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War Trash
A Novel
by Ha Jin

8.7 based on 16 reviews read critic reviews how did we calculate this? based on 10 votes read user comments rate this book

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• Official Publisher Site

A story that opens a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war—the experiences of Chinese POWs held by Americans during the Korean conflict— which paints an intimate portrait of conformity and dissent against a sweeping canvas of confrontation. [Pantheon Books]

Pantheon Books, 368 pages
10/05/2004
$25.00

ISBN: 0375422765

Fiction
Historical Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Booklist Donna Seaman

Ha Jin's taut drama of war, incarceration, coercion, and survival is galvanizing, and his ardently observant narrator is heroic in his grappling with the paradox of humankind's savagery and hunger for the divine. [Aug 2004, p.1872]

Kirkus Reviews

Another brilliant installment in Ha Jin's history of modern China ("The Crazed," 2002, etc.), written with his usual understatement and clarity.

Library Journal Shirley N. Quan

Yuan's gritty yet gripping tale forces readers to contemplate the horrors of a past war from a different perspective. This is the author's strongest storytelling effort to date. [Aug 2004, p.67]

Los Angeles Times Linda Jaivin

Startlingly seductive...both a work of profound humanism and devastating nihilism.

Publishers Weekly

The force of this story, painted with starkly melancholy longing, pulls the reader inexorably along.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Annabel Lyon

The novel has an eerie, deadpan quality that gives the most horrific violence the immediacy of news footage.

The New York Times Book Review Russel Banks

Powerfully moving...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.

Washington Post Charles McCarry

A powerful work of the imagination whose psychic territory is not the hunger and humiliation of the prison camp but the haunted past that was the old, lost China and the mysterious future that is in the process of becoming Mao Zedong's chimerical new China.

Houston Chronicle John Freeman

Jin does not wish to entertain but to inform and put his readers in a place where most of us would choose not to linger. He has certainly accomplished that goal here. Readers are likely to finish War Trash feeling like they, too, have escaped this terrible camp.

New York Review Of Books Ian Buruma

This book is not simply a treatise on Chinese politics and society, but a fine novel on the human condition.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger K. Miller

Its plain, straightforward test may be somewhat fitting to a memoir, but it occasionally can be less than gripping to read. Nevertheless, the story overcomes the solemn simplicity with which it is told.

Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles

Indeed, there's a muted quality to this narrative that would grow dull from a less talented writer, but here he holds our attention like a whisper. The slightly stilted, temperate tone runs all the way to the last word, and the cumulative effect is deeply moving.

Entertainment Weekly Melissa Rose Bernardo

A tough read -- the sights, sounds, and stench of war seem unshakable -- but it's both timely and touching.

The Guardian Julia Lovell

As a portrait of life in the camps, and a study in the corruption and hypocrisy of modern Chinese political culture, War Trash is unfailingly powerful. But Ha Jin's fourth novel is still scattered with linguistic glitches that compromise the reading experience.

The New Yorker

The subject is fascinating, but in execution the novel often seems burdened by voluminous research, and it strains dutifully to illustrate political truisms.

San Francisco Chronicle Alan Cheuse

A long, tough slog of a book, giving us, rather inadvertently, I fear, a sense of what it must have been like to fight up and down those coveted pieces of territory in a world of blood, bullets and mud.

The average user rating for this book is 8.7 (out of 10) based on 10 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

TheKate M gave it a10:
So meticulous and haunting! It has been over a year and dozens of books since I have read this and it still stalks the periphery of my mind.

dave g gave it a10:
Exciting. War Trash and Waiting are his best.

Bob L gave it a9:
Well written book and gives an insight of what life was like as a POW and the influence of other captives on daily existence. Although it is fiction it does bring home the suffering of soldiers away from home.

Paul H gave it a10:
Wonderful, this and Kafka on the Shore are the two best novels I've read in a long while.

Stone J gave it a10:
"Who can bear the weight of a war?" asks Yu Yuan. "To make witness 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." Yu has borne such weight for fifty years. Conscripted by the then newly-founded Chinese Communist Party into fighting in Korea, captured and thrown into a POW camp, he became caught between allegiances, his fate determined by warring political ideologues who viewed his skills as an English translator as a tool for their own ends. Ha Jin's novel, War Trash, is a most unsettling book; a fictional memoir so seamless and genuine it reads as non-fiction. Fusing violent history and glowing imagination, written in the first-person style of a man translating his Chinese thoughts into English phrases, War Trash is so finely hued, so real, it takes one's breath away. Yu, now an elderly teacher writing his account "in a documentary manner so as to preserve historical accuracy," is hardly a vibrant character. A natural sceptic, Yu is an unassuming man whose only wish during his internment was to return to China. Life as a POW is not forgiving to those who would remain neutral, as the politics of prisoners serve to form a dangerous microcosm of battling belief systems. Pro-Nationalists treat Communist Party members as traitors to China, dealing out horrific brutalities to loyalists of Mao's philosophy. The Communists, however, judge their principles more important than the safety and security of their soldiers, their leaders fixated on propaganda and grabbing headlines. Yu witnesses scores of his comrades slaughtered in tragic prison uprisings designed to promote ideology, fuelling Yu's reflection that "war was an enormous furnace fed by the bodies of soldiers." Jin, National Book Award winner for his novel The Waiting, has fashioned a delicate novel that functions on many levels. As moral allegory, War Trash serves as warning to those who blindly obey, realizing that the path to self-realization is best served by one's own judgements, and not the dogma of others. Likewise, as political commentary, the parallels to the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay scarcely need mentioning. When Yu comments on the Koreans' hostility toward the Chinese, "To them we had come here only to protect China's interests - by so doing, we couldn't help but ruin their homes, fields, and livelihoods," a more apt description of the current Iraq war there couldn't be. War Trash is not meant as polemic; it is a story first, told by a man whose mere survival speaks volumes to his courage. Like Thomas Keneally's recent, unfairly ignored work The Tyrant's Novel, it is a tale of man's awakening to the world state, and his fight to make peace within himself when all about is chaos. Completing Yu's tale with a perfectly tuned atmosphere of sorrow, Jin writes an ending of haunting simplicity. "Do not take this to be an "our story"," Yu writes. "I have just written what I experienced." What Yu experienced was terrifying. What Jin presents is phenomenal.

ra l gave it a10:
This is the most soul wrenching tale of deceit and gorey trauma that I have ever read. You must read this book.

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