Entry into a foreign war under false pretenses, questionable command decisions, too few troops, inadequate supplies and harrowing abuse of war prisoners. Sound familiar? It’s all part of Ha Jin’s recent novel War Trash, set in 1951 during the Korean War. The novel’s title refers specifically to North Korean and Chinese POWs held by the US; however by the end of the story told by Yu Yuan, a kind, thoughtful, ultimately apolitical Chinese Communist held in one of the US camps, the message is clear that all soldiers in wars fought for uncertain and unprincipled reasons are expendable Awar trash to those who send them to fight. The book is a sad and timely read.
The novel’s narrator is 73 year old Yu Yuan, a retired English teacher who lives in mainland China. One of Yu Yuan’s children lives in the US and Yu Yuan begins writing a chronicle of his experience fighting as part of the Chinese Avolunteer people’s army in Korea, and as a POW in a US run camp, while he is in the US visiting his child and grandchildren. He characterizes the memoir as the Aonly gift a poor man like me can bequeath his American grandchildren. Yu Yuan pledges to write Ain a documentary manner to preserve historical accuracy. This results in a strangely stilted writing style, and abominable dialogue, yet the overall effect of the first person chronicle of events is gripping and the novel brims with emotion in spite of the methodical documentary style.
Yu Yuan recounts that he was a cadet in the Chinese Nationalist military academy at the time of the Chinese revolution. He welcomes the revolution for pragmatic reasons. He writes, AI felt grateful to the Communists, who seemed finally to have brought peace to our war battered land. This soon changes when he is conscripted to fight in Korea as part of the AVolunteer People’s Army, cynically characterized as such by the Chinese to avoid all-out war with the US.
The Chinese forces sent to Korea are poorly equipped and subject to distant command decisions that make little sense in the battlefield. The inevitable result is a large loss of soldiers, both in battle and to starvation, illness and fatigue. Yu Yuan survives months of terrifying experiences as a soldier, including witnessing the horrific deaths of his friends and colleagues, only to be taken as a POW. He is sent, with shrapnel crippling one of his legs, to a US POW camp. Upon arrival at the camp, Yu Yuan is cared for by a compassionate American female doctor.
She speaks some Chinese and he speaks some English. They establish a friendship and Yu Yuan tells us when he begins his memoir that he wants his grandchildren to become doctors, not so that they can Awallow in wealth, but because for five decades he has believed in the nobility of the medical profession because Adoctors 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.
Following his stay in the camp hospital, Yu Yuan is housed in a US run camp with thousands of prisoners, including Chinese Communists such as himself and Chinese Nationalists. While diplomats negotiate regarding the prisoners’ status, the camp becomes a war zone between the well-organized Communists and Nationalists, with a key battle between the two being to which country, Taiwan or Mainland China, each prisoner will choose to be re-patriated. This poses a classic Hobson’s choice for prisoners such as Yu Yuan. Taiwan offers the prospect of more freedom but also the risk of being tried for being a Communist. Repatriation to Mainland China may mean life as a political pariah because the Communist soldiers all signed statements before Avolunteering that they would die for their country. Yu Yuan’s decision is guided by his overriding desire to return to Mainland China not for political reasons, but to take care of his mother and to marry his fiancee.
The clashes between the prisoners in the camps are gruesome, including the public disemboweling of a Communist by a Nationalist as an example of what will happen to prisoners who opt to be repatriated to Mainland China. Yu Yuan is subject to brutality in the form of a forced tatoo reading AFuck Communism intended to mark him upon return to China as a traitor.
He nevertheless remains allied with the Communist faction because of his resolve to return to his family. As the months wear on and the violence between the two factions continues, Yu Yuan becomes increasingly disillusioned with the zealotry and dogma of his colleagues noting that Athere was a kind of religious fervor in some of these men, who were capable of laying down their lives for an idea.
Yu Yuan at times admires the dedication of men who put their lives toward a larger cause, something he refers to as the Amultiplier effect of using one’s life to create a greater force by being part of a movement, while also recognizing that much of the Communist Amovement has nothing to do with improving people’s lives. He describes his ambivalence about a skirmish where the Communists triumph in flying a red flag over the camp: AI was ambivalent about the attempt to reseize the flag. On the one hand, I admired the courage our men had displayed, and in a way I’d been awestruck by their passion and bravery which I have to admit I didn’t show. On the other hand, I doubted whether it was worth losing a man’s life for the sake of a flag, which symbolic as it might be, was just a piece of nylon cloth.
Yu Yuan dispassionately describes both the brutality and humanity in the camp, as well as his own role in making always pragmatic decisions toward achieving his goal of returning to his family. His conclusion, embodied in his wish that his grandchildren become doctors, is that war and its aftermath are fundamentally incongruent with basic human values. He writes, AWithout such obliteration of human particularities, how could one fight mercilessly? When a general evaluates the outcome of a battle he thinks in numbersBhow many casualties the enemy has suffered in comparison with the losses of his own army. The larger a victory is, the more people have been turned into numbers. This is the crime of war: it reduces real human beings to abstract numbers.
War Trash is not a cheerful post-election read and the message is not a new one. It is nevertheless worthwhile and mesmerizing in its spare, elegant story-telling prose. The book’s strong anti-war, humanitarian message resonates today as lives continue to be lost In Iraq, without meaning or reason, while the distant command in Washington speaks only in abstract numbers and fervent platitudes about impending victory.
