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War Trash: A novel |  |
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War Trash: A novel | |
Caught between the two is the narrator, an instinctively decent young man named Yu Yuan, a cadet at Huangpu Military Academy, the West Point of Nationalist China. Though on the losing side, he feels "grateful to the Communists, who seemed finally to have brought peace to our war-battered land." Because Yu speaks English, the communists permit him to complete his studies. He soon finds himself crossing the Yalu River with the 180th Division of the People's Volunteer Army. He leaves behind his widowed mother and his young fiancée, for both of whom he feels deeply and worriedly responsible.
The soldiers of the 180th Division are told to expect little resistance from the soft, spoiled Americans they will meet in combat. "At the mere sight of us, the Americans would go to their knees and surrender -- they were just pussycats." Poorly equipped with Soviet weapons they do not know how to use, incompetently led by Party hacks, the 180th soon encounters reality. Pounded by U.S. airpower and shattered by ferocious American ground attacks, the division is surrounded and destroyed. Thousands, including a grievously wounded Yu, are taken prisoner.
After surgery in an American hospital, Yu is sent to a large, American-run prisoner-of-war camp on Koje Island in the Sea of Japan near Pusan. "Inside the compound," Yu tells us, "my first impression was that I had returned to the Chinese Nationalist army: everywhere I turned, I saw people wearing the sun emblem of the Nationalist Party." These men, who are in control of the camp by American consent and through sheer force of numbers, are still loyal to Chiang Kai-shek. They plan to go to Taiwan after the war. The communists, many fewer in number, are determined to return to the motherland.
Each side competes fiercely for the loyalty of every new prisoner. Because of his value as an interpreter, Yu Yuan is a desirable prize. Though Yu is not a communist -- and realizes that he is likely to have an easier personal life in Taiwan than in a Maoist China that will always suspect his loyalty -- he opts for return to the mainland. His reasons are Confucian: An only child, he is the sole support of his old mother, and he also supposes that he must soon become a father as the result of a single night of lovemaking with his fiancée.
When he declines to join the Nationalist faction, its enforcers knock him over the head and, while he is unconscious, tattoo the English words "[Expletive] COMMUNISM" on his belly. Thus indelibly branded as an enemy of the people, Yu Yuan struggles to elude the fate that political zealots have designed for him. But in his insistence on being the captain of his soul, he fashions a destiny with which it might have been impossible to live had he not, in the end, been able to live with himself -- and with the obscene tattoo that is a constant reminder that what is written is written.
Reviewed by Charles McCarry
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics agree that War Trash, by the National Book Award-winning author, has an unusual tone. Yu’s methodical, even pedantic storytelling of the Chinese soldiers taken prisoner by U.N. forces struck some critics as dull; many complained of slow patches. However, several readers praised this very slowness. To them, Yu’s is the soft voice of a man who wants to record a painful past without sensationalism. The New York Times Book Review even called Yu "one of the most fully realized characters to emerge from the fictional world in years." War Trash, which was extensively researched, proved too academic for some tastes. For those unperturbed by its dryness, the novel offers a faithful account of a nearly forgotten time—one that may shed light on the events of our own.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Ha Jin, the author most recently of The Crazed (2002), has made exposing hidden facets of China's recent past his calling, and in this tour de force, he illuminates historical events that are as timely as they are shocking. Haunted by his Korean War experiences as a soldier in the Chinese army, Yu Yuan, 73, decides to commit his wracking memories to paper, and proves to be a remarkably sympathetic and compelling guide to a heretofore unknown circle of hell. Interned in an American POW camp after being seriously wounded, Yu Yuan is alarmed to discover that the Americans and Nationalist Chinese loyal to Chiang Kai-shek are forcing POWs to go to Taiwan upon their release instead of their homes in mainland China. The impetus is to weaken the communist base, but the result is the coalescence of a covert prisoners' resistance movement of great daring and ingenuity in spite of vicious divisiveness. As the captors seek to reduce the captives to "war trash" with brutal mind games and outright torture--and one can't help but think of the prisoner abuse scandals in Iraq--the prisoners respond by staging dramatic protests. Singled out because of his fluency in English, spiritual-minded Yu Yuan, intent on returning home to his widowed mother and fiancee, treads a knife's edge as translator and go-between. Ha Jin's taut drama of war, incarceration, coercion, and survival is galvanizing, and his ardently observant narrator is heroic in his grappling with the paradox of humankind's savagery and hunger for the divine. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“I am enthralled by Ha Jin’s work: he always presents moral conundrums within historical contexts; the frayed edges of humanity; the ways in which both the tenacious and hopeless survive. He is one of our most gifted and essential writers.” –Amy Tan
“This is more than a novel. It’s an historical document about a forgotten part of a forgotten war. No historian could bring to light this tale of interminable loneliness and suffering about Chinese prisoners during the Korean War as well as Ha Jin has.” –Robert D. Kaplan, author of Warrior Politics
“Ha Jin is one of the finest writers in America: subtle, huge-hearted, possessed of an utterly original, mind-altering vision of the world, and an exquisite, disciplined style. His work never fails to thrill me, and expand my ideas about life, and about the transformative powers of fiction.” –George Saunders
“Ha Jin’s historical novel about Chinese prisoners held during the Korean War couldn’t be more topical. In telling this story from the loser’s perspective, he has called upon all of his wonderful and impressive skills as a writer. He never shies away from the degradation of the prisoners, while at the time revealing small humanities that happen in even the most desperate of circumstances.” –Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
“Ha Jin’s stark, evocative prose transports us to a harrowing world we have never before seen and which we will not soon forget.” –Michael Shapiro, author of The Shadow in the Sun: A Korean Year of Love and Sorrow
“Ha Jin is emerging as a major figure in the literary interpretation of life in Communist China. War Trash shows how Chinese men trapped in POW camps in Korea endured cruelty, manipulation, and mind-boggling turns of fate. Still, under Ha Jin’s steady moral vision, their humanity, sympathy, and rationality remain apparent. In the end, the trampled ‘trash’ uplifts the reader.” –Perry Link, Professor of Chinese, Princeton University
编辑推荐 From Publishers Weekly
Jin (Waiting; The Crazed; etc.) applies his steady gaze and stripped-bare storytelling to the violence and horrifying political uncertainty of the Korean War in this brave, complex and politically timely work, the story of a reluctant soldier trying to survive a POW camp and reunite with his family. Armed with reams of research, the National Book Award winner aims to give readers a tale that is as much historical record as examination of personal struggle. After his division is decimated by superior American forces, Chinese "volunteer" Yu Yuan, an English-speaking clerical officer with a largely pragmatic loyalty to the Communists, rejects revolutionary martyrdom and submits to capture. In the POW camp, his ability to communicate with the Americans thrusts him to the center of a disturbingly bloody power struggle between two factions of Chinese prisoners: the pro-Nationalists, led in part by the sadistic Liu Tai-an, who publicly guts and dissects one of his enemies; and the pro-Communists, commanded by the coldly manipulative Pei Shan, who wants to use Yu to save his own political skin. An unofficial fighter in a foreign war, shameful in the eyes of his own government for his failure to die, Yu can only stand and watch as his dreams of seeing his mother and fiancée again are eviscerated in what increasingly looks like a meaningless conflict. The parallels with America's current war on terrorism are obvious, but Jin, himself an ex-soldier, is not trying to make a political statement. His gaze is unfiltered, camera-like, and the images he records are all the more powerful for their simple honesty. It is one of the enduring frustrations of Jin's work that powerful passages of description are interspersed with somewhat wooden dialogue, but the force of this story, painted with starkly melancholy longing, pulls the reader inexorably along.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Ha Jin's new novel is the fictional memoir of a Chinese People's Volunteer, dispatched by his government to fight for the Communist cause in the Korean War. Yu Yuan describes his ordeal after capture, when P.O.W.s in the prison camp have to make a wrenching choice: return to the mainland as disgraced captives, or leave their families and begin new lives in Taiwan. The subject is fascinating, but in execution the novel often seems burdened by voluminous research, and it strains dutifully to illustrate political truisms. In a prologue, Yuan claims to be telling his story in English because it is "the only gift a poor man like me can bequeath his American grandchildren." Ha Jin accurately reproduces the voice of a non-native speaker, but the labored prose is disappointing from an author whose previous work—"Waiting" and "Ocean of Words"—is notable for its vividness and its emotional precision.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From The Washington Post
The "war trash" of this hypnotic novel are Chinese soldiers who were taken prisoner by U.N. forces -- mainly American -- during the Korean War. Written in the modest, uninflected prose of a soldier's letter home, Ha Jin's story, a mixture of authentic historical detail and realistic invention, is a powerful work of the imagination whose psychic territory is not the hunger and humiliation of the prison camp but the haunted past that was the old, lost China and the mysterious future that is in the process of becoming Mao Zedong's chimerical new China.
Caught between the two is the narrator, an instinctively decent young man named Yu Yuan, a cadet at Huangpu Military Academy, the West Point of Nationalist China. Though on the losing side, he feels "grateful to the Communists, who seemed finally to have brought peace to our war-battered land." Because Yu speaks English, the communists permit him to complete his studies. He soon finds himself crossing the Yalu River with the 180th Division of the People's Volunteer Army. He leaves behind his widowed mother and his young fiancée, for both of whom he feels deeply and worriedly responsible.
The soldiers of the 180th Division are told to expect little resistance from the soft, spoiled Americans they will meet in combat. "At the mere sight of us, the Americans would go to their knees and surrender -- they were just pussycats." Poorly equipped with Soviet weapons they do not know how to use, incompetently led by Party hacks, the 180th soon encounters reality. Pounded by U.S. airpower and shattered by ferocious American ground attacks, the division is surrounded and destroyed. Thousands, including a grievously wounded Yu, are taken prisoner.
After surgery in an American hospital, Yu is sent to a large, American-run prisoner-of-war camp on Koje Island in the Sea of Japan near Pusan. "Inside the compound," Yu tells us, "my first impression was that I had returned to the Chinese Nationalist army: everywhere I turned, I saw people wearing the sun emblem of the Nationalist Party." These men, who are in control of the camp by American consent and through sheer force of numbers, are still loyal to Chiang Kai-shek. They plan to go to Taiwan after the war. The communists, many fewer in number, are determined to return to the motherland.
Each side competes fiercely for the loyalty of every new prisoner. Because of his value as an interpreter, Yu Yuan is a desirable prize. Though Yu is not a communist -- and realizes that he is likely to have an easier personal life in Taiwan than in a Maoist China that will always suspect his loyalty -- he opts for return to the mainland. His reasons are Confucian: An only child, he is the sole support of his old mother, and he also supposes that he must soon become a father as the result of a single night of lovemaking with his fiancée.
When he declines to join the Nationalist faction, its enforcers knock him over the head and, while he is unconscious, tattoo the English words "[Expletive] COMMUNISM" on his belly. Thus indelibly branded as an enemy of the people, Yu Yuan struggles to elude the fate that political zealots have designed for him. But in his insistence on being the captain of his soul, he fashions a destiny with which it might have been impossible to live had he not, in the end, been able to live with himself -- and with the obscene tattoo that is a constant reminder that what is written is written.
Reviewed by Charles McCarry
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics agree that War Trash, by the National Book Award-winning author, has an unusual tone. Yu’s methodical, even pedantic storytelling of the Chinese soldiers taken prisoner by U.N. forces struck some critics as dull; many complained of slow patches. However, several readers praised this very slowness. To them, Yu’s is the soft voice of a man who wants to record a painful past without sensationalism. The New York Times Book Review even called Yu "one of the most fully realized characters to emerge from the fictional world in years." War Trash, which was extensively researched, proved too academic for some tastes. For those unperturbed by its dryness, the novel offers a faithful account of a nearly forgotten time—one that may shed light on the events of our own.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Ha Jin, the author most recently of The Crazed (2002), has made exposing hidden facets of China's recent past his calling, and in this tour de force, he illuminates historical events that are as timely as they are shocking. Haunted by his Korean War experiences as a soldier in the Chinese army, Yu Yuan, 73, decides to commit his wracking memories to paper, and proves to be a remarkably sympathetic and compelling guide to a heretofore unknown circle of hell. Interned in an American POW camp after being seriously wounded, Yu Yuan is alarmed to discover that the Americans and Nationalist Chinese loyal to Chiang Kai-shek are forcing POWs to go to Taiwan upon their release instead of their homes in mainland China. The impetus is to weaken the communist base, but the result is the coalescence of a covert prisoners' resistance movement of great daring and ingenuity in spite of vicious divisiveness. As the captors seek to reduce the captives to "war trash" with brutal mind games and outright torture--and one can't help but think of the prisoner abuse scandals in Iraq--the prisoners respond by staging dramatic protests. Singled out because of his fluency in English, spiritual-minded Yu Yuan, intent on returning home to his widowed mother and fiancee, treads a knife's edge as translator and go-between. Ha Jin's taut drama of war, incarceration, coercion, and survival is galvanizing, and his ardently observant narrator is heroic in his grappling with the paradox of humankind's savagery and hunger for the divine. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“I am enthralled by Ha Jin’s work: he always presents moral conundrums within historical contexts; the frayed edges of humanity; the ways in which both the tenacious and hopeless survive. He is one of our most gifted and essential writers.” –Amy Tan
“This is more than a novel. It’s an historical document about a forgotten part of a forgotten war. No historian could bring to light this tale of interminable loneliness and suffering about Chinese prisoners during the Korean War as well as Ha Jin has.” –Robert D. Kaplan, author of Warrior Politics
“Ha Jin is one of the finest writers in America: subtle, huge-hearted, possessed of an utterly original, mind-altering vision of the world, and an exquisite, disciplined style. His work never fails to thrill me, and expand my ideas about life, and about the transformative powers of fiction.” –George Saunders
“Ha Jin’s historical novel about Chinese prisoners held during the Korean War couldn’t be more topical. In telling this story from the loser’s perspective, he has called upon all of his wonderful and impressive skills as a writer. He never shies away from the degradation of the prisoners, while at the time revealing small humanities that happen in even the most desperate of circumstances.” –Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
“Ha Jin’s stark, evocative prose transports us to a harrowing world we have never before seen and which we will not soon forget.” –Michael Shapiro, author of The Shadow in the Sun: A Korean Year of Love and Sorrow
“Ha Jin is emerging as a major figure in the literary interpretation of life in Communist China. War Trash shows how Chinese men trapped in POW camps in Korea endured cruelty, manipulation, and mind-boggling turns of fate. Still, under Ha Jin’s steady moral vision, ... --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.
Review
“I am enthralled by Ha Jin’s work: he always presents moral conundrums within historical contexts; the frayed edges of humanity; the ways in which both the tenacious and hopeless survive. He is one of our most gifted and essential writers.” –Amy Tan
“This is more than a novel. It’s an historical document about a forgotten part of a forgotten war. No historian could bring to light this tale of interminable loneliness and suffering about Chinese prisoners during the Korean War as well as Ha Jin has.” –Robert D. Kaplan, author of Warrior Politics
“Ha Jin is one of the finest writers in America: subtle, huge-hearted, possessed of an utterly original, mind-altering vision of the world, and an exquisite, disciplined style. His work never fails to thrill me, and expand my ideas about life, and about the transformative powers of fiction.” –George Saunders
“Ha Jin’s historical novel about Chinese prisoners held during the Korean War couldn’t be more topical. In telling this story from the loser’s perspective, he has called upon all of his wonderful and impressive skills as a writer. He never shies away from the degradation of the prisoners, while at the time revealing small humanities that happen in even the most desperate of circumstances.” –Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
“Ha Jin’s stark, evocative prose transports us to a harrowing world we have never before seen and which we will not soon forget.” –Michael Shapiro, author of The Shadow in the Sun: A Korean Year of Love and Sorrow
“Ha Jin is emerging as a major figure in the literary interpretation of life in Communist China. War Trash shows how Chinese men trapped in POW camps in Korea endured cruelty, manipulation, and mind-boggling turns of fate. Still, under Ha Jin’s steady moral vision, their humanity, sympathy, and rationality remain apparent. In the end, the trampled ‘trash’ uplifts the reader.” –Perry Link, Professor of Chinese, Princeton University
