An interesting perspective told in a deeply boring manner. ( )

A man forced by the Communists to join the army is shipped to South Korea and captured by Americans. He spends years in POW camps, hounded by the Communists and nationalists alike to either repatriate or go to Taiwan. All he wants is to go back to his hometown to take care of his mother and marry his fiancee. Ha could have been bitter, but realized many others that he lived with in the POW camps were much worse off. Well-written fictionalized memoir. ( )

It's an important read but boy does it drag on. ( )

War Trash by well known Chinese novelist, Ha Jin is straightforward, unembellished, without literary flourishes, and nearly devoid of literary elements like simile and metaphor. Despite the pared down prose, the story is moving, colorful, and manages not to sound merely journalistic or reportorial but confidently and artfully written. I'd characterize it as a narrative told by a man who is emotionally open and vulnerable but whose ethic is restrained and wary of exposing anyone else's experiences other than his own to public scrutiny. He does not suppose, rather, he doesn't presume authority over another's authenticity.

It may sound contradictory but Ha, through his narrator hero, Yu Yuan, gives readers a lot of information about the Chinese character. We see that the Chinese are unashamedly sentimental, especially about their mothers and home villages. They are frequently brought to tears and mourn deeply and in open display at friends' and relatives' deaths. Their national characteristic leans toward "herd" instinct -- that is, an openly expressed inability to deal well with solitary living or friendlessness, or without a clan within which to dwell. At one point, Yu Yuan recognizes in himself and his fellow captives a national timidity because they are docile and cooperative with their American captors, and disinclined to make any efforts to escape. He notes the sharp contrast between the Chinese and North Korean POWs who organize themselves in military style, collect and construct weapons, and plot and conspire against their enemy occupiers, and who are wholeheartedly devoted to Marxist communism.

In the period of the story, the 1950s, communism was climbing into entrenchment and dominance over the people of China. Yet, the bulk of the population was apolitical, or at least, politically naive mostly due to being uneducated or minimally so. In the notorious selection process when the Chinese prisoners were forced to choose for repatriation or for release from the POW camp to Taiwan, the soldiers reverted to making their decisions on a personal level, i.e., their desire to return to mothers, lovers, and villages vs. feelings of severed connections or untethered emotions, which produced a perceived rootlessness. None seemed persuaded by the political argument to build a great communist China, nor did they suffer qualms that their choice might be perceived as betrayal of the great leader, Chairman Mao.

Compared to authors like Dai Sijie, Ma Jian, and Yu Hua, Ha's literary style seems less allegorical. His characters in no way seem symbolic but honestly human, real, and natural. He does not draw on the rich lore of Chinese legend and mythology, which stands in strong contrast to, say, the novella of Bi Feiyu above. This, of course, can be attributed to the unrelated subjects of the two works, war vs. classic opera. Even with that said, I find Ha's style very western, firmly realistic, direct, simple, and practical in a manner I haven't encountered among other Chinese authors in my library.

All these points are why I feel supported in asserting that War Trash ranks in power as an equal to any of the highly regarded American writers of WWII fiction: Norman Mailer, Herman Wouk, and James Jones ( )

Jin's naïf-pedantic style worked well for etching the details of a sad, slow-motion love triangle in the empty, slow-moving world of pre-reform China in Waiting. It works less well for rendering the privations and intrigues of life in a Chinese POW camp in Korea in the fifties, with all the clever improvisational "Great Escape" and boy scout stuff, and the internal denunciations and counterdenunciations and weird machinations about who is gonna get repatriated to China and who to Taiwan, and reaching out across cultural lines for different kinds of interactions with the American captors (not idealized in a shit-eating way, though somehow it perpetually seems like something like that is about to break out and I was worried). It's a great, promising setting but Jin seems to just take you through an utterly plausible, utterly artless series of events and dilemmas as they may have happened to any individual real POW, with no attempt to spin them into a story, and also he has this didactic thing and so in combination it seems like he is constantly trying to teach you a lesson but keeps changing his mind about what that lesson is. ( )