ABSTRACT
Although I had been studying the Korean War for more than thirty years, I was not prepared for the shock of seeing the big scar on the arm of Zhang Da, whom I met in April 1999 at his restaurant in Beijing. The scar was created by his taking a razor nearly fifty years ago to remove the slogan fan gong kang E—“Oppose the communists and resist Russia”—that had been tattooed on his upper arm in the first year of his captivity as a POW. To complicate the story, other Chinese POWs who later chose to go to Taiwan volunteered to be tattooed with the same slogan. But Zhang's was done against his will, violently by the pro-Taiwan POWs, to persuade him against returning to China. At the time, this struggle between the pro-Taiwan and pro-China POWs mimicked the unfinished Chinese civil war, which continued in the POW camps under the American command. This account of Chinese POWs in the Korean War suggests one among many Chinese perspectives that enlarge—especially for American readers—an appreciation of the human dimensions of war. But it is only one, and the suffering and cruelty of tattooing is small compared to the casualties and deaths suffered by soldiers in the heat of battle on all sides of the conflict. And it is smaller still than the human suffering caused by the collateral damage inflicted on Korean civilians throughout the war.
