war trash by Ha Jin

'War Trash': View From the Prison Camp

By RUSSELL BANKS

Published: October 10, 2004

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N reading Ha Jin's powerfully moving ''War Trash,'' one might be forgiven for forgetting that it's a work of imaginative fiction and not a nonfiction account by an elderly Chinese man writing in fastidious, plain-spoken English of his years as a P.O.W. in United States and South Korean military prisons during the Korean War. Ha Jin, the author of the fine National Book Award-winning novel ''Waiting'' and several other works of fiction, was born and raised in China, but otherwise appears to have little in common with his narrator. Appearances to the contrary, then, though ''War Trash'' is indeed a work of fiction, one has to keep reminding oneself of that fact. The seamless, somewhat unsettling fusion of invention and reportage is aided and abetted by the fact that Ha Jin taps into two ancient and honorable Western literary traditions -- the novel in the form of a nonfiction memoir, and the nonfiction memoir as prison narrative. The former links Defoe's ''Robinson Crusoe'' to Kerouac's ''On the Road'' to Allan Gurganus's ''Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,'' and the latter links John Bunyan's ''Relation of My Imprisonment'' to Jacobo Timerman's ''Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number'' to Jack Henry Abbott's ''In the Belly of the Beast.'' It's a brilliant and original enjambment, and Ha Jin pulls it off with mastery; the result is that his narrator, Yu Yuan, is one of the most fully realized characters to emerge from the fictional world in years.

This would seem on the surface of things most unlikely. Neither notably eccentric nor charismatic, Yu Yuan is not an especially vivid personality. He is a 73-year-old retired teacher of English, who -- except for the three years he spent as a young soldier in the Chinese Army imprisoned on Koje and Cheju Islands off the coast of South Korea -- has lived a quiet, obscure and nearly solitary life in the provinces of mainland China. Though his fate has been hammered and misshapen by powerful social and historical forces (the Chinese Civil War and the triumph of the Communists over the Nationalists, the Korean War, the Cultural Revolution, and the opening of China in the 1980's), he has always been a somewhat passive observer, stoical, reflective and sorrowful. He married late, had two children, one of whom moved to the United States, and now, as he says, ''I even have two American grandchildren.'' It's while visiting his son and Cambodian daughter-in-law and grandchildren in Atlanta, where the novel opens, that Yu Yuan makes two momentous decisions: to have surgically erased from his belly an obscene anti-American tattoo, which carries a history from the prison camps as complicated, painful and emblematic as his own, and to ''complete this memoir I have planned to write for more than half of my life. I'm going to do it in English, a language I started learning at the age of 14, and I'm going to tell my story in a documentary manner so as to preserve historical accuracy. I hope that someday Candie and Bobby'' -- his grandchildren -- ''and their parents will read these pages so that they can feel the full weight of the tattoo on my belly. I regard this memoir as the only gift a poor man like me can bequeath his American grandchildren.''

To engage and keep our affectionate regard, a novel in the form of a memoir depends more on the voice of the narrator than on plot or any particular cluster of events and characters. And it's the voice of Yu Yuan, unadorned, trusting and intimate, that carries the story. It need not be a familiar voice -- and to an American ear Yu Yuan's is not especially familiar: it's a little stiff and formal, almost as if it had indeed been translated from Chinese. In every sentence, however, the narrator's voice is recognizably, authentically, universally human. Despite his ''documentary manner,'' because his intelligence, imagination and emotional palette lie embedded in his language -- its diction, naturally, but also its very syntax and punctuation -- we come quickly to know Yu Yuan's moral perspective. And it is his moral perspective, on the ways that the world at large has impinged on his personal life and the crises, conflicts and hard choices created there, that informs the novel and gives it significance and inescapable relevance to events being played out in the world today, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay.

''War Trash,'' though it appears to be a realistic portrait of a particular time and place, is at bottom a moral fable, timeless and universal. Set for the most part in the years when Yu Yuan was a P.O.W., 1951-53, with brief summaries of the years that precede and follow, it's an episodic first-person account of pain, oppression and deprivation, a classic prison narrative that leads the sufferer step by step from an initial state of delusion and self-centered conformism through stages of partial enlightenment all the way to spiritual clarity and freedom. Read as allegory or fable, and ''War Trash'' invites such a reading, it's an essentially religious form invented and perfected by persecuted Puritan divines in Jacobean England -- although in this case the narrator's spiritual journey seems more Buddhist than Christian.

I don't mean to suggest that the novel is not conventionally realistic; on the contrary, it's a painfully detailed picture of nearly unendurable physical conditions, of sadistic treatment of the prisoners by their American and South Korean guards and military administrators, and of violent struggles for power and control among the prisoners themselves. As in any prison, especially a military one, the political conflicts of the outside world -- in Asia in the early 1950's, they're between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists, the Chinese and the North Koreans, the North and South Koreans, and the Americans and everyone else -- are expressed inside the prison walls with murderous brutality and cruel precision. For Yu Yuan, the most painful and morally complex conflicts are those that divide the Chinese from themselves. All the Chinese P.O.W.'s were captured soldiers and officers from the People's Liberation Army who crossed the Yalu River from China into Korea in the spring of 1951. Once imprisoned, they divided themselves into two warring units, those loyal to Communist China who wished to be repatriated to the mainland and those loyal to Nationalist China who wished to be repatriated to Taiwan. Yu Yuan is trapped in the middle. He has no particular loyalty to either the Communists or the Nationalists, and certainly none to the North Koreans or to the South Koreans and Americans, but because he speaks English, the lingua franca of the camps and the sole connecting tissue between the prisoners and their captors, he is important to all of them. He is alternately courted, bullied, blackmailed, bribed and tortured, first by one group, then another, falling in and out of favor, in and out of protective custody, as it were, as the fortunes of each group rise and fall within the prison system.

If he allies himself permanently with the Chinese Nationalists and asks to be repatriated after the war to Taiwan, he will receive much better food, shelter and medical treatment from the Americans and South Koreans. But he will never be able to return to his homeland, where he believes his widowed mother and beloved fiancee await his return. On the other hand, if in order to get back to China he allies himself with the Chinese Communists, he will be condemned in prison and later at home to a life controlled by rigid party discipline and unthinking ideology. He will be a cog in a vast machine. And though Yu Yuan is a man who accepts nearly everything, he is also by nature a skeptic, a man who thinks for himself and questions and tests every received truth against his own experience. Thus he is pulled first one way, then another, and as the prisoner-exchange negotiations in Panmun-jom between the warring parties go on and the day of reckoning approaches, the pressure on Yu Yuan to declare one way or the other increases.

With the suspense building toward a surprising climax and an utterly satisfying end, there is a philosophical certitude and serenity in the final pages of the novel that one rarely experiences in fiction. It is a Buddhist calm. In the midst of his greatest turmoil, Yu Yuan has been reading the one book his captors have allowed him, the Bible -- particularly the Book of Ecclesiastes, which, he says, ''I read repeatedly and which deepened my sense of human futility. These pages calmed me down and taught me that even though I couldn't find a solution now, it didn't mean there wasn't one. I must be patient and learn to resign myself to waiting. There is a time for effort and a time for repose; a time for knowledge and a time for ignorance. At present all I could do was wait with an alert mind.'' ''War Trash'' is not a large novel, but it is a nearly perfect one.

Russell Banks's novels include ''Continental Drift,'' ''The Sweet Hereafter'' and ''Cloudsplitter.'' His latest novel, ''The Darling,'' is published this month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/books/review/10COVERBA.html?8bu=&pagewanted=print&position=