Book Review: War Trash by Ha Jin (2004)

This Pulitzer-Prize finalist won the PEN/Faulkner Award for 2004. It's a very readable and, ultimately, moving fictional memoir of the Korean War from the perspective of a Chinese prisoner of war. The narrator, Yu Yuan, is a young student at a Nationalist military academy when the Communists seize power. As such, he's always under suspicion of counterrevolutionary sentiments. With the Korean War, Yuan is moved to the "volunteer" army and sent into the conflict. After his PLA unit is mostly wiped out, and after months of hiding out in the mountains, Yuan becomes a POW. The POW camps are divided into pro-Nationalist and pro-Communist factions. Yuan never really fits in with either side, but his knowledge of English (learned from a Christian missionary while he was a youth) makes him a valuable asset for both sides. Most of the novel recounts Yuan's experiences in the POW camps and the cruelties inflicted on the POW's, mostly by other POW's.

The issue for Chinese (and North Korean) POW's was repatriation. Yuan is pretty typical. He's not a Communist (neither in party membership nor in sympathies). But his elderly mother and fiance live in mainland China, and he has no reason to go to Taiwan. The Nationalists and the U.S. put pressure on the Chinese POW's to not repatriate. Meanwhile, the Communists fear that they will lose face if many POW's refuse to repatriate. What's interesting here is how these large-scale ideological conflicts put real (and also fictional) individuals under great pressure. Yuan goes from camp to camp, sometimes thrown in with the Nationalists, sometimes with the Communists, and must somehow find a way to survive and make it back to his mother and fiance . . . plot spoilers in the next paragraph.

The irony, of course, is at the end that Yuan's mother dies while he's in the camps, although he doesn't know that. And, because the Chinese Communist party treats repatriated POW's as traitors, his fiance will not marry him (or even see him again) once he returns. So what he's wanted for so long no longer exists. But, also ironically, Yuan's equivocations in the past do not harm him, either. The fact that he's not a member of the Communist party means that he's not treated as harshly as the party members who were captured.

This is one of those novels that really gets you in the last few pages. But this is also a pretty ambitious novel, a fictional war memoir, with many characters and a lot of thick description. The character Yuan starts, according to his account, as a naive young man; in early chapters, he cannot understand the motivations of those around him. His narrative ends with a great deal of wisdom and insight.

Definitely worth a read.