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War Trash Paperback – May 10, 2005
by Ha Jin (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars 99 ratings

Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, War Trash is Ha Jin’s most ambitious book to date





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Editorial Reviews

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
Review




“Powerfully moving. . . . Brilliant and original. . . . Timeless and universal. . . . Nearly perfect.” —Russell Banks, The New York Times Book Review



“A powerful work of the imagination.” —The Washington Post



“Startingly seductive.... A work of profound humanism.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review



“Haunting. . . . Deeply moving. . . . [Ha Jin] holds our attention like a whisper.” —The Christian Science Monitor


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Product details

Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (May 10, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400075793
ISBN-13: 978-1400075799
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Customer Reviews: 4.0 out of 5 stars99 customer ratings
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #228,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1605 in Military Historical Fiction
#3727 in War Fiction (Books)
#7953 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction




Customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
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Read reviews that mention
war trash korean war mainland china south korea chinese soldier chinese pow military academy pen faulkner commissar pei faulkner award work of fiction return to mainland chinese prisoners pow camp united states north korea huangpu military chinese pows young man human beings


Top Reviews

JustPlainBill
5.0 out of 5 stars Chinese POW in an American camp, an insider that is also the ultimate outsiderReviewed in the United States on June 12, 2018
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
East Asian history in the first half of the 20th century was much more complex than most Americans appreciate, and this includes the situation on the ground during the time that the Korean War was fought. This novel does a great job rolling up a number of those complexities into a single character, Yu Yuan, the narrator of this fictional memoir based on fact.

Yu Yuan is sent to North Korea with the Red Army to assist the Communists there. After a brief period of fighting, he is captured and sent to a UN/American POW camp. Due to the politics of the time, some bad luck, and a few of his own actions and decisions, he finds himself in the odd role of an insider that is paradoxically in many respects also the ultimate outsider.

For various reasons, he is suspected by the Chinese Communists of being a Nationalist sympathizer, and by the Nationalists of being a Communist, keeping him constantly off-balance with its regular odd turns. Because he is one of the few POWs that can speak English, he is extremely valuable to both sides, but this also has its own curious isolating effect. Most of the officers provide fake names to their captors, to disguise their importance, another secret one cannot allow to slip. The camps also house (separately) Korean POWs, which most of the Chinese cannot speak to, further isolating them, and even though the Chinese are there to “help” the North Koreans, they are viewed by some of them as invaders. These are just a few of the things that conspire to make his daily life a lonely one in some respects, since he can never really trust anyone.

Since I came to this novel with a lot of (factual) Korean War and modern East Asian history reading already under my belt and was previously familiar with these intricacies, I enjoyed this book even though it had a few slow moments here and there. There is a toned down suspense that some may not recognize unless they are thinking ahead about the corner it seems like Yu Yuan is being seemingly painted into. There are some times where he has to make some hard choices quickly (and probably doesn’t always make the best one). Even so, I thought Yu Yuan’s predicament was crafted to weave a lot of this together marvelously.

The story is written as a memoir, so perhaps for this reason, the language is simple narrative, with a straight-line plot that lacks the jumping around and multiple parallel plot lines common to a lot of best-sellers. Although I really enjoyed this book myself, those that like a more typical modern plot line with constant action continually panning back and forth between narratives may not find this has as much appeal.


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wsmrer
5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing story with a provocative titleReviewed in the United States on May 7, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
I was attracted to Ha Jin’s War Trash by virtue of it being a tale built around the so-called Forgotten War, what Americans refereed to as The Korean Conflict and by the Chinese as The War against American Imperialism in Korea. Its narrator, Yu Yuan, was a low level officer among the 300,000 Chinese ‘Volunteers’ sent to Korea by Mao Ze Dong; a war stalled but ironically not yet officially resolved.

I had made the classification Korean War Veteran by being drafted 3 months before the military ended that classification. The conflict was over but a colleague out of my basic training company sent that way lost his legs when unfortunately out of the bunker or trench at the 38th parallel when a mortar landed; a common occurrence launched by both side to pass away the boring hours across the demilitarized zone. Nothing about that conflict quite fit the usual War Story and the same is clearly true with Yu Yuan’s narrative.

His story is that of one of many captured troops who spent years in a POW camp run by the Americans or South Koreans on the outside but by its Inmate Society within. Yu Yuan captivity differed in that he was bilingual and therefore useful to both sides. It is written as a nonfiction account by an elderly Chinese man recalling his life and so genially offered that I had to keep doing the math to realize that he could not be the author but a fictitious creation. Ha Jin was born after the war, son of a military man, and one thinks, Ah’ his father’s story beneath but it is larger than that by far, a capsule of the historical forces unleashed by the Chinese civil war and the ideological battles rampant in the early twentieth century and the Leninist role of the Communist Party – powerful themes that settle together when finally one comes to understand the title War Trash.
A slowly building engrossing tale.

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Top international reviews

Audrey Two
1.0 out of 5 stars Not for me, I'm afraid :(Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 28, 2012
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I had to read this book for my book group and to be honest I had to force myself to read a certain number of pages every day just to get through it. Rarely have I read a book that I find so hard to enjoy that I struggle to find any redeeming features but sadly this is one. The gratuitous use of the F-word on the first page irritated me (and I'm not a prude by any stretch!). Unusually - for me - I even skipped some of the really tedious bits in the middle as the format of the chapters was such that if you read the first couple of paragraphs and then the last couple you got the gist of what had happened.

Simplified, this book is about the Korean war and follows the tale of a Chinese soldier through a little fighting and then various internment camps as he vacillates wildly about which side says he's on, not wanting to upset the communists nor the nationalists, not wanting to end up in Taiwan and wishing to go back to his mother and fiancee in China once the war is over. Some of the torture makes uncomfortable reading but I really didn't much care about the characters and learnt little more about the Korean war than I already knew.

This is a reasonably well known book by an acclaimed author but I think (hope!) his other better known writing is more enjoyable. I'm not quite sure for whom he was writing this and what audience enjoyed it; the view of the varied members of our book group was that it wasn't a great read.

One advantage: I only bought a second-hand copy from Amazon at 1p + £2.80 p&p so at least I didn't pay the full price for a new copy..... my copy is off to the local charity shop in the new year!
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Luc REYNAERT
5.0 out of 5 stars The war was an enormous furnace fed by the bodies of soldiersReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2012
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A Chinese soldier, Yu Yuan, is sent to Korea in order to help the communist side in the war. He is captured by the Western powers and becomes a prisoner of war (POW). Because he speaks a bit of English, he gets a privileged position inside all the POW camps where he is sent to. In fact, all those camps are secretly controlled by members of the monolithic Communist Party.

The POWs are bombarded by propaganda from the Left and the Right. Yu Yuan has to make a crucial choice when he will be freed: go to the communist mainland where his family and girlfriend live or to nationalist China or to a third country?
On the mainland, he will be considered as an anti-communist and a traitor; but, what about his family, if he doesn't go home?

This book is a brilliant anti-war novel with brutal war crimes on both sides, where soldiers are considered simply as cannon fodder in the hands of those in power at the Right and the Left. But, it is also a strong meditation on the fate of the intellectual, the independent free mind, who has to choose a side in a monstrous conflict: a choice between life and death, not only for himself, but for his whole family.

Not to be missed.
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Dr. jj Hodge
3.0 out of 5 stars drReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 20, 2011
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I was disappointed with the book; it went on endlessly about life in prison and by the end of it I thought I too was in a prison. In my experience it did not connect consistently with the human side, with meaningful, recognisable human feelings. But I can understand that for many people that lack of connection was the whole point: The point being to show the deep horror of communism; it also showed the wickedness underlying the self-righteous attitude of capitalist powers who may well have good reason to defend the virtues of democracy, but easily forget that this does not mean that what democracy does is invariably better than the nasty inhuman work of those they oppose.
I felt a brief glimpse of the human dimension in the chapter when the main character was being treated by doctor Green. She brought into the narrative something fresh and free and beautiful. She understood China at a deeper level and through here presence, as depicted in the narrative, we could see and feel the presence of the human dimension which contrasted with the brutality, the dark forces at work on both sides of the war. Her presence in the narrative helps the reader see the entire situation from a new and refreshing perspective. The unfortunate thing, I felt, is that we soon lose sight of Dr. Green. She disappears from the narrative and is only once touched upon in later chapters. The rest is a dark grey world of days of confinement in a ruthless world. I think it is most interesting from a historical perspective: I now have some insight into what that war stood for in socio-historical terms. But as a piece of literature it falls short of the mark.
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M Watkins
4.0 out of 5 stars The other Korean War.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 8, 2015
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Excellent read, As this was happening during my time in the Far East it was most interesting to read about the war from the other side and to hear about the callous way in which the US treated their prisoners! it was areal eye opener.