed by their abundant resources. Tiger often said he wished that when the war was over, he could bring home just one pile of the shell casings the Americans had discarded, so he could sell the brass – which would be enough for him to live on for the rest of his life.
Gradually I developed a kind of attachment to the commissar, who seemed more and more amiable to me. One day when we two were alone, he confessed that he'd once had his doubts about intellectuals in the army, but that I had made him think differently. To the servicemen, most of whom were illiterate, every college graduate was an intellectual. Apart from my loyalty to our comrades, Pei must have been amazed to see that I could read alone for hours without respite and immerse myself in a novel written in English, of which he had read an ornate translation long ago. He was especially pleased that at night I would do guard duty for an hour, just like the enlisted men among us. He told me that if he got killed, I should help Chaolin lead them. I said I couldn't accept such a responsibility; I wasn't a Party member and was unsuitable for leadership. Besides, Chaolin was very capable and might not need my help at all. But the commissar insisted, "Your deeds are your qualification. You should lead our men if worst comes to worst."
What he implied was that I should succeed Hao Chaolin if they were both lost. In truth, although I was calm in appearance, I was apprehensive at heart. What would happen to my mother if I perished in this foreign land? I missed my fiancee terribly. At night I often dreamed of her and my mother and woke up tearful. I wondered if my comrades had heard me babble in my sleep. Could Julan and I communicate through dreams, telepathically? Or were the dreams nothing but the vagaries of my mind? One night I saw her face shine with a mysterious smile, as if she had some secret but meant to keep me in suspense. As I stretched my hand to touch her tilted eyebrows, she faded away and I woke up with a numbing ache in my chest.
When the other men laughed heartily listening to Pei, I often remained pensive. One day the commissar said to me, "Why don't you teach us some English?"