The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War ed. by Judy Yung (review)

udice towards, like the Chinese whose immigration to the U.S. had been selectively excluded, and the Japanese, with whom the country was at war. The authors show that the growing government concern expressed for Mexican Americans, though important in the long run, was mainly pragmatic during the war. There were two main elements to the government’s position. The first was the maintenance of the “Good Neighbor” policy, which sought friendly relations with Latin American countries, especially Mexico, and so the treatment of Mexican Americans earned greater scrutiny. The second was the desire to maintain a compact between labor and capital to limit labor shortages and work stoppages in order to keep factories running and war material rolling off assembly lines. That brought in the well-intentioned Fair Employment Practices Committee, which attempted to end workplace discrimination. Civil rights gains though, have had to come from direct challenges to discriminatory laws and practices from Mexican Americans themselves. This well-written, very readable book addresses important themes and develops them in a way that will appeal to a broad audience while providing a solid grounding in the established literature and insight from primary research. The book is enhanced by a collection of well-considered appendices, including moving excerpts from Raul Morin’s Among the Valiant about the battle experiences of Mexican Americans in World War II. Those with a special interest in Texas will find eye-opening firsthand testimony in “Affidavits of Mexican Americans Regarding Discrimination in Texas during World War II,” collected by Alonso S. Perales. Texas State University–San Marcos Paul Hart The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War. Edited by Judy Yung. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Pp. 256. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-29598-754-5. $22.50, paper.) Born and raised within the confines of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Eddie Fung left home as a sixteen-year-old in 1938 searching for broader horizons. Dreaming of a romantic life as a cowboy, he ended up on a West Texas ranch, where he built fences, maintained windmills, doctored cattle, planted crops, and learned how to pace himself for long days of backbreaking labor. “It was nothing but hard work,” he recalls in this engaging memoir. “So, right away, my illusions of the movie cowboy were shattered” (p. 45). Unlike Chinatown, the ranch had no indoor plumbing. Eddie found himself “basically cut off from the outside world. There was no electricity, no phone, no radio or newspaper. Our closest neighbor was twenty miles away” (p. 59). The other ranch hands found him comical: “Here was a big city boy coming to Texas wanting to be a cowboy when most Texans would give their eyeteeth just to get away from that kind of life” (p. 45). As it turned out, Eddie’s immersion in this primitive life unwittingly prepared him for what was to follow—forty-two months in Japanese prison camps during 2009 Book Reviews 347 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 347 World War II. As a member of Texas’s Lost Battalion, he became a POW along with thousands of American soldiers after the fall of Java in early 1942. The prisoners were forced to work on the Burma-Siam Railroad on reduced rations while suffering from malaria, dysentery, and tropical infections. At one point Eddie’s weight dropped to sixty pounds, even as he hauled hundred-pound loads. Eddie Fung describes his years as a POW without bitterness, but in vivid detail. He explains his particular experience as the only Chinese American prisoner, how he and his comrades survived on the meager rations, how they kept up morale, and how they reacted when faced with the demand to sign loyalty oaths to the Japanese Imperial Army or face execution. The Adventures of Eddie Fung is a remarkable book on many levels, not the least because its informant is, as editor Judy Yung describes, “a natural storyteller with a fantastic memory for detail, a precise way of expressing himself, a wonderful sense of humor, and a strong determination to tell the story right. . . . He also proved to be an unusual interviewee in that...