Today, more than half a century later, I came to know a little more about the Korean War through the reading of a novel entitled War Trash.China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is now a professor of English at Boston University. And one can imagine what happened in the days and years that followed. The POWs, including Commissar Pei, were just war trash to be relegated to the garbage of history. Pei was not able to save his own skin, to say nothing of protecting his subordinates. He was sent to a state farm in east Liaoning to grow rice though nominally he was the manger of the farm. Yu Yuan was lucky not be branded as a traitor because he was not a Communist Party member and had not broken any promise.

           The book has a simple plot, but it is full of surprises. Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer who had spent some time in the Huangpu Military Academy but who later joined the People’s Liberation Army, marched into the Korean battlefield together with tens of thousands of soldiers, only to be made captives without much fighting—probably on account of some strategic mistake made by the CPVA commanders. Yu’s command of English thrust him a whirlpool of physical and psychological warfare in the POW camps. The Americans, who ran the camps under the flag of the UN, the underground Chinese Communist Party organization, the North Korean captives, and Taiwan’s Kuomintang—all tried to use his English knowledge to serve their purpose.

           He became a middle school teacher, married another woman, and had two children, one of whom went to the US to pursue advanced studies….

           I think of Peng Dehui, the supreme commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers who was targeted in a relentless inner-Party struggle at the Lushan Meeting in 1959. I have yet to learn of any CPVA captive who later carved out a brilliant career, political or otherwise, in China.