Soldiers caught between death and life

Yuan survives this ordeal largely because of his ability to speak English, which he learned as a teenager from an American missionary. Both his captors and his fellow prisoners find him a useful translator, and this role as a quasiofficial mediator perfectly matches his temperament. Though he's naive and idealistic, Yuan has none of the revolutionary zeal of his comrades. How much simpler, he thinks, to be a "genuine Communist, crazed and fanatic." He regards even those he loves or loathes from a strangely disinterested point of view.

But such independence can be a deadly quality in these polarized prison camps. Saddled with thousands of detainees, the Americans cannot quickly discriminate between those with Communist sympathies and those with Nationalist sympathies. Many of the prisoners are terrified of being repatriated to mainland China, where they signed statements promising to die in defense of their country. And many others know they could be tried as Communists in Taiwan.

While diplomats in Panmunjom dither over the prisoners' status, the camps devolve into war zones of coercion, retribution, and punishment between Nationalist and Communist prisoners. Through it all, Yuan struggles merely to survive so that he can return to care for his mother and marry his fiancée.

He takes us through two years of imprisonment, through moments of common decency and bloody skirmishes against the guards or between opposing groups of prisoners. For the most part, the American GIs are honorable and fair, but there are episodes of brutality when the fabric of law is rent by boredom or cruelty. Far more dangerous, though, are the partisan thugs inside the barbwire who are quick to punish suspected traitors or sacrifice their followers for petty gains.

Despite Yuan's claim to "a documentary manner," this is largely a story of quiet disillusionment, of learning to see that Mao regards him and his friends and millions of others as dispensable.

"The Communists treat every person just as a number," he realizes. "This is the crime of war: it reduces real human beings to abstract numbers."

Born in 1956, Jin missed the Korean War, but he lied about his age when he was 14 to join the People's Liberation Army in China, and this novel is steeped in the details of history as much as in the flavor of personal experience. In fact, the voice of "War Trash" is a rebuttal of its title. It's a timely story about discarded survivors whose lives are more complex and more pitiable than the ideology on either side would have us believe.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. E-mailRon Charles.

Page: 1 | 2