The Adventures of Eddie Fung
Subtitle: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: December 30, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780295987545
Subjects: Asian / Middle Eastern history: Second World War; Biography: general; Prisoners of war; Second World War, 1939-1945; Social Science; Biography / Autobiography; Sociology; Myanmar (Burma); Military; Military - World War II; Personal Memoirs; Ethnic Studies - Asian American Studies; Biography; Chinese Americans; Cowboys; Participation, Chinese American; Texas; World War, 1939-1945
Description: "Eddie Fung has the distinction of being the only Chinese American soldier to be captured by the Japanese during World War II. He was then put to work on the Burma-Siam railroad, made famous by the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. In this moving and unforgettable memoir written with his wife, Eddie recalls how he, a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown, reinvented himself as a Texas cowboy before going overseas with the U.S. Army. On the way to the Philippines, his battalion was captured by the Japanese in Java and sent to Burma to undertake the impossible task of building a railroad through 262 miles of tropical jungle." "Working under brutal slave labor conditions, the men completed the railroad in fourteen months, at the cost of 12,500 POW and 70,000 Asian lives. Eddie lived to tell how his background helped him endure forty-two months of humiliation and cruelty and how his experiences as the sole Chinese American member of the most decorated Texan unit of any war shaped his later life."--Jacket.