War Trash by Ha Jin

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