Review: War Trash by Ha Jin | Books | The Guardian

Review: War Trash by Ha Jin | Books | The Guardian




Fighting for Mao
Ha Jin's subject is fascinating, but linguistic glitches let him down in War Trash, says Julia Lovell


Julia Lovell

Sat 12 Nov 2005 12.12 AEDTFirst published on Sat 12 Nov 2005 12.12 AEDT




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War Trash
by Ha Jin
352pp, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99

Ha Jin's writing CV might reasonably leave any warm-blooded author near-nauseous with envy. Almost every piece of fiction he has published in the past decade has won a major prize in the US, including two PEN/Faulkner awards for his second novel, Waiting (1999), and for his fourth and most recent, War Trash. What makes his rapturous reception by the North American literary establishment all the more notable is the fact that English is not his first language; he was born and brought up in mainland China and joined the army as a teenager, before leaving to study in the US in 1985. In a publishing market in which translated fiction from China barely has an audience, Ha Jin has found his way into the hearts and bookcases of anglophone readers like no other Chinese-born novelist.

As a voice from communist China now accessibly resident in the US, his fiction is able to move between both Chinese and western literary cultures with unusual assurance and ease. His appeal does not stem exclusively from the fact that he writes in English, although being able to address readers directly, without the potentially flawed mediation of a translation, is undoubtedly a help. After living and writing in the west for much of the past two decades - gaining, in the process, a PhD in English from Brandeis - he also inevitably has a better technical grasp of what anglophone readers expect from a work of literary fiction than most of his peers still writing in China: in particular, a command of character, situation and psychological plausibility that is lacking in many contemporary mainland narratives.

Unsurprisingly for a non-native speaker of English, Ha Jin's novelistic voice still falls short of the absolute linguistic fluency that discriminating readers would also normally demand from literary fiction. Although his English is excellent for someone who spent the first 30-odd years of his life in China, and although his fourth novel is much better written than his third, neither is faultless. Perhaps because anglophone audiences know and expect so little of translated Chinese fiction - viewed at best as scarcely more than a source of pseudo-documentary information on China, at worst as clunky socialist realism - Ha Jin's periodic stylistic infelicities barely seem to register for criticism, even with his editors and those who have judged his novels so frequently prizeworthy. This is a shame, because Ha Jin has the insider's knowledge of China - of the secretive state-within-a-state that is the Chinese military - the political freedom to write about it and the instinct for character and story that could make him an exceptionally interesting novelist; what he continues to lack is the unfailing, sentence-by-sentence command of tone, and maybe the painstaking editorial input, that he needs to raise his game as an author.


Like Waiting and many of his best short stories, War Trash is set in the Chinese army. A former officer in the nationalist forces defeated by the communists in 1949, Yu Yuan is drafted into Mao's "volunteer" army to fight in Korea in 1951. Thanks to the incompetence of his generals, Yu is soon captured by the Americans and spends the remainder of his war in a succession of POW camps, struggling to survive the violent political conflict that erupts within the community of prisoners. With communist authority in China barely established, many of the POWs soon begin to revert to old nationalist loyalties, murdering or mutilating anyone who expresses loyalty to the mainland. Although less openly vicious than nationalist sympathisers, loyal communist officers demonstrate little more humanity towards their rank and file, readily sacrificing them in showy but futile acts of resistance against the Americans. When the prisoners are finally repatriated to China, they are condemned to spend the rest of their lives as "war trash", officially condemned for having let themselves be taken prisoner: "[W]e were all discharged dishonourably," Yu records, "we had become the dregs of society." The lucky ones are spurned by their former sweethearts and given menial jobs; the less fortunate are imprisoned as traitors or spies.

As a portrait of life in the camps, and a study in the corruption and hypocrisy of modern Chinese political culture, War Trash is unfailingly powerful. But Ha Jin's fourth novel is still scattered with linguistic glitches that compromise the reading experience. Too often, passages of dialogue read unidiomatically or like clumsy translations from the Chinese: "I'm not a meanie," Yu apologises to a soldier he has denied a cigarette; "My, a lot of meat the bird must have," one prisoner muses on the subject of turkeys; "I have to get a piece of your flesh today," an angry nationalist screams at Yu Yuan, "I don't believe we can't teach you how to behave!" Although the novel is sprinkled with a number of eerily striking images - a wound "festered with rings of maggots like a large white chrysanthemum" - elsewhere physical descriptions are either clichéd or simply awkward: teeth are gnashed, nostrils are flared, long faces are worn; Yu Yuan's head "expanded with a swoon"; a prison ship "shuddered without stopping".

Admiring reviewers in the US have already acclaimed War Trash as one of their books of the year, as "nearly perfect". While Ha Jin's dark, brutish subject matter is never less than fascinating, the language in which he tells it is still not nearly perfect enough. If he is to realise his full potential as a literary craftsman, he will have to sharpen up his linguistic act first.

· Julia Lovell's history of the Great Wall of China will be published next year by Atlantic