Hideki Tōjō, Army Minister, came up with a solution. The Imperial Army’s pacification of the Communist rebellions supported by the Soviet Union in Manchuria and China resulted in many prisoners. They could be put to work, for free.
The prisoners were brought into the Tunnel to take the place of regular work crews. As shift supervisor, I managed them with the aid of a squad of soldiers. The prisoners were a sorry sight, chained together, naked, thin like scarecrows. They did not look like dangerous and crafty Communist bandits. I wondered sometimes how there could be so many prisoners, since the news always said that the pacification of the Communists was going well and the Communists were not much of a threat.
They usually didn’t last long. When a prisoner was discovered to have expired from the work, his body was released from the shackles and a soldier would shoot it a few times. We would then report the death as the result of an escape attempt.
To hide the involvement of the slave laborers, we kept visiting reporters away from work on the main Tunnel. They were used mainly on the side excavations, for station cities or power stations, in places that were not well surveyed and more dangerous.
One time, while making a side tunnel for a power station, my crew blasted through to a pocket of undetected slush and water, and the side tunnel began to flood. We had to seal the breach quickly before the flood got into the main Tunnel. I woke up the crews of the two other shifts and sent a second chained crew into the side tunnel with sandbags to help with plugging up the break.
The corporal in charge of the squad of soldiers guarding the prisoners asked me, “What if they can’t plug it?”
His meaning was obvious. We had to make sure that the water did not get into the main Tunnel, even if the repair crews we sent in failed. There was only one way to make sure, and as water was flowing back up the side tunnel, time was running out.
I directed the chained crew I’d kept behind as a reserve to begin placing dynamite around the side tunnel, behind the men we had sent in earlier. I did not much like this, but I told myself that these were hardened Communist terrorists, and they were probably sentenced to death already, anyway.
The prisoners hesitated. They understood what we were trying to do, and they did not want to do it. Some worked slowly. Others just stood.
The corporal ordered one of the prisoners shot. This motivated the remaining ones to hurry.
I set off the charges. The side tunnel collapsed, and the pile of debris and falling rocks filled most of the entrance, but there was still some space at the top. I directed the remaining prisoners to climb up and seal the opening. Even I climbed up to help them.
The sound of the explosion told the prisoners we sent in earlier what was happening. The chained men lumbered back, sloshing through the rising water and the darkness, trying to get to us. The corporal ordered the soldiers to shoot a few of the men, but the rest kept on coming, dragging the dead bodies with their chains, begging us to let them through. They climbed up the pile of debris toward us.
The man at the front of the chain was only a few meters from us, and in the remaining cone of light cast by the small opening that was left I could see his face, contorted with fright.
“Please,” he said. “Please let me through. I just stole some money. I don’t deserve to die.”
He spoke to me in Hokkien, my mother tongue. This shocked me. Was he a common criminal from back home in Formosa, and not a Chinese Communist from Manchuria?
He reached the opening and began to push away the rocks, to enlarge the opening and climb through. The corporal shouted at me to stop him. The water level was rising. Behind the man, the other chained prisoners were climbing to help him.
I lifted a heavy rock near me and smashed it down on the hands of the man grabbing onto the opening. He howled and fell back, dragging the other prisoners down with him. I heard the splash of water.
“Faster, faster!” I ordered the prisoners on our side of the collapsed tunnel. We sealed the opening, then retreated to set up more dynamite and blast down more rocks to solidify the seal.
When the work was finally done, the corporal ordered all the remaining prisoners shot, and we buried their bodies under yet more blast debris.
There was a massive prisoner uprising. They attempted to sabotage the project, but failed and instead killed themselves.
This was the corporal’s report of the incident, and I signed my name to it as well. Everyone understood that was the way to write up such reports.
I remember the face of the man begging me to stop very well. That was the face I saw in the dream last night.
? ? ?
The Square is deserted right before dawn. Overhead, neon advertising signs hang from the City’s ceiling, a few hundred meters up. They take the place of long-forgotten constellations and the moon.
Betty keeps an eye out for unlikely pedestrians while I swing the hammer against the chisel. Bronze is a hard material, but I have not lost the old skills I learned as a Digger. Soon the characters of my name are gone from the plaque, leaving behind a smooth rectangle.
I switch to a smaller chisel and begin to carve. The design is simple: three ovals interlinked, a chain. These are the links that bound two continents and three great cities together, and these are the shackles that bound men whose voices were forever silenced, whose names were forgotten. There is beauty and wonder here, and also horror and death.
With each strike of the hammer, I feel as though I am chipping away the shell around me, the numbness, the silence.
Make the secret a bit harder to keep. That counts for something.
“Hurry,” Betty says.
My eyes are blurry. And suddenly the lights around the Square come on. It is morning under the Pacific Ocean.
* * *
1. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 had set the ratio of capital ships among the US, Britain, and Japan at 5:5:3. This was the ratio Japan got adjusted in 1930.
2. Allowing Germany to re-arm also let the German government heave a big sigh of relief. The harsh Treaty of Versailles, especially those articles about neutering Germany, made a lot of Germans very angry and some of them joined a group of goose-stepping thugs called the German Nationalist Socialist Party, which scared everyone, including the government. After those provisions of the treaty were scrapped, the thugs got no electoral support at the next election in 1930, and faded away. Heck, they are literally now a footnote of history, like this one.
THE LITIGATION MASTER AND THE MONKEY KING
The tiny cottage at the edge of Sanli Village—away from the villagers’ noisy houses and busy clan shrines and next to the cool pond filled with lily pads, pink lotus flowers, and playful carp—would have made an ideal romantic summer hideaway for some dissolute poet and his silk-robed mistress from nearby bustling Yangzhou.
Indeed, having such a country lodge was the fashion among the literati in the lower Yangtze region in this second decade of the glorious reign of the Qianlong Emperor. Everyone agreed—as they visited one another in their vacation homes and sipped tea—that he was the best Emperor of the Qing Dynasty: so wise, so vigorous, and so solicitous of his subjects! And as the Qing Dynasty, founded by Manchu sages, was without a doubt the best dynasty ever to rule China, the scholars competed to compose poems that best showed their gratitude for having the luck to bear witness to this golden age, gift of the greatest Emperor who ever lived.