War Trash

I am a big fan of Ha Jin's work, and this book does not disappoint.

The book covers a different side to life in the PRC, that of those soldiers who fought in the Korean War. Yuan is a young Nationalist cadet who is sent to Korea by the Communists to fight the South Koreans and their American allies. Woefully ill-equipped, many Chinese are taken prisoner, so most of the action takes place in the P.O.W. camps. The prisoners live on a precarious cliff as those higher up argue as to what is to be done with the P.O.W.'s on both sides. The atrocities of war are all too realistic, with young, inexperienced troops sent into battle lacking the necessary equipment. Victory at any cost.

The inner workings of camp life are well-described, show more especially the cultural and ideological clash between the Americans and the Chinese prisoners. This is clearest in the wake of the camp commandant, which his soldiers take as a personal attack on his beloved superior, but which Yuan remarks that if the tables were turned would be seen as an attack on China. The struggle between the individual and the collective is strong, Yuan is not an ideological man, but he knows that the only way to get back to his mother and fiancee is to fall in with the Communists. The prisoners, both the North Koreans and Chinese, are caught between the rival political factions. Many don't know want to go back, especially as their being captured will be seen as a total failure. This reminds me of my Grandfather telling us about prisoner negotiations at the end of WW2 - getting British boys back, but knowing that the fate of those being sent back to the East would be bleak.

As a reader, it was Yuan's openness that made me keep turning pages. He weighed up both sides, found both wanting, but didn't lose sight on his ultimate objective of getting home. show less

This is the story of Yu Yuan's experience as a Chinese prisoner of war during the Korean War, as told by him as an old man. Yu Yuan had been a student at a military academy suspected by Mao's army of being sympathetic to the Nationalists. He, along with other students, were placed into certain "disposable" units. Yu Yuan's unit was ordered to Korea to assist the North Koreans as "volunteers", rather than regular army. Poorly equipped, supplied, and trained, most of these soldiers were fairly soon killed or captured. Yu Yuan was captured, and spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp.

The book provides an insider's view of the society, culture and daily life of a prison camp. A hierarchy develops, with those at the top relieved from show more most of the drudgery and better provided for, not as a result of anything the captors did, but as a result of the actions of those of lesser status in the camp. Yu Yuan, because he is fluent in English, straddles both elements of the prison society.

Through-out their time in the camp, the prisoners know they will have to choose between being repatriated to mainland China or opting for Taiwan when the war ends and they are released. Those who have already chosen Taiwan are presented as thugs, and pressure the others to make the same choice, sometimes violently and brutally. Yu Yuan can't decide: he is not a Communist, but wants to return to his family and fiancee, who he knows he will never see if he chooses Taiwan. On the other hand, he knows that if he chooses mainland China, he will be under suspicion for the rest of his life. He may even be charged criminally for treason, since it was drilled into him, and other soldiers, that they must never surrender, but die before being captured.

This book is well-written and informative. Ha Jin portrays the Chinese soldiers with what I believe is an accurate characterization of the values instilled in them by the government. At the same time, he has created real people, with real and individual internal conflicts. show less

“Who can bear the weight of a war?â€? asks Yu Yuan. “To make witness is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not appropriate them.â€?

Yu has borne such weight for fifty years. Conscripted by the then newly-founded Chinese Communist Party into fighting in Korea, captured and thrown into a POW camp, he became caught between allegiances, his fate determined by warring political ideologues who viewed his skills as an English translator as a tool for their own ends.

Ha Jin’s novel, War Trash, is a most unsettling book; a fictional memoir so seamless and genuine it reads as non-fiction. Fusing violent show more history and glowing imagination, written in the first-person style of a man translating his Chinese thoughts into English phrases, War Trash is so finely hued, so real, it takes one’s breath away.

Yu, now an elderly teacher writing his account “in a documentary manner so as to preserve historical accuracy,â€? is hardly a vibrant character. A natural sceptic, Yu is an unassuming man whose only wish during his internment was to return to China.

Life as a POW is not forgiving to those who would remain neutral, as the politics of prisoners serve to form a dangerous microcosm of battling belief systems. Pro-Nationalists treat Communist Party members as traitors to China, dealing out horrific brutalities to loyalists of Mao’s philosophy.

The Communists, however, judge their principles more important than the safety and security of their soldiers, their leaders fixated on propaganda and grabbing headlines. Yu witnesses scores of his comrades slaughtered in tragic prison uprisings designed to promote ideology, fuelling Yu’s reflection that “war was an enormous furnace fed by the bodies of soldiers.â€?

Jin, National Book Award winner for his novel The Waiting, has fashioned a delicate novel that functions on many levels. As moral allegory, War Trash serves as warning to those who blindly obey, realizing that the path to self-realization is best served by one’s own judgements, and not the dogma of others.

Likewise, as political commentary, the parallels to the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay scarcely need mentioning. When Yu comments on the Koreans’ hostility toward the Chinese, “To them we had come here only to protect China’s interests – by so doing, we couldn’t help but ruin their homes, fields, and livelihoods,â€? a more apt description of the current Iraq war there couldn’t be.

War Trash is not meant as polemic; it is a story first, told by a man whose mere survival speaks volumes to his courage. Like Thomas Keneally’s recent, unfairly ignored work The Tyrant’s Novel, it is a tale of man’s awakening to the world state, and his fight to make peace within himself when all about is chaos.

Completing Yu’s tale with a perfectly tuned atmosphere of sorrow, Jin writes an ending of haunting simplicity. “Do not take this to be an “our storyâ€?,â€? Yu writes. “I have just written what I experienced.â€? What Yu experienced was terrifying. What Jin presents is phenomenal. show less

In War Trash, Ha Jin tells the tale of Yu Yuan - a Chinese "volunteer" in the Korean War, who was captured and endured time in a POW camp. There he falls into the factional conflicts between the Communist and Nationalist Chinese groups, and the American guards but through all the privations and troubles he suffers he continues to hold onto the hope of his fiancée and mother back in China. A epilogue details life for the returnees after the Korean War and the various hardships they endured in spite of the difficulties the POWs endured in Korea.

Ha Jin's novel is fictional but it is historical fiction and though the protagonist and the other characters are fictional the events they are caught up in are based on historical ones, and show more through it Yu Yuan becomes a avatar for the Chinese soldiers who served in Korea and who, when captured, were cruelly toyed with by the superiors in the hopes of scoring political gains.

The novel powerfully explores the toll wartime experiences can take on a man and on his sense of humanity and decency and yet through it all, Yu Yuan endures everything - he demonstrates a "moving humanity" in the face of extreme inhumanity.

This is an excellent novel and explores a little-known side, especially in China today, to a war often pushed onto the side-lines by conflicts before and after it. show less

from James--

Outside of M.A.S.H. and little bit from an American History class, I don't have a lot of knowledge of the Korean War, especially from the Chinese perspective. This story is not told as a history of the conflict, but is the first-person account of a POW. Along the way, you get a little bit of the social and political background, but mostly it's Yu's struggle to thread the needle between the communist and the nationalist and, ultimately, his desire to get home. By coincidence, this is the second war novel I've read recently. The other covered the Vietnam era. It's not my usual genre, but I do think I've learned a little by stretching out.

Ha Jin is a Chinese immigrant and his writing style seems authentic, especially with a show more Chinese protagonist. As a non-native speaker, his language flows in interesting ways. One of my favorite lines: "We shook hands while he smiled awkwardly, as if he had a sensitive molar." Not a tooth ache, but a sensitive molar. It reads like a non-translated translation and is full of those types of turns-of-phrases.

I would recommend War Trash to anyone interested in war fiction, Korean or Taiwan history, or first-person narratives. show less

Jin's naïf-pedantic style worked well for etching the details of a sad, slow-motion love triangle in the empty, slow-moving world of pre-reform China in Waiting. It works less well for rendering the privations and intrigues of life in a Chinese POW camp in Korea in the fifties, with all the clever improvisational "Great Escape" and boy scout stuff, and the internal denunciations and counterdenunciations and weird machinations about who is gonna get repatriated to China and who to Taiwan, and reaching out across cultural lines for different kinds of interactions with the American captors (not idealized in a shit-eating way, though somehow it perpetually seems like something like that is about to break out and I was worried). It's a show more great, promising setting but Jin seems to just take you through an utterly plausible, utterly artless series of events and dilemmas as they may have happened to any individual real POW, with no attempt to spin them into a story, and also he has this didactic thing and so in combination it seems like he is constantly trying to teach you a lesson but keeps changing his mind about what that lesson is. show less

I read this just after reading Ha Jin's Ocean of Words, a book of stories about life in the Korean War. Moving from that -- many about life at the front -- to this full length novel about life as a prisoner of war during that conflict, was fairly seamless. The protagonist is a rarity -- an English speaking Chinese who was captured while fighting for the Communist Army trying to protect North Korea. The book covers the travails of the main character, Yu Yuan - aka Feng Yan - as he tries to survive, be insurgent, and decide his postwar fate.

The writing is solid and excellent. While comparisons to Joseph Heller and Hemingway would be too great, the 'war fiction-short sentence-flowing events which the soldier is powerless over' feel is show more ubiquitous. Especially poignant are the beginning and endings which add twists of relevancy and anguish to the already harsh story. Ha Jin is able to provide a believable, realistic account where neither the Communists or the Nationalists come out looking very good. show less