"Of course you may."

"How come you've become an army doctor here?"

"It's a long story."

"Did you volunteer?"

"Yes and no. Last year, after graduation I went back to the States to see my biological mother. On my way back I stopped in Japan. The Korean War had just broken out and army doctors were in short supply, so I was recruited by the Far Eastern Headquarters. Then I came to Korea."

"Don't you hate China because we came to fight the U.S. Army?"

"When I joined up, I'd never thought China would take part in this war. Later China rushed in, but I still can't hate China, to be honest. I was raised in China, which is my second country." She turned thoughtful, then continued, "I have a question for you too. You have no airplanes, no warships, and no tanks; how can you possibly win this war?"

I said sincerely, "MacArthur's army would have crossed our border and seized Manchuria if we hadn't come to Korea. We had no choice but to fight the better-equipped aggressors. But with justice on our side we will win this war."

"You're very idealistic," she said. I could tell she was dubious.

By now several inmates had moved closer to listen to our conversation, so I switched the subject. "Do you really want me to teach you calligraphy?" I asked.

"Of course."

"But how can I do it?"

"That's easy. Tomorrow I'll bring you some paper and a pen. You write a sheet of characters as models, like in a copybook. I'll take it back with me and copy the words. This will be a good way to spend my off-hours."

I agreed readily, determined to do what I could to repay her.

Toward the next evening, she came with a shiny black fountain pen and a sheaf of white paper. On the top page were three big characters, Ge Su-Shan, which looked stiff and slanted toward the right. Obviously her handwriting had been affected by her sloping English hand. She said, "Here's my Chinese name. You see, this is the best I can do. Can you teach me how to write my name well first?"

I began to explain to her how to inscribe the individual strokes, the horizontal one and the vertical one. Then with the pen I illustrated the left-falling stroke, the hook, the dot, and the right-falling stroke. She tried to write a few, but couldn't do them well. I was surprised that this was difficult for her, but I also could see that she had attempted calligraphy before, just as every pupil had to practice it in a Chinese elementary school. Frustrated, she asked me to hold her hand to inscribe the strokes so that she could feel how the pen was supposed to move. This was a common method in teaching calligraphy, we both knew. Yet I hesitated, reluctant to touch her hand, in part because I was a prisoner but mainly because of the inmates gathering around to observe. Their eyes unsettled me.

"Come on," she said. "Don't you Communists believe in equality between men and women? At this moment I'm your student."

Her words embarrassed me, so I held her hand. Together we began writing the strokes. Her hair and her clothes exuded a whiff of tobacco; she must have been quite a smoker. I had noticed that the tips of her index and middle fingers were slightly yellow. Although her hand had silky skin and slim fingers, it was quite strong, its muscles tight and its bones sturdy. I was surprised to find her fingernails rather stubby. Her hand felt more like a male laborers. This put me somewhat at ease, and we concentrated on the hook and the right-falling stroke. In a way I was moved by her letting me hold her hand to practice. I smelled of DDT, which had just been sprayed on me for delousing.

After half an hour's practice, she could do most of the strokes decently. She was happy about the progress.

When we stopped for the day, she asked me to write some words she could take back and copy in her spare time, since she couldn't come every day. I thought for a few seconds, then carefully wrote down this ancient poem:

Sand dunes are glimmering like snow Beyond our camping ground. Behind us, moonlight Is frosting a frontier town.

Whence comes the tootling pipe? For a whole night The soldiers think alike Of the distant fireside.

She read the lines silently, her lips opening and closing, revealing her strong teeth. Then she told me, "Actually I studied this poem in middle school. But it means more to me now."

Lifting her head, she said to the patients around, "You should all take good care of yourselves. When the Panmunjom negotiations are over, you can all go back to rejoin your families." A few men sighed. She glanced at a man's handless arm and added, "I hope this is the last war of mankind."

I wanted to say something, but words deserted me.

From that day on Dr. Greene came to see me once a week, handed in her homework for me to correct, and took back a page of sample characters I had inscribed for her. When she was here, she also checked my wound, which was healing fast. The inmates would gather around to see her homework and often praised her progress. Gushu was quite attached to her, saying she was a saint, because she had managed to stop his wound from suppurating.

Although our ward accommodated over seventy patients, most beds were unoccupied during the day. I found that a good number of the men were ambulatory and were actually fairly healthy; they were probably remaining here because the hospital offered better board and lodging than the regular prison camps. I wondered why the doctors didn't discharge them. There was so much deliberate confusion of identities among the POWs, who often destroyed their ID tags and changed their names randomly, that the doctors could hardly keep track of all the patients. Beyond question, some of these men were malingerers, good at faking illness. The hospital seemed to have become a vacation place for many POWs.

Now that I was able to move around with the aid of crutches, I often left the tent. It was already early winter and most trees had shed their leaves. Naked branches made the yellowish land appear more drab; even the sea to the south had turned gray. But in the north the hills were still green, scattered with patches of junipers and cypresses. I often watched seagulls flying in the sky draped with ragged clouds. The birds had no walls or fences to confine them. How precious the idea of freedom was to a prisoner! I couldn't help but compare myself with almost every creature my eyes fell upon. Even my worms-eye view of American airplanes often set me imagining how free the pilots must feel up in the air.

One day I heard some women singing a Russian song, "The Evening of Moscow Suburbs," which had also been popular in China; afterward Captain Yoon told me that that compound, number 12, contained only female prisoners. I could see a corner of their barracks, which must have held hundreds of Korean women. The reason we had mistaken them for civilians was that some of them had been guerrillas and still wore long-sleeved white dresses, black skirts, or baggy slacks. Later I heard that there was only one Chinese woman in that compound. I had known her, Zheng Dongmei. She had served in our division's song-and-dance ensemble and worn a pair of short braids. She was full of life and so cheerful that wherever she was, you could hear her singing and laughing. But she wasn't a good soldier and could pitch a grenade only fourteen yards; in a live throw she got one of her front teeth cut in half by a splinter of shrapnel from a grenade she herself had flung.

From where we were, I could see only a small portion of the women's quarters across a broad dirt road. Beyond their compound was the TB ward, which housed hundreds of consumptives. Somehow tuberculosis was still endemic to Koreans. In the evenings I would stand by the barbed wire and listen to the women singing. Though far away, I could hear their songs clearly because they always sang in chorus. Their voices transported me into reveries. They chanted all kinds of songs, sometimes passionately and sometimes lightheartedly, such as "Spring Is Coming," "Marshal Kim Il Sung," "The Anthem of the Korean People's Army," and "The Anthem of the Chinese People's Volunteers." Later I heard them sing "Defending the Yellow River!," "Solidarity Is Power,"