A scrap heap made of people

In China in the early ‘80s, I met a shuffling, middle-aged factory worker who was in many ways unremarkable. He wore an old white shirt, baggy blue pants and cloth shoes and spoke Mandarin with a thick Shandong accent. Yet he was a Caucasian American, a former Korean War prisoner who had defected to his captors. Later, I met a Chinese survivor of the same war who was still brought to tears by his memories.

In a sense, both were discards of history, the litter of battle -- or “war trash,” the title of writer Ha Jin’s new and startlingly seductive novel. Set in the POW camps of the Korean War, “War Trash” is, appropriately, both a work of profound humanism and devastating nihilism.

The narrator, Yu Yuan, studied at the Nationalist military academy when the Communists came to power on the mainland in 1949. When Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist army fled to Taiwan, Yu stayed, switching to the Communist army. It seemed a reasonable choice: The revolution had apparently rid China of corruption and brought a longed-for peace, allowing him to focus on caring for his widowed mother and his fiancee, Julan.

The first shots of the Korean War shatter Yu’s world, because he is ordered to “volunteer” for the front. It doesn’t take long for Yu and his comrades, whose food supplies run out after a week, to realize that the well-equipped U.S. troops aren’t the “pussycats” promised by Chinese Communist propaganda.

“The war,” Yu observes with mounting horror, “is an enormous furnace fed by the bodies of soldiers.” Captured along with the remnants of his defeated company, Yu ends up in a U.S.-run POW camp.

In the hellish camp, pro-Nationalist Chinese POWs are given free rein by the Americans to torture, maim and murder the Communist supporters; in one chilling and indelible scene, they carve the heart from a living Communist soldier. The GIs themselves are not averse to putting the boot -- or rifle butt, burning cigarette, occasional grenade, flame thrower and even machine gun -- into the POWs. Seen from this perspective, Abu Ghraib could be tradition, not aberration.

The physical torture is matched by the mental self-torture of shame and fear, for as Communist soldiers they ought to have died rather than allow themselves to be captured. Leaders among the Communist POWs, tormented by this knowledge, inflict a regimen that places party interests above the well-being of individual soldiers.

Yu catches the attention of leaders on both sides because of his command of English. He is not so much caught between a rock and a hard place as ricocheted forcefully from one to the other. His dilemma is written on his body when pro-Nationalist tormentors knock him unconscious and tattoo an anti-Communist obscenity on his belly.

Much that occurs in “War Trash” has a basis in fact. The entertaining but ultimately tragic episode in which Chinese and North Korean prisoners kidnap U.S. Gen. Matt Bell, for instance, is based on the abduction of Brig. Gen. Francis T. Dodd. And surely the character Margaret Hinton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent who incites Yu’s dark and perceptive meditation on the “ownership” of the stories of war, refers to veteran war correspondent Marguerite Higgins, though interestingly the author has assigned her the surname of one of the most famous observers of the Chinese revolution, William Hinton.

Readers familiar with Ha Jin’s other novels, such as the exquisite “Waiting,” a love story that won the 1999 National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, may be surprised by the brutal and uncompromising subject matter of “War Trash.” Yet the hallmarks of this Chinese emigre and Boston University professor’s other fiction are present: the acute and empathetic psychological observations, the fascination with human imperfection, the sensual prose, the vividly described settings and, above all, that miraculously buoyant, sly humor. As in “Waiting,” there is even a somewhat inhibited central male character who finds passion a difficult proposition. In “Waiting,” it’s the passion of the lover; in “War Trash,” it is that of the ideologue. *