The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History
The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War

Finally, two historians beam searchlights on another buried history of the Korean War. Monica Kim’s The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History and David Cheng Chang’s The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War are welcome arrivals to Korean War studies. By centering on prisoners of war, both historians make the novel argument that the Korean War was fought over not only territory but also human terrain.¹ After the tactical war stalemated by mid-1951, a new war commenced during the armistice talks: the war over the repatriation of POWs (the Chinese POWs, specifically, for Chang). In telling this story, Kim magnifies interrogation sites as “intimate encounter[s]” (3) of a “longer twentieth-century story of American imperial expansionist ambitions in Asia” (34), while Chang locates the “seeds of conflict among the Chinese prisoners [in the Korean War POW camps]” in the 1945–49 Chinese Civil...