Review: 21 Stayed

At the end of the Korean War (or as it’s known in China, 抗美援朝kàngměiyuáncháo, The War Against America For Chosen), POWs on both sides were allowed to choose whether they would defect to the capturing side or return home. About two-thirds of the Chinese POWs stayed with the UN forces and were repatriated to Taiwan, along with several thousand North Koreans. Faced with this potential embarrassment, the PRC looked for Americans who would be willing to defect.

They found twenty one.

The author gives a description of what prisoner life was like under the Chinese, and goes into the backgrounds of the soldiers who defected. What she found is that, among other things, 18 suffered from poverty, and many of them suffered emotional turmoil from poor relationships with one or both of their parents. Life had left them vulnerable.

Overall, the book has a sad tone. Written in 1955, in the wake of McCarthyism, we see that educational problems and poor parenting in the United States are nothing new. Society had left them vulnarable to the twisted psychiatry of the Communist prison camp administrators. Strangely, though their system couldn’t last, Communism’s criticisms of our system yet persist.