Mark your calendars for Sunday February 22nd at 2:00pm. The Pleasanton Library will feature guest speaker WWII POW Eddie Fung.

The Adventures of Eddie Fung tells the story of the only Chinese American soldier ever to be captured by the Japanese during World War II and 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, Eddie recalls how he, a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco 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 civilian 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.

Based on 75 hours of oral history interviews, the book is lovingly edited by Judy Yung, Professor Emerita of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and author of the acclaimed Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco.

“A remarkable chronicle of a boy from Chinatown who in his journey through life acquires a wealth of insight and wisdom.”

--Professor Franklin Ng, California State University, Fresno