During this period of hiding, several men starved to death. However hard we tried, we simply couldn't get any grain and had to live on wild herbs and fruits, which day by day were becoming scarcer.

One afternoon a band of bareheaded soldiers emerged in the southeast, moving toward us. They looked like a platoon. After observing them through binoculars, Commissar Pei decided they were our men. Indeed as they were coming closer, we recognized their leader, Wan Shumin, who had been the deputy commander of an engineering company. Before we withdrew from Jiader Hill, he had led two squads to demolish a bridge on a roadway. They carried out the mission but were cut off from us and trapped in that area. Since then, they had roamed around to elude the enemy and look for a way to return north, to no avail. Two days before, near Maping Village, they had picked up a large sack of sorghum that smelled of gasoline. They hated to use up all the grain themselves, so now they offered some to us. We were all delighted, not just about the food, but more importantly, that these men were unwounded and less combat-fatigued. Their arrival increased our fighting capacity and made us feel like a functional unit again.

Commissar Pei 's mood often affected us. He was our mainstay, as though he had always known what to do and where to go. In fact he was just ten years older than most of us. When he was happy, we tended to be in good spirits too. Unfortunately, thanks to his ulcer, he was gloomy and miserable most of the time. But he could eat sorghum porridge now, so we saved half a bag of the grain for him, about thirty pounds. Luckily Tiger found a bottle of multiple vitamins and a pack of Fortress cigarettes in a secret pocket of the leather bag he had carried for the commissar. Pei offered a cigarette to everyone who was present. I didn't smoke at that time, so I declined.

From that day on Pei took three vitamin pills a day, which helped him a good deal. In addition, the cook boiled sorghum porridge so well for him that it looked almost like paste, and soon Pei stopped regurgitating food. Miraculously his ulcer began to heal.

Once again we attempted to find our way out of the hostile territory. A group of three men, all officers, was sent out to probe the enemy's positions, but they didn't come back. They were all Party members, unlikely to have deserted. Actually desertion made no sense if they wanted to go back to China alive, because they couldn't mix with Korean civilians and would be easily identified. Logically speaking, the only way to survive was to surrender to the enemy. But most of us, terrified by the propaganda that described in grisly detail how the Americans had tortured Chinese POWs, dared not think of capitulation. We had been told that the enemy would turn most captives into guinea pigs for testing biochemical weapons. As a result, many of us thought we would prefer death to captivity.

Having waited four days without hearing from the three men, we decided to seek a way out by ourselves. It was dangerous to remain in the same area for too long. We set off north, without any specific goal in mind. After about three miles we spotted the enemy on a hilltop. They saw us too and opened fire; we scrambled into the larch woods nearby. As we ran away, bullets swished past, clipping branches and twigs. It was clear now that the three officers must have fallen into the enemy's hands.

We climbed a foothill and went down into a small valley. From there we saw a puff of wood smoke rising from a hill slope. Some civilians must have been over there, so we headed stealthily toward the fire. Coming closer, I smelled something like cooked rice and my heart leaped. Then a clearing emerged, in which a middle-aged Korean woman in a long white dress was chopping brushwood with a hatchet to feed the fire under a dark pot. At the sight of us, she yelled and dropped the ax and ran back into a shed built of wattles and bundles of cornstalks.

We loudly ordered her to come out, but she didn't stir. We waited a few minutes, then entered the doorless shed. Inside crouched four women. One of them was quite young, under twenty, her middle finger wearing an aluminum thimble. They looked clean and all wore the same kind of shoes that resembled miniature boats, made completely of gray rubber. The folded blankets and the indented straw on the ground indicated that they lived here, hiding from soldiers. They cowered together, shivering, and one broke out sobbing. We couldn't understand their language, so it was impossible to get anything from them. We brought them out of the shed; they were still trembling in the sun. When I removed the lid from the pot, a wave of steam rushed up with a sizzle. The rice looked glutinous and smelled overwhelmingly fragrant. I was amazed that under such circumstances they still had fresh rice. I had seen Korean families eat watery soup with only a few rice grains in it. Now all eyes turned my way, fixed on the cast-iron pot. I was sure that if the commissar had not been around, we would have wolfed down the food without hesitation. Pei took out his notebook and wrote "Chinese men," then stepped closer to the women and showed them the characters. He told them we wouldn't harm civilians and they mustn't be afraid. The oldest of them raised her thumb to acknowledge that we were a good army, though apparently they couldn't make out what Pei was saying. Then he wrote "Rice" on the paper and flashed it at them again.

"Opsumnida!" said the same woman, shaking her face, which was as furrowed as a walnut. Perhaps she meant "We don't have any."

I asked the youngest of them in English, "Where is your home?" She couldn't understand me and kept shaking her head. If only one of us had been able to speak Korean. Or if only we'd had a few bottles of penicillin powder or atabrine pills, which I was sure we could exchange with them for food. Korean women were very fond of medicines and cosmetics, even soap and toothpaste. We kept glancing at their pot, but dared not touch the rice.

The encounter with the civilians convinced us that there must be grain hidden somewhere. We stayed up on the opposite hill and kept a close watch on the women, but they never came out of the clearing in the daytime. They seemed aware they were under surveillance. We figured they must have lived in the village at the southern end of the valley. So at night we went there to dig around among the razed houses in hope of finding some edibles. We found nothing.

Then one day we happened on another burned village, which we watched from a distance but dared not approach while it was still light. Though there seemed to be nothing left there, a wisp of smoke rose from the ruins. As we wondered if someone was cooking over there, a stocky woman came out of the village, heading toward the hill slope in the east. We followed her through binoculars and saw her enter the bushes. Five or six minutes later she reappeared with a bulging sack that must have held grain. So after dark, we went over to dig in the bushes and found a sack of rice too, about fifty pounds. Regulations said that we must never take anything from civilians, but we were hungry and some of us were dying. Commissar Pei took out his notebook and wrote an IOU, saying that we had borrowed the grain and would compensate its owner when our army came again to liberate South Korea. He placed the piece of paper into the empty pit and held it down with a cobblestone. The words were in a running script; I suspected that the owner would never figure out the meaning and would curse us like mad.

If only we'd had money to pay them. In contrast to us, the North Korean army was loaded with cash; every man had bales of it, because they had seized the South Korean government's currency plates in Seoul. Their soldiers always paid for everything they took from civilians, who were pleased but didn't know the banknotes were losing value. I often wondered why the North Koreans wouldn't share some of the money with us. I guessed our top generals must have been too proud to ask them such a favor.