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`War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing'

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Sep 19, 2004, Page 18

War Trash By Ha Jin, Pantheon Books 352 pages [US; Hardback]

War Trash is set during the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 and its narrator is a Chinese male who volunteers to go to Korea and fight on the side of the northern Communists and against the South, where a UN force led by the US is committed. After experiencing widespread atrocities, sudden death and meaningless cruelties, he is captured. Most of the book is taken up with his experiences in American-run prisoner-of-war camps.

It's easy to state the virtues of this novel. Ha Jin is at the very roots of his being a non-confrontationalist. The last things his thoughtful and mild-mannered books contain are outright heroes and villains. Instead, he sees the world as full of confusion and half-truths, self-seeking mixed with altruism, kindness mixed with greed, anger mixed with resignation. Even before you open such a novel as War Trash you can be certain that what you will not find is a story of Communist villains versus free-world heroes. There will be no talk of evil empires or capitalist conspiracies, wars on terror or embattled democracy. Instead, you can expect to find compassion and confusion, irony and skepticism, acute observation and a strong sense of the sheer pity of it all.

This is not to say that there won't be plenty about the evils of war. There will be, and there is. This is Ha Jin's first novel to deal with the subject, and, genial though he usually is, he's clearly horrified by what men do to each other in battle, and knows he'd be evading his responsibility if he failed to show war in its true and loathsome colors.

It may nevertheless be wrong to talk of observation. This book has been researched from documentary evidence, and in a note at the end Ha Jin writes that whereas all the main characters are invented, most of the events described are taken from published sources. Even so, the author's perceptive eye as to human behavior is as alert here in this novel dealing with events he can never have experienced as it is in his earlier books such as Waiting and The Crazed where we assume he's writing more directly from his own experience.

The world of the US-run prison camps is not depicted as one where the captives are an undifferentiated mass. There are, of course, both Koreans and Chinese being held there, but the Chinese too are by no means all of the same mind. Some, such as the narrator, have led most of their lives in Chinese Nationalist Party- (KMT)-dominated regions of the country, and others seize the opportunity to be sent to Taiwan rather than be repatriated back to China. Repatriation carries its dangers -- the Communist Party had instructed these volunteers never to surrender, so the status of ex-prisoners is itself problematic. In addition, some Chinese prisoners had had anti-Communist slogans forcefully tattooed onto their bodies which could only add to their woes once they arrived home.

There are some particularly horrifying scenes depicting extreme violence perpetrated against prisoners wanting to return to China by prisoners planning to opt to be sent to Taiwan. Only seconds separate one man's calling out a pro-Communist slogan and his body being dismembered by supporters of the opposite camp and his heart being held aloft on the tip of a knife. (The prison camp, as is so often the case, is partly run by the prisoners themselves, and tension between the two political groupings runs high).

It's typical of Ha Jin that he makes his narrator a graduate of a Nationalist military academy, and yet at the same time someone who chooses to be repatriated to China. He simply wants to go home, to meet up again with his fiancee and look after an aged parent. This side-lining of political commitment, and highlighting instead the human, the domestic and the ordinary, is typical of all his tales, some of which have been compared to the stories of Anton Chekhov, another markedly non-political writer.

The narrator initially ends up in the US, but decides, at the age of 73, to return to China, the land that has bred him and will retain his bones. But his life in Korea doesn't lead easily to this eventual pair of destinations. Because he's perceived as an educated man who also speaks some English, he is co-opted to help in the screening, propaganda and administration work of the camp, and hence to see into the stories of many of his fellow prisoners -- Ha Jin here deftly using the memoirs he's been reading when preparing to write the novel.

Few things could be more appropriate to the present confrontational age than this tolerant, horrified, detailed look back at the Korean War. What the world needs at present is exactly this kind of humane skepticism. War is always the worst of all possible options, and we can't be told this often enough. That all sides act brutally in conflict is another truth we should never forget. Ha Jin, born in China, living in the US since 1985, and writing in English but about East Asia, has in this book seized his opportunity. In these brutally confrontational times, his is a voice of moderation, realism, sanity and wisdom. It's impossible to believe that, in taking on this Korean subject-matter, Ha Jin isn't commenting on the present state of the world. So read this book, and meditate on its message. If for Korea you read Iraq, I doubt if Ha Jin will complain.
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