There’s a sad similarity in most of the war
novels I’ve read. Naive recruit goes to the war. Naive recruit fights. Naive recruit has to scramble to survive. Jaded veteran witnesses things he’d rather not see. There’s a lot of that vibe to Ha Jin’s novel War Trash. For connoisseurs of war novels, I suppose they can see through the sameness to the novel parts of these stories. I know I can do it with Science Fiction. But I’m not so good with this for war novels.
The plot is this: Yu Yuan is a former Nationalist conscripted into the Communist Army and sent to Korea. By former Nationalist, I mean he was enrolled at the military university because his family couldn’t afford to send him to another school. In Korea, his unit is under-trained, understaffed, and under-equipped. Very quickly, they are reduced to scrambling the countryside with no food. Instead of harassing the Americans and South Koreans, they are running from them. Soon he is captured.
This is where the book gets interesting. The prisoners of war aren’t uniformly united. Some profess allegiance to the Nationalist government in Taiwan. Some profess allegiance to the Communist government in Beijing. Of course, the U.S. gives a preference to the Nationalists. The Nationalists use whatever methods of coercion they to convince the other prisoners to agree to be repatriated to Taiwan rather than mainland China. Though not a Communist, Yu Yuan wishes to return to mainland China because he has a frail mother and a fiancé there.
Rather than siding with one group or another, Yu tries to avoid taking sides. He cooperates with whoever has power over him at the time, whether it’s the Nationalists in the main camp, or Commissar Pei in a later camp for Communist P.O.W.s. Consequently, no one trusts him very much and he constantly has to prove his loyalty.
To me, his vacillation is what makes him war trash to me. Not the fact that he allowed himself to be captured and didn’t throw himself on the American’s bayonets. The man rarely takes much of a stand at all.
There are also some interesting cultural differences between the prisoners of war here and, say, those in King Rat or the soldiers in All Quiet On The Western Front. In particular, the Chinese seem to be much more tuned in to leadership. Without the appointed leader, they fall back to rote. And they express relief, joy, and all sorts of other emotions when contact with their leaders is restored.
Anyway, this wasn’t a bad book. I’ll probably read more by Ha Jin, but I am learning I don’t think I want to read too many novels which are primarily about soldiers in wartime.
Title: War trash
Author: Ha Jin
Imprint / publisher: Vintage International / Random House
Format: Trade paperback
Publication date: 2004 (May 2005 in trade paperback)
Length: 352 p.
ISBN-10: 1-4000-7579-3
Subject: Korean War, 1950-1953 — Prisoners and prisons — Fiction
Subject: Korean War, 1950-1953 — Fiction
Subject: Chinese — Korea — Fiction
Subject: Prisoners of war — Fiction
Subject: Translators — Fiction
LC classification: PS3560.I6 W37 2005b
