A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin

prisoners’ dialects and for understanding their psychology. In the beginning he had sympathized with those POWs who still had unhealed wounds, but he was jaded by now. Some prisoners would weep wretchedly like small boys and beg the UN officers to send them to Generalissimo Chiang’s army in Taiwan. Some kept complaining about being bullied by others, particularly by their prison-compound leaders, handpicked by their captors. Some remained reticent, only repeating, “I want to go home.” A few, the minute they sat down, would curse their interrogators and even call Gary “the Americans’ running dog.” There was a fellow, his face and limbs burned by napalm, who would make a strange noise in response to the interrogators’ questions, and Gary couldn’t tellwhether he was giggling or hissing or crying. One of his eyes never blinked; maybe it was already sightless. The files on the POWs were messy because the prisoners would frequently change their names, also because they were often regrouped in different prison units. And no staffer would take the trouble to set the files in order, everybody being overwhelmed with the work he had to do.
    A number of POWs were leaders within the prison compounds and worked hard to persuade others to desert the Communist ranks. These men were quite obedient to the Americans and eager to curry favor with the prison administration. Whenever possible, Gary would strike up conversations with them, sharing cigarettes or candy or peanuts. He learned from them the calisthenics that the Chinese army had designed for its soldiers. He found many of these men using names different from those in their files. The prison administration wouldn’t bother to straighten this out, or perhaps even encouraged them to adopt aliases as a disguise. Occasionally Gary would take a photo with one of those men as “a keepsake.” Whenever it was possible, he’d bring their files back to his room, which he shared with an officer who’d always go out in the evenings. With his German camera Gary shot photos of some anti-Communists’ files and kept a list of their names with cross-references to their current aliases.
    When his Pusan stint was over, in late October, he returned to Okinawa with six films of the prisoners’ files and resumed his work as a translator at the agency. He could have had the photos developed, but that might be too risky, so he put the films into a cloth pouch and tied its neck with a shoelace. He wrote to Hong Kong, to the old address, a Baptist seminary, which he’d been told to use in case of emergency.
    To Gary’s delight, Bingwen Chu wrote back two weeks later, saying in the voice of a fake cousin that Gary’s family in the countryside was well and missed him, and the two of them should spend some time together in Hong Kong in February. As for the “medicine,” Gary should go to Tokyo as soon as possible and deliver it to“a friend” there, who was an overseas Chinese. Bingwen provided the man’s address in Shibuya district and described him as “a short, thickset fellow with a balding head and a Sichuan accent.” Gary wondered why Bingwen and he couldn’t meet somewhere in Japan. Then he realized that few Chinese agents, unable to speak a foreign tongue and unfamiliar with the life and customs of another country, would dare to undertake a mission in an environment where they had little control. This realization made him smile with a modicum of complacence, feeling he must be quite outstanding compared to his comrades back home, perhaps one in a thousand. Like his American colleagues who often went to the capital on weekends, he took a three-day leave, flew to Tokyo, and delivered the intelligence without incident.

Minmin and I started out for Maijia Village early the next morning. Once we got out of Linmin Town, I was amazed to see that most of the country roads were well paved, some new. The villages and small towns in this area seemed all connected by decent roads,