War Trash

War Trash
Author: Ha Jin 2004 350pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started February 19 2008, Finished February 24 2008

A novel in the form of a memoir, almost entirely drawn from actual historical accounts, this account of a Communist Chinese soldier’s incarceration in US POW camps during the Korean War feels strangely secondhand and while it is often fascinating history, it consistently failed to engage me emotionally. The book completely succeeds as an indictment of Maoist Communist totalitarianism which sent hundreds of thousands of unequipped and underfed troops into hopeless battle against foes of overwhelming materiel superiority, considered their capture, even if while wounded or unconscious an act of unforgivable betrayal, encourageed those soldiers once in captivity to stage inevitably suicidal symbolic protests e.g. a raising and refusing to lower the Communist Chinese flag resulting in dozens of fatalities among the flag raisers and then once the war was over, treated the returning POWs as traitors, stripped them of all privileges and rights and cast them to the lowest rung of society. As an indictment of the communist system that destroys its own and “always treats [its] enemies more leniently than [its] own people”, War Trash reminded me of Darkness At Noon, though lacking that earlier masterwork’s psychological acuity. Jin seems to realize the shortcomings of his method – forging a fictional memoir from actual ones – when toward the end he quotes a Korean War reporter: “Who can bear the weight of a war? To witness it is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories, we must not appropriate them.”