Adams, Clarence. An American dream; the life of an African American soldier and POW who spent twelve years in Communist China.

ADAMS, Clarence. An American dream; the life of an African American soldier and POW who spent twelve years in Communist China. Della Adams & Lewis H. Carlson, eds. Univ. of Massachusetts Press. 155p. illus, notes, c2007 1-55849-595-1. $22.95. SA

For a long time, one of the more tantalizing mysteries of the Cold War was the fate of the 21 American soldiers who refused repatriation at the end of the Korean War, and who disappeared into new lives behind the Iron Curtain. Their action stood in sharp contrast to several hundred North Korean and Chinese POWS who resisted any attempt to return them to their homelands. Alternately vilified as turncoats or pitied as victims of "brainwashing," public awareness promptly consigned them to limbo after the war. Years later, when some of them began to trickle back, little notice was taken.

Their reasons for defecting varied: some were bedazzled by their captor's utopian ideology; others were restless adventurers; a few were common misfits. Sergeant Clarence Adams, however, had his own reasons. An African American raised in segregated Memphis, he boiled with resentment at the snubs and injustices of his younger years, and at the barbs he still encountered in the newly integrated US Army. His story is more than one of simple discontent, however. Adams was also genuinely curious about the Chinese claims of an open society of proletariat like himself, and he wondered how far he could advance himself in the land of his captors. The Chinese, it turned out, had no grand plan for their new emigres--they simply absorbed them. Those who wished just to earn a living were assigned jobs; those with more ambition were dispatched to universities and left to fend for themselves. Adams's struggles to learn Mandarin and study Chinese literature, and his efforts to fit into his new society, are the most interesting parts of this book. Equally interesting, though, is Adams himself. Never entirely the naive youth nor the victimized black citizen he claims to have been, he was above all an expert at looking out for himself. The greatest value of his story is his picture of Chinese society and how it works. Raymond Puffer, Ph.D., Historian (retired), Edwards AFB, CA

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