> Review Chinese experience of the

Ha Jin. 2004. War Trash. New York: Pantheon Books, 352 pages, ISBN 0 375 42276 5

oner learns to read, which in the muted armed only with bamboo spears and tones of the novel, brings satisfaction to shouts of ‘Mansei!’ (p.187). This epi- the narrator. Rarely, however, are emo- sode, like other repudiations of proletar- tions overplayed. While homesickness ian Korean nationalism, demonstrated among the troops receives sympathetic a deep need among the prisoners for treatment, this text seldom wallows in images of a dominant North , as sentimentality. seen in the accompanying drawing. In the midst of prison camp struggles, Ha Like the 2,000,000 mainland Chinese Jin credits the Americans their share of who were thrust into Korea as ‘volun- brutality, but does not spare the prison- teers’, the narrator encounters an array ers for their own folly. Preparing for an of nationalities, testifying to Korea’s all-out rumble with the guards, Chinese inundation by foreign soldiers. Ameri- prisoners create signs reading ‘Respect cans appear as solicitous doctors, embat- the Geneva Convention!’ even as they tled black soldiers sympathetic to com- sharpen their shanks. munist doctrine, and angry sergeants capable of torture. No one communi- The Chinese-North Korean camara- cates particularly well, and language derie that pervades War Trash exists barriers appear frequently, reminding today only in propaganda artefacts and the reader that, for the Chinese troops wartime kitsch hawked by vendors who trudged across the Yalu River and along the northern bank of the Yalu into the pockmarked netherworld of the River. Nevertheless, Ha Jin faithfully DPRK, Korea was a strange and foreign chronicles Chinese soldiers singing land. In this predicament, the Chinese North Korean songs and participating troops shared a root concern with their in smaller, yet more beautiful gestures. western rivals who were steadily pour- During one particularly intense denun- ing into the confusion of Pusan. ciation of their American captors, a Chinese soldier breaks into sobs, and is Amid the polyglot forces inundating the silently handed a towel by his Korean peninsula, War Trash paints North Kore- comrade. In another episode describing ans as perhaps the most interesting. the preparations for a camp uprising, North Korean POWs flare throughout the narrator finds himself in the depths the text as haughty firebrands whose of an underground compound, hosted nationalistic furor and personal pride by a princely and solicitous North Kore- can never be squelched. In discussing an who somehow has a radio through the need for ‘patient negotiation’ with which he allows his Chinese friend to Ball-Point Pen Drawing Confiscated from a North Korean Prisoner of War, Koje Island, 15 July 1953 the Americans, notes the Chinese nar- hear, at last, news from home. This book Courtesy New York Public Library Propaganda Collection (Box 11). rator, ‘our Korean comrades tended to is like that – dreary, almost impassable, be too hot-blooded’, noting that Kim until an unexpected flare from under- Il Sung’s men ‘wouldn’t share the ground infuses life with emotion and Adam Cathcart resents Ha Jin’s most challenging and Korean words that none of us could same earth and sky with the American rare companionship. edifying work to date. understand’ (p.200). Born in but imperialists. In the camps, this pride he Chinese experience of the Kore- resident in Atlanta since 1985, Ha Jin manifested itself in fierce North Korean In a way we are all prisoners of the Kore- Tan War (1950-1953) remains little Readers familiar with such classic Kore- has become well-known largely on the resistance to American control. Indeed, an War, and live in the world it created. noted and barely understood. No one, an War films as Pork Chop Hill will rec- strength of such sentences. one of War Trash’s most harrowing Divisions and loyalties remain lashed other than the Koreans themselves, ognize the muted strain of fatalism that Less poetic but more useful are the episodes chronicles a prison rebellion into place, frozen across an artificial sustained heavier casualties in the war winds like a dirge through War Trash. novel’s descriptions of the everyday instigated by a core group of North barrier that time has hardened into a than the Chinese, who buried more The men in the prison camps are noth- activities that governed life in the POW Korean POWs. nigh-unbridgeable chasm. In 1953, Ha than 100,000 men in Korean soil, ing more than insignificant flotsam, camps. Unrestrained by American Jin’s narrator crossed north of the 38th including the napalm-saturated body war trash, pawns in a grinding chess regulations, prisoners communicated Faced with the abduction of an Ameri- parallel towards home, but the rest of us of Mao’s eldest son. Beyond domestic match centering on the truce village of across distinct compounds via hand can general by a shock brigade of com- are still waiting for the war to end. < propaganda denouncing the American- Panmunjom. For momentary victories signals, or by slinging rocks with mes- munist POWs, American soldiers led UN forces, China’s intervention in at the negotiating table, leaders on both sages that fluttered over fences. War quell the Cheju compounds with the Adam Cathcart the Korean War sharpened her hostil- sides would unscrupulously sacrifice Trash contains a few meditations on the full force of tanks. Facing hundreds of Assistant Professor of East Asian History ity to the capitalist West, prevented the the lives of hundreds in battlefield offen- role of singing and the arts as cathartic American troops bristling with weap- Hiram College, Ohio, USA integration of with the main- sives or prison camp uprisings. The text necessities for camp culture. One pris- onry, the Koreans run futilely forward, [email protected] land, and cut deeply into the masses of thus mirrors the inner desolation that young men who had joined the war as the inconclusive truce talks created. [advertisement] ‘volunteers’. Those interested in military history and the Korean War will be pleased with the Ha Jin confronts this consequential layers of detail in Ha Jin’s work, whose subject in his novel War Trash, the kinship with the list of reference works unadorned first-person narrative of unobtrusively located as back matter a Chinese POW in Korea. True to the is clear. As such, War Trash straddles actual experiences of Chinese commu- the boundary between history and fic- nist POWs, the novel is long and quite tion, and bids to join the company of frequently depressing. Beginning with Solzhenitsyn’s gulag literature. A semi-annual journal dedicated to the its dark wrapping and sheer girth, the study and preservation of Asian traditions reader apprehends a sense of the work’s The writing is often aimless, as the unrelenting sobriety. Unlike Waiting, recollections of the old can be, but the This year’s issues include articles on: his celebrated story of romance amid reader frequently wanders into inlets On the Wings of a Bird: Folklore and Nostalgia the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the of beauty. In one episode showing the * political currents that seethe under- transfer of prisoners from Koje Island * Pipit Rochijat’s Subversive Mythologies neath the surface of War Trash are not to Cheju-do, the narrator relates the * Homo narrans in East Java calmed by any semblance of a love story. following tableaux: ‘Once we were * Hairstyles in Korea and Japan Developed female characters do not clear of the hill slope, the muddy beach * Special Issue: Animal Folklore exist in this book, and counter-narra- appeared, spreading like a long strip of Subscription rates for two issues/year: Institutions us $40.00, Individuals us $22.00 tives, subplots, and flashbacks are simi- unplanted paddy fields. At its northern Contact address: Editor, Asian Folklore Studies, Nanzan University larly absent. Basking in depression, War end, at the beginning of the wharf, were 18 Yamazato-cho, Showa-ku, 466–8673 Nagoya, Japan Trash is a brutally slow exploration of anchored two large black ships, the e-mail: [email protected] the prisoner’s world, and as such, rep- sides of their prows painted with white

IIAS Newsletter | #43 | Spring 2007 2 3