BOOK REVIEW / MEMOIR : An Unshakable Soul--Even After Years at Hard Labor : BITTER WINDS A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag, <i> by Harry Wu and Carolyn Wakeman</i> ; John Wiley & Sons, $22.95, 290 pages

Stoop labor in the fields was the most desirable work assignment in the slave labor camps of the People’s Republic of China during the ‘50s. In “Bitter Winds,” Harry Wu’s memoir of his 19-year ordeal as a “thought criminal,” Wu explains why.

“While working in the irrigation ditches one morning, one of my squad members discovered a hole in the canal bank and called for my help,” he writes. “I grew excited, hoping it might lead to a rat’s nest full of stored rice and corn and wheat. . . . That would be a fortune.”

As Wu tells us in “Bitter Wind,” he was arrested on the day after his graduation from college in 1960 and condemned to an open-ended sentence of “re-education through labor.”

His crime? Wu, a banker’s son from a middle-class family in Shanghai, was cursed with an independent spirit, an insistently curious mind, and a love of freedom that made it impossible to pay obeisance to the revolution with sufficient fervor to satisfy the cadres of the Communist Party.

“I know you are very tough, very stubborn,” Wu’s father warned his son after the Communists came to power in China, “but this time you must also be very careful.”

Unhappily, but perhaps inevitably, we see that Wu was never careful enough. Even as a starved and tortured prisoner within the innermost circle of the Chinese gulag, his spirit was unbroken--at one point, Wu buried a copy of “Les Miserables” rather than turn over his cache of “reactionary” literature for burning by the Red Guard, and he ended up in a coffin-like “confinement cell” for the audacious crime of writing a letter of protest to Mao Zedong.

The party demanded confession as the price of mercy, but Wu allows us to understand that no degree of self-abasement was great enough, no betrayal was complete enough, to satisfy his captors. The prison system was designed to eradicate every memory, to sever every link to friends and family, and to create a “new socialist person” whose only concern was blind service to the state.

“You must begin with your father and describe how he has betrayed and exploited the working class,” Wu was told by his police interrogators at the outset of his long confinement. “That way you can show that you want to become a true fighter for communism.”

“Bitter Winds” deserves to be compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” as an achingly intimate account of what happened to millions of innocent men and women in the secret penal realm of the People’s Republic. And there’s a strong dose of Kafka and Orwell in Wu’s tales of a world so twisted by revolutionary ardor that every decent human impulse became a crime.

“Suddenly the traditional practice of foot-binding came to my mind,” he writes of a bitter revelation that came to him in his darkest hour. “We have switched to head-binding, I thought. . . That’s why they arrested me. That’s why they want to change me.”

Wu’s book includes his own precise and damning testimony about the crimes committed against “thought prisoners” by the Communist regime. Beatings and executions were commonplace--one prisoner was summarily shot at a “struggle meeting,” and then his brains were scooped out and eaten. Wu describes the brutal forced-feeding that he endured when he lost his appetite while in solitary confinement.

“The Party and the government do not fear your threat of suicide,” said a police captain as a rubber hose forced through Wu’s nose and down his throat--and one is reminded of a particularly vile and nightmarish manifestation of the Red Queen.

What makes “Bitter Winds” so memorable, however, is not merely its meticulous documentation of the indignities and outrages practiced upon the Chinese people by an authoritarian regime. Rather, Wu shares with us the secret moments of life in the gulag, the hidden encounters that allowed a man such as Wu to survive the daily torment of mind and body for nearly 20 years, the subtle acts of courage and heroism by which some prisoners rescued themselves and some prisoners rescued their fellows.

Wu describes, for example, his curious marriage of convenience to a fellow prisoner, a woman whose crime was a relationship with an American who defected to China after the Korean War--Wu and his wife lived together in a cave near the coal mine where they both labored, and they forged a tender bond not so much of love but of shared affliction.

Perhaps the most poignant story in “Bitter Winds” focuses on a prisoner named Lu, a man for whom forbidden homoerotic encounters with his fellow prisoners became a passion and then, literally, a matter of life and death. So frank is Wu in telling Lu’s story that he gives us the very moment when Wu himself, after declining Lu’s sexual overtures, makes a heartfelt but unsuccessful effort to entice Lu out of a suicidal despair.

“Come, put your arms around me,” Wu finally said to Lu, but too late to save his life.

Today, Harry Wu lives and works in the United States--he’s a scholar-in-residence at Stanford University--and “Bitter Winds” is the saga of a man whom history tried and failed to break: “I had met the king of hell, but he was not ready for me,” Wu writes of a coal-mine accident that nearly killed him--but his words are a suitable epigram for his remarkable book.