35 Years After His Capture, American Korean War Veteran Still Calls China Home

“Life is never on an even keel,” said American Korean War veteran James Veneris, puffing on a Chinese cigarette.

The 66-year-old Pennsylvania native spoke from experience, having endured personal tragedy and political upheavals in the 35 years since he chose to make China his home after his capture in the war.

Veneris is one of about 20 American and other U.N. soldiers who were taken prisoner in Korea and chose to settle in China after the 1953 armistice.

Most drifted back over the years, but Veneris stayed on, spending more than three decades in this quiet city, the capital of Shandong province in east China.

“I was captured at a roadblock on Nov. 28, 1950,” he said. “I’ll never forget that day.”

That was two days after Communist Chinese troops came to the aid of their North Korean allies in the war against the U.S.-backed South. He was 28 and had been in Korea for less than a month.

“I was looking for my unit,” he explained.

Prisoner for 3 Years

He spent three years in Chinese-run prison camps in North Korea, where he says his treatment was good. “If they hadn’t treated us well, I wouldn’t have come here,” he said.

“I’m no turncoat. I fought in World War II. I wanted peace and just didn’t think we should have been in Korea.

“I’m not a Communist. I’m a Democrat,” he said. “I voted for Harry Truman.”

Veneris hails from Vandergrift, a small town not far from Pittsburgh. His black hair has turned white, and he is better known by his Chinese nickname--Lao Wen, or “Old Temperate”--perhaps the quality that helped him endure some of the most chaotic years of China’s modern history.

He worked at various jobs--from bartender to boilermaker--before he volunteered to fight in Korea.

When he first arrived in Jinan he was a lathe operator in a paper factory.

At the onset of the Cultural Revolution, a decade of left-wing inspired chaos that began in 1966, he hauled carts of scrap cloth for making pulp--a job he held for 10 years.

“The Cultural Revolution was a mistake from the very beginning,” he said.

But he tempers his criticism, saying it made him physically stronger and deepened his understanding of his fellow workers.

“You have to sweat together to think together,” he said.

It was during those years that he was divorced from his second wife--his first died of tuberculosis. He married again, and his third and current wife has multiple sclerosis.

“The worst years were 1959 to 1961, when there were severe food shortages,” he said.

That was brought on by Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” a misguided plan to promote rapid economic growth that nearly crippled the economy.

“Everyone was so thin, they didn’t have enough to eat,” he said. “They would work for 10 minutes and then rest.”

Praise for China Today

Veneris has only praise for the China he sees now. He is better off as an English teacher at Shandong University, and he hails China’s economic strides under reforms led by leader Deng Xiaoping.

“I’m very confident this (the reforms) will succeed. I want to be part of it and still be an American,” he said.

He carries pictures of Deng along with Mao and his two children by his second wife in his wallet.

Veneris, who holds an American passport, has returned to the United States twice since 1976, a sign of the vast improvement in Sino-American relations.

Had he returned earlier--when China was still the enemy--his reception might have been less welcome.

Now all that is history.

“China is my second home,” he said. “I think Americans can accept this. The United States was built by immigrants. They left their homes and adopted America.”