War Trash [B2031]

2004 PB in nice clean condition. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist. Ha Jin's masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao's 'volunteer' army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors. With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one's fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, War Trash is Ha Jin's most ambitious book to date.

From Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A beautiful work of fiction based on a true reality and turned into a deeply moving work. The way it's told, like an old man sharing his life, is so genuine, it simply captures you. And the horrors of war, the political sides of it, the Chinese and Korean particularities are so well portrayed, that you keep on going, awe struck, amazed and perplexed, wishing for the conclusion and feeling everything that you are meant to feel."; "If you read this book and you aren't sad, question your own humanity."; "Ha Jin's narrative stands as a strong condemnation of the human cost of war. He exposes the suffering of ordinary soldiers, emphasizing that this ideological war was indifferent to individual humanity. Those who fought were treated as disposable pawns in a larger political game. I believe this is the finest of all Ha Jin's novels."