War Trash by Ha Jin

Second reading; first read about 5 years ago.


"When a general evaluates the outcome of a battle, he thinks in numbers--how 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 numerals. This is the crime of war: it reduces real human beings to abstract numbers," writes author Ha Jin in this fictional account about the Korean War. He postulates that the nations and the generals involved in a war view the individual soldiers as expendable pawns, "war trash."

Jin's protagonist, Yu Yuan, is a "volunteer" soldier of the Chinese Communist army who is captured by the Americans and becomes a prisoner of war, already dishonored in the eyes of his government because he did not die fighting. As a proficient speaker of English, he becomes an intermediary between the Chinese and the Americans and thus enjoys a rather privileged status, yet he soon finds that he has more to fear from his compatriots than from his captors.

For those in need of a quick history lesson (which I was), the Korean War started just a few years after the Chinese revolution, when the Communists gained ascendancy under the leadership of Chairman Mao, and the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Formosa. Thus, the Chinese POWs were given the choice of being returned to mainland China or to Formosa. Although Yu Yuan is not politically minded at all, and actually fears the Communists, he longs to return to the mainland to care for his aging mother and to be reunited with his fiance'. His account of his imprisonment includes incidents of extreme cruelty from the Communists, from the Nationalists, and sometimes from the Americans, as the battle for his allegiance is waged inside the POW camps, not because he is valued as a human being, but because he is a pawn in the public relations campaigns of the factions.

The actual recounting of events here sometime becomes tedious, yet the narrative elements all add up to a powerful indictment of ideologies and of war when they disregard the human beings involved.

Recommended for history buffs and for those inclined to be receptive to an anti-war message. Winner of the Pen Faulkner Award.