War Trash

Ha Jin's novel "War Trash" (2004) is cast in the form of memoir written by the 73 year old Yu Yuan recounting his experiences nearly 50 years earlier as a Chinese soldier and POW in Korea. The fictitious memoirist is a man of my own age. I could understand his desire to reflect on the momentous events of his younger life. A lifelong resident of mainland China, Yu writes his memoirs while visiting his daughter, her husband, and two grandchildren in Atlanta, Georgia. He notes that at his age he "won't be coming to the States again." He writes in English, a language he began to learn at the age of 14, and tells his story "in a documentary fashion to preserve historical accuracy." Yu regards his memoir as "the only gift a poor man like me can bequeath his American grandchildren."Yu was a graduate of the Huangpu Military Academy in China and his student years overlapped the Nationalists and the Communists. He was sent to Korea as part of the Chinese invasion, leaving behind an aged mother and a fiancee. His unit was decimated by the Americans and Yu suffers a severe leg wound. He recovers the use of his leg thanks to the work of a American woman physician, Dr. Greene. Yu is then sent to a variety of prison camps. His memoir describes the harsh life of the camps with among other things the heavy tension between the nationalist and the communist Chinese and the interrelationship with their American captors. Yu is a bookish young man and his skills in English are put to use as an interpreter. He is pulled throughout by both the nationalists and the communists. Yu is not ideologically inclined and wants in his heart only to go home to take care of his mother and marry his sweetheart.Ha Jin succeeds in giving the tone of a memoir to his novel. He gives an extensive bibliography of sources he consulted for information about the Korean War and about the treatment of POWs. While the depiction of the war is convincing, the focus is on Yu and on his detachment from the competing groups and from the brutality around him. Although not religious, Yu is shown as a reader of the Bible which he says improves his English. The only Biblical book mentioned by name is Ecclesiastes with its emphasis on change and on the shortness of human life.Yu has two formative experiences which he wishes to explain to his grandchildren and which pervade his memoir. The first involves a tattoo which he received on his belly against his will from the nationalist Chinese. It consists of a standard four-letter American obscenity followed by a reference to communism, which later becomes changed for prudential reasons to keep the obscenity and to remove the letters in the word "Communists" with the exception of the "U" and the "S". Much of the memoir explains the story of the tattoo Yu has carried with him through life.The second experience involves Yu's relationship with Dr. Greene, the American physician who cured his leg and whom he never sees again. Yu has kept the memory of Dr. Greene and it forms what he sees as the value of life and of his hopes for his young grandson. It is critical to the memoir and prevents Yu's understanding of life from descending into only existentialism or individuality. Yu reflects:"I cannot explain in detail to my son and daughter -in-law why I often urge Bobby to think of becoming a doctor, because the story would involve too much horror and pain. In brief, this desire of mine has been bred by the wasted lives I saw in Korea and China. Doctors and nurses follow a different set of ethics, which enables them to transcend political nonsense and man-made enmity and to act with compassion and human decency.""War Trash" has a thick, complex texture with many characters and places. It invites reflection and slow, careful reading. Yu writes at the conclusion of his memoir of his relationship to his captors and fellow POWs: "In the depths of my being, I have never been one of them. I have just written what I experienced." The book tells the story of a war and of a person.Robin Friedman

I was attracted to Ha Jin’s War Trash by virtue of it being a tale built around the so-called Forgotten War, what Americans refereed to as The Korean Conflict and by the Chinese as The War against American Imperialism in Korea. Its narrator, Yu Yuan, was a low level officer among the 300,000 Chinese ‘Volunteers’ sent to Korea by Mao Ze Dong; a war stalled but ironically not yet officially resolved.I had made the classification Korean War Veteran by being drafted 3 months before the military ended that classification. The conflict was over but a colleague out of my basic training company sent that way lost his legs when unfortunately out of the bunker or trench at the 38th parallel when a mortar landed; a common occurrence launched by both side to pass away the boring hours across the demilitarized zone. Nothing about that conflict quite fit the usual War Story and the same is clearly true with Yu Yuan’s narrative.His story is that of one of many captured troops who spent years in a POW camp run by the Americans or South Koreans on the outside but by its Inmate Society within. Yu Yuan captivity differed in that he was bilingual and therefore useful to both sides. It is written as a nonfiction account by an elderly Chinese man recalling his life and so genially offered that I had to keep doing the math to realize that he could not be the author but a fictitious creation. Ha Jin was born after the war, son of a military man, and one thinks, Ah’ his father’s story beneath but it is larger than that by far, a capsule of the historical forces unleashed by the Chinese civil war and the ideological battles rampant in the early twentieth century and the Leninist role of the Communist Party – powerful themes that settle together when finally one comes to understand the title War Trash.A slowly building engrossing tale.

I had to read this book for my book group and to be honest I had to force myself to read a certain number of pages every day just to get through it. Rarely have I read a book that I find so hard to enjoy that I struggle to find any redeeming features but sadly this is one. The gratuitous use of the F-word on the first page irritated me (and I'm not a prude by any stretch!). Unusually - for me - I even skipped some of the really tedious bits in the middle as the format of the chapters was such that if you read the first couple of paragraphs and then the last couple you got the gist of what had happened.Simplified, this book is about the Korean war and follows the tale of a Chinese soldier through a little fighting and then various internment camps as he vacillates wildly about which side says he's on, not wanting to upset the communists nor the nationalists, not wanting to end up in Taiwan and wishing to go back to his mother and fiancee in China once the war is over. Some of the torture makes uncomfortable reading but I really didn't much care about the characters and learnt little more about the Korean war than I already knew.This is a reasonably well known book by an acclaimed author but I think (hope!) his other better known writing is more enjoyable. I'm not quite sure for whom he was writing this and what audience enjoyed it; the view of the varied members of our book group was that it wasn't a great read.One advantage: I only bought a second-hand copy from Amazon at 1p + £2.80 p&p so at least I didn't pay the full price for a new copy..... my copy is off to the local charity shop in the new year!

A Chinese soldier, Yu Yuan, is sent to Korea in order to help the communist side in the war. He is captured by the Western powers and becomes a prisoner of war (POW). Because he speaks a bit of English, he gets a privileged position inside all the POW camps where he is sent to. In fact, all those camps are secretly controlled by members of the monolithic Communist Party.The POWs are bombarded by propaganda from the Left and the Right. Yu Yuan has to make a crucial choice when he will be freed: go to the communist mainland where his family and girlfriend live or to nationalist China or to a third country?On the mainland, he will be considered as an anti-communist and a traitor; but, what about his family, if he doesn't go home?This book is a brilliant anti-war novel with brutal war crimes on both sides, where soldiers are considered simply as cannon fodder in the hands of those in power at the Right and the Left. But, it is also a strong meditation on the fate of the intellectual, the independent free mind, who has to choose a side in a monstrous conflict: a choice between life and death, not only for himself, but for his whole family.Not to be missed.

I was disappointed with the book; it went on endlessly about life in prison and by the end of it I thought I too was in a prison. In my experience it did not connect consistently with the human side, with meaningful, recognisable human feelings. But I can understand that for many people that lack of connection was the whole point: The point being to show the deep horror of communism; it also showed the wickedness underlying the self-righteous attitude of capitalist powers who may well have good reason to defend the virtues of democracy, but easily forget that this does not mean that what democracy does is invariably better than the nasty inhuman work of those they oppose.I felt a brief glimpse of the human dimension in the chapter when the main character was being treated by doctor Green. She brought into the narrative something fresh and free and beautiful. She understood China at a deeper level and through here presence, as depicted in the narrative, we could see and feel the presence of the human dimension which contrasted with the brutality, the dark forces at work on both sides of the war. Her presence in the narrative helps the reader see the entire situation from a new and refreshing perspective. The unfortunate thing, I felt, is that we soon lose sight of Dr. Green. She disappears from the narrative and is only once touched upon in later chapters. The rest is a dark grey world of days of confinement in a ruthless world. I think it is most interesting from a historical perspective: I now have some insight into what that war stood for in socio-historical terms. But as a piece of literature it falls short of the mark.

Excellent read, As this was happening during my time in the Far East it was most interesting to read about the war from the other side and to hear about the callous way in which the US treated their prisoners! it was areal eye opener.