A prisoner's fight for survival in a murky conflict
KIMBERLY MARLOWE HARTNETT
War sires an odd perspective. The more distant the fight, the clearer it all looks. The causes, missteps and victories of America's Revolutionary and Civil Wars are exhaustively mapped and chronicled, as is the United States' role in the World Wars. Even the Byzantine plotting and undercurrents of the Vietnam era are now in focus.
The Korean conflict is an odd exception. It remains a fuzzy, flat picture, in part because the so-called police action in Korea could not be easily judged as victory or loss and therefore did not mesh neatly with the superpower posture America assumed so aggressively at midcentury.
Ha Jin's novel "War Trash" burrows deep into a nearly invisible subgroup within this curious war; his hero and narrator is Yu Yuan, a young Chinese POW held by American forces in Korea from 1951-53. The prolific Ha Jin, an English professor at Boston University whose fiction and poetry have won several prestigious prizes -- including the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Asian American Literary Award -- takes on an intimidating project here. The result is a skillful and unusual novel, sharply real, without an ounce of gilding sentimentality.
There is a treacherous duality to Yu Yuan's life as a prisoner: the grinding monotony of prison-camp life, punctuated by moments of sweating fear as he tries to sidestep conflicting factions and ideologies around him. Like many of his fellow POWs, Yu Yuan is a reluctant fighter caught up in Chairman Mao's maelstrom who dreams of returning to a simple pre-revolution life in mainland China. But unlike many of his camp brothers, he is well-educated. Yu Yuan translates, speaks and writes English well enough to be an object of both suspicion and value among the many pockets within the camp -- Chinese communists and nationalists, Koreans and Americans.
The simple act of reading an English-language Bible given to him by a chaplain causes the book-starved soldier anguish. Is he a tool of the imperialist captors? Does reading Scripture betray a dependence on religion, the opiate of the masses derided by the communists? Even as he wrestles with these questions, Yu Yuan knows that reading keeps him sane -- and realizes that his translation skills, honed by picking his way through the English Bible, could prolong his life.
Ha Jin captures the detail and paralyzing sameness of the prisoners' days, yet without plodding -- splicing in irregular moments of terror without artificiality. There is a poignant, sometimes alarming irony to this story, coming as it does so soon after reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse by American troops.
The graphic photos we saw from Abu Ghraib prison were just a tiny piece of a POW world. Through Yu Yuan's eyes, one realizes that the atrocity is not the leash around the prisoner's neck, it is the weight of many things: days of rationed, unfamiliar foods, the tense, forced allegiances of camp life, the fears that one's family is being punished or killed. The leash is just a metaphor that is easily read by those far from the camps and prisons.
"War Trash" has, like nearly all fine fiction, a sturdy spine of autobiography. Ha Jin, who served in the Chinese Army, left his native country to attend Brandeis University in 1985. He was about to return four years later when Tiananmen Square erupted. He remained here, struggling to support his family until his writing led him to teaching and rising success. His works often reflect the stratified guilt and longing of the sojourner who owes his soul to one country and his survival to another. "War Trash," told as the now-elderly narrator looks back, takes us into the lives of those whose homeland is torn apart, and reveals the remarkable human ability to survive even as one's world shatters and mends.
Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett recently reviewed "The Great Failure" by Natalie Goldberg for The Oregonian.
© 2004 The Oregonian