War Trash

Author Ha Jin, born in the People's Republic where he lived until 1985, offers a unique perspective on Chinese culture, different from that of most "Chinese" novels written for a western audience. Setting the novel in a POW camp in South Korea from 1951 - 53, Ha Jin focuses on the differing attitudes the Chinese, Koreans, and Americans have toward home, country, and each other. Through Yu Yuan, a young soldier from the Chinese Communist army, Ha Jin shows how differently this young man sees his life and his obligations but how similarly he values friendship, justice, honor, and love. The only son of an elderly mother, Yu Yuan is a twenty-three-year-old member of the Chinese army when his unit enters Korea to aid the North Koreans in 1951, but the Chinese army, Yuan discovers, is not a "well-oiled machine," and there is no glory in battle. Their weapons are Russian, but no one can read the instruction manual. Lines of communication are so long that men can get orders to march in two different directions from two different officers on two different days, and no officer is allowed to make his own decisions. Yuan recognizes that his own life has no value. Wounded during a vividly described battle which inflicts atrocious casualties, Yuan is assigned to a POW camp, hiding his true identity because being captured is a crime in China. Abominable camp conditions, presented in stunning detail, become especially challenging for Chinese like Yuan and his mates, who want to return to their families on the mainland after the war. The Nationalist Chinese, allies of the US, have been given almost free rein within the camp to bully the mainland Chinese into going to Taiwan, instead of returning home. Water tortures, unremitting beatings, murders, denial of food, and the tattooing of anti-Communist slogans on the bellies of Communists are powerful "motivations" for refusing repatriation. Buffeted by fate, Yuan epitomizes the helpless individual at the mercy of a system in which individualism is not valued. He yearns to return home to his mother and fiancee with some sense of honor, and does not think about freedom, which he has never known. Ha Jin's writing is efficient and exact, his narrative revealing stories of horrific battles, constant privation, and abusive behavior by Nationalist Chinese, mainland Chinese officers, and Americans. A strong novel which emphasizes culture more than individuals, War Trash lacks a love story which sometimes unites other war novels, but it remains fascinating and rewarding for readers interested in seeing how culture determines behavior. Mary Whipple

This important novel which masquerades as the memoir of the eponymous Yu Yuan, a Chinese POW and repatriate of the Korean conflict, may deceive you in its simplicity. It is anything but simple. There are no clear cut lines drawn, no obvious "good" or "evil" characters portrayed here. The reader is only made painfully aware of the complex politics of waging war and its profound influences on the common soldiers, the everyman, the "war trash" of this novel's title. Ha Jin evokes a visceral hatred of war itself simply by revealing one human being's struggle in its midst. Yu Yuan faces many challenges as an English speaking Chinese POW, who yearns for his fiancée and old mother back on the mainland. Ha drags the reader through each of his hero's agonizing dilemmas only to release her with the infused notion that perhaps none of Yu's choices were made by him but, contrarily, for him. I recommend this book wholeheartedly, not just to anyone who might deplore war and its odious affects, nor just to the "everyman" it documents, but also to those who would presume to wage war even though some of those individuals may not particularly care to read books.

After finishing this book, I feel finally released from the hellish nonexistence of POW life. This novel is almost unbearable in its grim, relentless depiction of the thousands of men held captive for years in Korea as they awaited the results of endless negotiations on their fates. Although their lives are individualized by the novel's narrator, Yu Yuan, an English-speaking graduate of the prestigious Huangpu Military Academy of Nationalist China, these POWs are nothing more than pawns in a geopolitical power struggle between Maoist mainland China and Nationalist China (and the U.S), represented by Chang-kai-shek and Taiwan. In the long run, no one really cares much about these thousands of displaced souls. And Yu Yuan, shifting loyalties in a dangerous but practical attempt to stay alive, finds himself trying to return to what life he had in mainland China: his old mother (he was an only child), and his fiance, who he misses terribly. But what Yu Yuan struggles to return to proves to be an illusion. Through Yu Yuan's eyes we see the corrosive effects of war, and the utter loss of identity and of meaning it produces. Although such themes have been voiced many times before in many other novels, War Trash is unique in portraying this historic period, the Korean War, and in its single-minded focus through the eyes of its all-too-human narrator.

My god, I would have thought that a front-page review in The NYT's Book Review would have made this book a bestseller, but something is wrong with the universe. This is one of the most moving, compelling, finely-wrought works of literature I have ever read, as important as any major work of American fiction of the last 10 years. Ha Jin's novel uses the flat, subdued voice of an everyman (in this case, a Chinese POW) to explore the themes of nationalism, war, torture, survival, political relations and most of all family. The book's modest style helps make it more than ambitious, but critical. Most of all, this is an inredibly readable book, not self-conscious or fancy, but as urgent as a letter from a missing member of your own family. I urge you to read it today and remember why you started reading novels in the first place.