"War Trash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jin Ha)

12. STAGING A PLAY

Despite the leaders' efforts to organize and inspire the prisoners, the initial enthusiasm for our union in Compound 602 soon faded away and a lot of men turned moody again. Clearly the Communists had lost the battle of the screening – out of twenty thousand Chinese POWs more than fourteen thousand had refused to repatriate, most of them voluntarily but some against their will. To rebuild the comrades' confidence and revive their spirit, a performing arts troupe was formed, a couple of songs were composed, and several entertainments were provided, including poems, cartoons, and music (played mainly on self-made instruments). Then a group of men collaborated on the script for a play, entitled The Dream on Wall Street; it was about how the American capitalists controlled the White House and the Congress, and how they were behind the Korean War, striving to rule the globe. The play consisted of three acts and five scenes. Having read the script, the compound leaders decided to have it staged. To do this, the troupe needed a platform, props, and costumes. But how could they come by those things here?

To my surprise, some men began building an "open-air theater." In front of the barracks was an open field with bumps and sunken areas in it; toward its northern end the ground bulged a little, a foot or two higher than the rest of the field. Each battalion sent over sixty men to level the ground and heap up earth to make a stage, so that all of the audience sitting in the field could see the performance. Within three days a large platform was built out of oil drums, rocks, crates, tent poles, water pipes, and canvas. In spite of the mishmash, the "theater" looked quite impressive, as good as most stages improvised in the countryside back in China, where after the fall harvest villagers would hire troupes to perform for them. I wasn't interested in the play, which was more like a propaganda skit, but I was impressed by the men's ingenuity in staging it. They overcame one difficulty after another and created all the structures and props needed for the performance. They undid flour sacks, washed them clean, dyed them with tincture of Mercurochrome or that of gentian violet, basted them together, and hung the pieces up as curtains. They also used olive green blankets to make Western suits and American officers' uniforms. The battalions sent over some electricians to install lamps. To adjust the intensity of the light to the drama, they managed to control the electric current with an ad hoc resistor – salt water in a junked porcelain sink. Most of the props were made of wood and burlap sacks, variously painted. Drums were improvised out of bottomless oil cans tightly sealed with rain cloth at both ends. Two violins were created as well – the makers used bamboo and wooden boards and unraveled some nylon shoelaces to get the sturdy strands, then twisted them into strings.

The director of the play was Meng Feihan, a man who had lost his right foot. Before joining the Communist army, he had been a college student in Hong Kong. A talented musician and also a composer, he taught the prisoners how to sing more effectively and how to read music. He never seemed to tire of teaching others; three men were busy learning how to compose from him. Though crippled, he was more active than anybody else. Whenever he finished working on a scene, he would be bathed in perspiration. I guessed he hadn't fully recuperated from his injury yet. He was very strict about rehearsals – if one thing wasn't right he would make the actors repeat it again and again until he was satisfied. He insisted that every one of them learn his lines by heart. Yet however stern he was with them, the inmates respected him.

After a week's preparation, the play was ready for the stage. Ming took the role of Harry Truman. He was good at acting and often made people howl with laughter at the rehearsals. Since most of the characters were Caucasians, the actors would have to put on makeup to transform their Asiatic features, but there was no eyebrow pencil or putty or paint available. From Dr. Wang, Ming got some aspirins and exchanged them for makeup with two South Korean guards. They gave him powdered dyestuff, chewing gum, vanishing cream, paraffin wax, and an eyebrow pencil. To prepare the makeup, the actors mixed the colored powder with Vaseline given them by a medic. The gum was used to enlarge their Chinese noses. Two men were assigned to chew it, then to wash the lumps clean; it was not only pliable but also stickier, much better than putty, the conventional material used for this purpose in the theater.

On the evening of April 21, The Dream on Wall Street was shown to the six thousand POWs of Compound 602. Among the main characters were Harry Truman, the special envoy John Foster Dulles, two senators, and a corpulent banker on Wall Street. The play was quite amusing, though on occasion marred by propagandistic gibes. The music, played on the shabby self-made instruments, wasn't very effective, but it helped enliven the performance, especially the washbasins used as gongs and the two pot covers, one bigger than the other, serving as a pair of cymbals. Even the lights were managed well, going brighter or dimmer according to the development of the drama. Most amazing was the talent of the actors, particularly Ming, impersonating Truman, and Jin Shang, who played a fat billionaire. Their manners and dialogue were funny, at times slapstick, but always potent enough to bring out a roar of laughter from the audience. Even the GIs watched the play from the guard tower, and some of them were apparently entertained.

Ming, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, was too tall for the role of Harry Truman, so he kept his legs bowed all the while, his feet fanning out to form a V. This made him clownish. He said to the banker, "Paul, we need another billion dollars."

The capitalist, in a top hat and a tailcoat, answered with one hand on his potbelly, "Mr. President, we don't have much left in our bank. We gave you two billion last year." He twirled a walking stick while speaking.

"That wasn't a gift, it was a loan."

"But we've already shared the cost of the war, haven't we?"

"Come on, we're talking about this year. Can't you give us another loan?"

"At this rate, the war will soon bankrupt us, sir."

"Give me a break! You guys always make tons of money whenever there's a war."

"But we have to reserve a certain amount of capital to make profits."

"Darn it! I'm your capital, I'm your investment, I am the president of the United States!"

"But a billion dollars is astronomical to us."

"Of course it's a huge sum. We have to maintain a large army on the Korean Peninsula."

Their exchange was interrupted by the unannounced appearance of two senators, one mustachioed and the other partly bald. Then the conversation resumed, and after another round of argument, the billionaire yielded and granted the loan at high interest.

As the scene proceeded, suddenly a GI shouted from the guard tower, "Hey, Officer Feng, you goddamned buffoon! Stop making fun of our president!"

That startled me because I thought he was yelling at me. Then I realized he knew Ming only by his alias, which was Feng Wen, close to mine. Another GI thundered, "Get your ass off the stage, Truman!"

A third cried in a joking tone, "Hey, Truman, you're fired! If you don't get off of the stage, I'm going to open up on you."

But to their credit, they didn't interfere further with the performance other than a few shouts, and remained a good audience for the rest of the play. More earnest than the Americans, the South Korean guards gathered outside the fence, along the barbed wire, watching attentively. Some of them even applauded when the curtain fell.

During the next few days, a number of Americans mentioned the performance to me. They wondered how it had been possible for the prisoners to stage a full-length play and where we had gotten all the theatrical props and costumes. I told them that some of the prisoners had been professionals, specifically the director, Meng Feihan, who had specialized in the performing arts. They were more impressed. One said, "Never thought there were artists among you." I was surprised that they would use the term "artist" so loosely. To us Chinese, only a maestro should be called that.

The Americans had taken us to be an army of peasants, more like cattle than men. The play seemed to have changed their perception of us a little. Later I noticed that the guards would treat the few actors somewhat differently from the regular prisoners, with more respect. They would no longer curse them. This amazed me, because to most Chinese an actor was just an entertainer, and however talented he was, he still belonged to the lower strata of society. His job was only to please others, so he wasn't as important as an officer or an official.