The highlight next week might well be Monday, Dec. 10 at 7:30PM, Capitola Book Café: Judy Yung & Eddie Fung, “The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War” I've been to a previous reading, they're both fun to listen to! A Chinese Cowboy, who would have thought!
"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 The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War, edited by Judy Yung, 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... 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." University of Washington Press.
For the first time in quite a while I went to a Poetry Santa Cruz reading again: John Balaban and Amber Cloverdale Sumrall. It doesn't look like Joe Stroud is willing to lead another workshop this spring, but the reading & meeting some of the usual suspects again last night reminded me how satisfying writing can be. After all, the PSC guys are nice enough to list me as an author on the Poetry Santa Cruz Website. Now, if I could only live up to that honor...
The highlight next week might well be Monday, Dec. 10 at 7:30PM, Capitola Book Café: Judy Yung & Eddie Fung, “The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War” I've been to a previous reading, they're both fun to listen to! A Chinese Cowboy, who would have thought!
"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 The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War, edited by Judy Yung, 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... 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." University of Washington Press.
