Little Foreign Devil 2010 Chapter 20

8/3/2019 Little Foreign Devil 2010 Chapter 20

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MANNA FROM HEAVEN

SEPTEMBER CAME AND WENT, and there we were

still holed-up in the gray mission compound. To keepour spirits bolstered, the re-orientation team had Block35 converted into an information center complete withlatest issues of Time, Life, Look, Readers Digest, Field & Stream, Saturday Evening Post as well as a flashy arrayof the new fandangled pocket books. Bolster our spirits?Quite the reverse. It galled us to read about the openingsession of the United Nations at San Francisco, aboutBritain’s Prime Minister Clement Atlee promising inde-pendence for India (what had happened to Winston?),about the new wonder drug – penicillin, about the newcraze – the Bobby Soxers. Left stranded on the sidelines

as the world rolled merrily along its way, liberation wasfast losing its relish for us. We’d had enough of lecturingand were tiring of Spam and were getting pretty blaséabout the planes that came over everyday, the C47s,the B24s, the B25s, even a diminutive L5 which puton a spectacular aerial display entirely for our benefit.But maybe not so blasé about the B29s. They wereincredible. First sign of them was the deep rumble of distant thunder, and the rumble all the time increas-ing in resonance until with a deafening eruption theybroke into view. And we thought the B24s huge! Howcould such a colossus of seventy tons dead weight defy

the natural laws of gravity? The lead behemoth wouldswing open its bomb bays, signaling the rest to followsuit, then in the blink of an eye the sky was a galaxy of variegated chutes. Some chutes failed, by golly. Wiredin tandem, fifty-five gallon drums, trailing tangles of



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red and white silk, came crashing down,spewing deadly missiles from the warfactories of Dole and Heinz and MaxwellHouse. In one furious blitz on the camphospital, ten pound cans smashed intothe wall immediately above a row of cotssplattering the patients with 67 variet-ies of soup and stew. Miraculously, nodeaths, no injuries.

Just as on liberation day, the gates wereflung open and out we dashed into thecountryside. We had to be quick aboutit. Local peasants were already theregathering up the manna from heaven.

Twenty feet from where Aubrey Gran-don and I were stuf fing ourselves withHershey Bars from a smashed carton,bronze-faced natives were sucking soup

and pineapple juice from punctured cans. One old geezer was squeezing Barbasol shaving cream into his mouth when Aubrey called out that the stuff was not for eat-ing. The old man’s lips spread in a frothy grin. Thenhe was laughing. Then we were all busting ourselves,

we and the natives. It was carnival time.A very pink, very sweaty, very out-of-sorts GI came

trotting up to our little fiesta. He bellowed at the Chi-nese: “Who the hell do you gooks think you are? That’s

our chow. Beat it. Go on, scram.” The Chinese stared without expression. The GI drew his Colt and pointedit threateningly. Still the Chinese held their ground.

The GI said to Aubrey, “Tell deeze sonzabitches to getlost.” Aubrey converted the order into a polite request.One of the Chinese replied: “Tell the soldier of the for-eign invasion army that this is our land, not his. Tellhim that for the last three years the Eastern OceanDevils confiscated our seed grain to feed you WesternOcean Devils. Tell him that in sustaining you, we werebrought to ruin.”

Aubrey tell the foreign invasion soldier? There was

nothing Aubrey could tell him. He was doing all thetelling himself with his: “We gonna shoot you crazysonzabitch gooks if you doan get yer ass outtaherepronto. . . .”



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The peasants did pick up and leave, and as theysauntered away, I noticed that one was armed withan ancient fowling piece. By itself, no match for theAmerican Winchester, but a million fowling pieces, tenmillion, a hundred million . . . ?

That there were two sides to the American characterbewildered me no end. I brooded over it. How couldthey be so overwhelming in their warmth and generos-ity, yet without qualm run roughshod over the haplesspeasants? Even more dismaying than the incidentat the airdrop was the way their of ficers were openlyembracing the infamous General Nieh, the puppet

commander, who only a month back had collaborated with the Japanese in their rape and pillage of centralShantung. ‘Embrace’? Yes, not too strong a word if you

were witness to what I was.Soon after their arrival in camp, the Americans called

for Chinese speaking inmates to volunteer as interpret-ers. I was one of the first to do so, but it was Roy Tchoo

who got the plum assignments, and well he should; hisPeking Mandarin was Mandarin at its purest. ThoughI hoped to get the assignment, he was the one selectedto head out to the hills with the rescue party to bringin the US fighter pilot whose plane came down near

Tsingtao. And he was the one to get all the glory whenthe team arrived back with the rescued pilot Lt WilliamZimpleman. Two things about the pilot surprised me.Where I had expected a big tall fellow, he was short and



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stocky. And instead of the leather jacket as depicted inHollywood films, he was in a suit of dark green. Whensomeone asked if members of his squadron all wore thestrange uniform, he gave a laugh and said that duringthe six months he was under the care of Chinese guer-rillas, they provided him with his own personal tailor

who made the suit for him.Back to Roy Tchoo, he was the one to sit at the

American commander’s side during the negotiations with Weihsien’s city fathers. But then I was not totallyleft out. I was Roy’s assistant for the big show theAmericans put on for General Nieh.

The strutting re-orientation major’s first act as masterof ceremonies for that occasion was to unceremoniouslyturf out the several internees who happened to be us-ing the center at the time. He then had his men set upa coffee urn, and lay out platters of Spam and cheesesandwiches, and stack each seating with an invitingdisplay of Hershey bars, Wrigleys gum, Chesterfieldcigarettes.

Our guests were late. We twiddled our thumbs forclose on an hour before they paraded in. What a bunchof cutthroats the general and his entourage! Not a glim-mer of a smile among the lot. For sure you’d never wantto bump into them on a dark night.

They scooped up the cigarettes. They left the food andcandy untouched. They stared tight-lipped at the major

as he launched into his welcoming speech, which Royrepeated in Chinese, three-four sentences at a time.

The speech dwelt on the solidarity of the Sino-Americanalliance. It lavished praise on Generalissimo ChiangKai Shek and his hierarchy of loyal generals of whichthe name Nieh was put at the very top. It concluded

with the grand pronouncement that America and China would march forward together, their eternal friendshipcemented by General Nieh’s unswerving faith in free-dom, justice, and democracy . . . .

While Roy was apologizing for the lack of real Chinatea, a US sergeant pinned blankets over the windows.

The film projector began to click and whirr. Some of the newsreels were black and white, some Technicolor,all concerned Americanfirepower: battleships, carriers,tanks, artillery. We saw carpet bombing, dive bombing,



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incendiary bombing. We saw battles galore: Saipan,Manila, Okinawa, Bastogne, Falaise. And we sawmountains of dead – dead Japanese, dead Germans,

and, surprisingly, dead Russians. The sight of Russiandead brought the General and his thugs to life. Theyclapped heartily. They cheered “Hao ! Hao !”

The major preened. He beamed a toothy smile at Roy.“Thanks for your help, buddy. We really impressed them.Looks like Uncle Sam has won himself a fine ally.”

Then he rounded on me as if it were my fault theguests hadn’t touched the food. “Why don’t the gookseat? You get them to eat, Buster. That’s your job.”

I presented a tray to one of the Chinese. Shakinghis head coldly, he muttered: “None of you Americansare touching the food. What fools do you take us for?”

The man next to him added: “You eat it. You poison yourself.” As I retreated, I heard him say: “If I had my way, it would not only be the Americans we’d get ridof, but all the Foreign Devils, the whole stinking lot of them, before they once again spread like vermin acrossour land.”



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As it turned out, the man had his way all right. AnAmerican Transport Of ficer announced to a crowd of in-ternees that they were to be immediately evacuated.

And almost the very next

afternoon a group of six hun-dred internees, about half the population of Weihsien’sForeign Devils, left by trainfor the port of Tsingtao. They

were lucky to get through.After that, no more trains.

The line was cut, bridgesdowned, stations set afire.China’s factional war hadflared up across the land. Allnight long we heard the din

of battle, but then at sunrise the shooting stopped, andthere they were, out in the fields, droves of peasantsbent over sickles, working the harvest just as countlessgenerations of their forebears had done before them.With such scenes of pastoral tranquillity it seemedpeace had returned. If that were only so. Came duskthere’d be a desultory shot, then another, then two insuccession, then a fusillade, then machine gun bursts,then the loud thud of grenades and mortar bombs; and

you wondered how a single peasant could survive thecarnage. Yet at daybreak they were back again, wholefamilies, reaping and gathering. I could vouch for that.

I saw it with my own eyes when as interpreter I rodeout each morning in the truck with a squad of GIsto the abandoned Japanese airstrip at Erhshihlipu.Pretty eerie out there in the wide open waiting for theday’s supply plane. Though the strip was guarded by



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a contingent of General Nieh’s troops, we never reallyfelt safe. Who would with that slovenly, scrofulous lotarmed with antiquated single-action rifles and stringsof grenades dangling perilously from waist belts?

They were sneaky too. You’d tell their sergeant it wasforbidden to go near a plane, and he’d be shouting andscreaming at his men, threatening them with the firingsquad if they strayed close. Yet the minute you turned

your back, he himself would be sneaking aboard to see what he could snaf fle.

Not only was it the Chinese who gotup to mischief. A GI made a playful grabfor a puppet’s rifle. The puppet hungon for dear life. The GI turned to me:“Tell this crazy gook he can fire off mycarbine if he’ll let me take a coupla shots

with his funny old museum piece.” Thepuppet sergeant intervened. “Bu xing,bu xing . Firing of rifles is forbidden.Even when under attack we are not al-lowed to pull the trigger until given theorder. But the honorable foreign soldiercan throw as many of our grenades ashe likes.” And when I translated thatfor the American, his eyes popped

wide. “You think I’m nuts to pull thestring on that rusty old chunk of iron!

Anyway, why the umbrella?” . . . “Toprotect him from the rain.” . . . “What if he come’s under fire?” . . . “All fightingstops when it rains.” . . . “That’s crazy,too crazy to believe.” . . . .

On my first outing to the airfield I had puffed withimportance. Wasn’t I at last doing my bit in the war?Second time out, I felt less heroic. It soon began topall, those long hours of idleness on the sun-scorchedmud flat. The GIs had but two subjects of conversation.When they had talked themselves out about the galsthey had left behind, their Marie-Lous, their Suzy-Anns,

their Josie-Belles, they were vehemently defending theirhome towns. Nothing compare dwith St Louis, Missouri. . . The only place to live was Sacramento, California. . . El Paso, Texas was number one. . . . I dreaded thequestion, but it always came: “Say bud, where you



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from?” Confess to Tien-tsin, Hopei Province, andthey’d gape as if I weresome freak brought up ina punk smelling mud hut.Why bother telling them

what long time Ameri-can residents of Tientsinknew well enough, thatthe of fice buildings andcentrally heated homesand schools there wereon a par with the world'sbest?

But no need to take allthat Yankee guff. I couldalways walk away fromtheir truck and button-hole some puppet soldier.Easier said than done.

The conscripts shiedaway from my city Mandarin. And the sergeant? Whyhe was off on an English speaking jag. Poor wretch, itnearly did him in. To show off his newly learned vocabu-lary he pointed a wagging finger at a dark-skinned GI

while he laughingly mouthed the words: “Black Face!”

How could he possibly know that in joining togetherthose two innocent words from his English Primer hehad loaded them with deadly venom.

An hour before sundown the puppet soldiers wouldbegin to agitate. In twos and threes they would abandontheir posts and head towards us, first those guardingthe far end of the strip, then the point men, then eventhe idlers grubbing about the wrecked Japanese aircraft.

Time to go, they’d say, gazing longingly at Weihsien’sprotective city wall. Soon the first shots would soundheralding the evening battle. Didn’t the Americans real-ize that out in the open they’d be sitting ducks?

Of course the Americans realized it. It set them off.“Why don’t the Sixth Marines in Tsingtao fl y in and kickhell out of the sonovbitch Commies once and for all?”

“Them marines got too much on their hands.”



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“Then we might as well quit this landing strip.”“Might as well. These gooks here are no help.”With every passing day the deterioration of General

Nieh’s guard contingent was plainer to see. Its depletedranks were now mostly made up of youths barely ableto shoulder the weight of their rifles.

“What happened to your sergeant?” I asked one of them when for several days running that scarecrow inuniform failed to show.

“He’s deserted and joined the Reds.”

There came the day when our morning excursion toErhshihlipu was put on hold. And when the truck stayedparked for a second day, then a third, a fourth, a fifth,

we had to assume the worst – the Reds had overrunthe strip. Numbing thought. It was the third week of October and the tenth since World War II had come toan of ficial end. You began hearing people say they werebetter off under the Japanese; at least then they lived inthe hope of being free as birds the minute the war wasover. Now, no such hope. Someone ventured the opinionthat this other war now entrapping the camp was theChinese version of the Hundred Years’ War . Hard to

argue against that. Hadn’t the Nationalists and Com-munists been slugging it out since 1927? And weren’tthey still in round one, for goodness sakes? “We’re stuckhere till doomsday” was the common refrain in bothPeking and Tientsin Kitchens. Faint hearts! How could



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anyone lose faith in the sublime ability of Americansto move mountains when so inclined?

It was Tai-tai who broke the news. “They’re going tofl y out the whole camp starting tomorrow.”

“All seven-eight hundred? Never!”“Orlich sent word to Betty. He ought to know.”Peter Orlich, a signals corporal in the OSS, one of the

original team that liberated the camp, was romanticallyinvolved with my half-sister Betty. Now stationed inPeking, the hub of the American military presence inNorth China, his teletype machine must be burning hot

with signals concerning plans for our evacuation.When I passed on the news at the workers’ meal table

in Kitchen Two Annex (Yes, right to the end we contin-ued supplying meals, and hefty portions too, as canbe seen from a happy Bessie Attree pictured below), itstarted off the armchair generals . . . “If the Yanks don’thave control of Erhshihlipu, how they gonna land theirplanes?” . . . “Who said they can’t take over the place?”. . . “The Communist 8th Route Army said. . . .”

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Little Foreign Devil 2010 Chapter 20