Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army at a time when the schools were shut down. Shanmin discovers in himself a self-imposed thirst for knowledge. Shanmin, an illiterate boy whom Yu Yuan tutors, provides a touching aside and perhaps a glimpse of autobiography. Not a Party member himself, he wants to return to the mainland to see his mother and his fiancée, who finally abandons him because he is politically suspect. As a translator and a political pawn, Yu Yuan is able to shift through the ranks of deadly enemies, caught between extremist ideologues.
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Ha Jin privileges his story with a narrator who's a free thinker-something rare under Chinese Communist rule. In an afterward that includes a two-page bibliography, the author assures us that the details are true. The Nationalists' brutal treatment of the Communists-culminating in a startling scene of murder-seems almost unbelievable, yet it is a matter of history proving stranger than fiction. The Nationalists enjoy the support of their American captors. Chiang Kai-shek loyalists inducted into the Communist army now dream of repatriat-ing to Free China (Taiwan) and eventually taking back the mainland. The POW camps prove divided between Nationalist and Communist. Ha Jin sometimes violates narrative convention in allowing Yu to narrate key scenes that he couldn't have witnessed. Yu's ability to speak English accounts for his rising prominence in the Communist army, especially after the Chinese forces are captured.
Yu Yuan, the narrator, is an unfortunate "volunteer" in the Chinese army sent across the Yalu River in 1951 to battle the Americans he is a man of sensitivity and intelligence reduced to survival mode as his army starves on the battlefield and in the prison camps.
Written for an American audience, it has nothing to do with America's current situation in the world, yet the horrors of the POW camps it depicts remind us of the horror of all modern armed conflict. The novel purports to be the memoir of a Chinese prisoner taken by the Americans during the Korean War. The narrative power of Ha Jin's new novel, War Trash, hinges on the impact of unknown history.
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