Chen’s Account

Chapter 9 Chen’s account  ( 2)

When the war started the Indian government patched up the camp and reinforced barbed wire fences around each wing and one that circled the whole camp. The five wings, named A, B, C, D and E wings, each had a compound with a water tank in the centre, pierced at intervals by taps.

The camp people registered us. We could only take clothes and things we used into the camp. The soldiers took our money, watches, jewellery, knives, scissors and anything sharp and put them in thick paper bags with our family‘s assigned number on it. Now we were numbers. The soldiers also put down the location of the camp we were assigned. Then they sealed it with a red, Indian government seal and issued us each a receipt. I walked inside the barbed wire fence with only my clothes.

I don‘t think the Indian soldiers knew what to do with 2,000 Chinese. They assigned us to tents and told us we would have more permanent housing soon. I put down our possessions on the dirt and sand floor of the tent and released my breath. There were beds in the tents. Whatever would happen tomorrow, I could sleep in peace and quiet tonight. For the last couple of weeks the Chinese had slept in dirty and noisy jails, napped on the floor of a lurching train and dozed on hard benches and train station platforms that left welts on bottoms and knots in bones.

I wondered about the holes in the sand and dirt floor, then collapsed on the bed and slept.

In the middle of the night many voices shouted, ―Snake! Snake! The holes were the snakes‘ dens. I huddled on my cot.

Later shrill screams jarred me awake, followed by the violent rustling of tree branches. I covered my ears and huddled further into my bedding.

Next morning we saw the peacocks pecking on the grass in the compounds. They chased and pecked at each other, screamed the same shrill sound I heard in the night, and then flew to their nests in the trees.

After two weeks the soldiers assigned more permanent quarters to the inmates. We settled in long barracks (previously used by the soldiers). Each barrack was divided into six large rooms and four smaller ones. Depending on the family size, we lived four or five families to each room. There was nothing in the rooms except lots of sand—no toilets, no kitchens, just sand. The men (49)

whose families were not arrested had no privacy at all. They set up their beds against the barrack walls outside on the verandahs with their belongings under their beds.

We washed clothes around big concrete tanks in the middle of the compound. The rule for using the tanks was: those who just wanted to wash their hands had priority.

Each section or wing had five toilets, which wasn‘t enough. We often shuffled our feet or danced outside the toilets, depending on the urgency of our bowels or bladders. We used to shout for the people inside to hurry up. The young men began to use the backs of the toilet housing for urination. When the rain came, which was not often, the raindrops hit the corrugated iron roof and sounded rather nice. We didn‘t go to the toilet between noon and four, as it was unbearably hot inside. You would be cooked if you stayed in for even a very short time. We used the tap and the wooden bucket in each toilet stall to clean ourselves after our toilet use. When we first arrived we used newspapers but we soon ran out of newspapers so we used the taps and buckets.

At first the camp commander arranged for the local merchants to cook our meals. We didn‘t have much of an appetite as the rice was always half-cooked. So the people in the camp got together. We selected representatives from each wing. The representatives went to the camp commander and requested we be allowed to cook our own food. We asked the commander to distribute the food to the representatives and let each wing be responsible for their own cooking. The commander agreed. So every morning the wing representatives picked up rice, cooking oil, vegetables, meat, fish, chicken and eggs.

In our wing our representative, Ken, picked up our daily food supplies. You could mistake him for a Muslim, with his bearded face. When each family cooked its own food, Ken distributed the supplies. He sang as he gave out the food. He sang Hindi songs and Hakka mountain yodelling. He made everyone smile.

The restaurant owner from Shillong, Ying, looked after the cooking. He organized all the food in the cooking area, and then he roped in young men with lots of muscle power to take turns killing and skinning chickens, chopping, stirring the cooking in the big communal wok. When the food was ready we banged on the metal lid of the wok and each family sent someone to pick up their share. My younger brother and I worked in the cooking area. We took food to the old people who had no family members in the camp. (50) "