War Trash Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  PROLOGUE

  1. CROSSING THE YALU

  2. OUR COLLAPSE SOUTH OF THE THIRTY-EIGHTH PARALLEL

  3. THREE MONTHS OF GUERRILLA LIFE

  4. DR. GREENE

  5. COMPOUND 72 ON KOJE ISLAND

  6. FATHER WOODWORTH

  7. BETRAYAL

  8. A DINNER

  9. BEFORE THE SCREENING

  10. THE SCREENING

  11. COMPOUND 602

  12. STAGING A PLAY

  13. AN UNUSUAL REQUEST

  14. A TEST

  15. MEETING WITH MR. PARK

  16. MEETING WITH GENERAL BELL

  17. THE ABDUCTION OF GENERAL BELL

  18. AFTER THE VICTORY

  19. THE APPREHENSION OF COMMISSAR PEI

  20. ARRIVAL AT CHEJU ISLAND

  21. COMMUNICATION AND STUDY

  22. THE PEI CODE

  23. THE VISIT OF A YOUNG WOMAN

  24. RAISING THE NATIONAL FLAG

  25. ANOTHER SACRIFICED LIFE

  26. KILL!

  27. A TALK WITH CAPTAIN LARSEN

  28. ENTERTAINMENT AND WORK

  29. A SURPRISE

  30. THE FINAL ORDER

  31. AT THE REREGISTRATION

  32. BACK TO CHEJU

  33. CONFUSION

  34. A GOOD COMPANION

  35. IN THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE

  36. A DIFFERENT FATE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ALSO BY HA JIN

  Copyright Page

  TO MY FATHER, A VETERAN OF THE KOREAN WAR

  Acclaim for HA JIN and WAR TRASH

  “Ha Jin is one of the few writers who can tell us in fine English what it is like to be a citizen of the People’s Republic of China. . . . This book is not simply a treatise on Chinese politics and society, but a fine novel on the human condition.” —Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books

  “Stark and powerful.” —The Boston Globe

  “[Ha Jin’s] narrator, Yu Yuan, is one of the most fully realized characters to emerge from the fictional world in years. . . . The narrator’s voice is recognizably, authentically, universally human. . . . [War Trash is] a classic prison narrative. . . . With the suspense building toward a surprising climax and an utterly satisfying end, there is a philosophical certitude and serenity in the final pages of the novel that one rarely experiences in fiction.” —Russell Banks, The New York Times Book Review

  “An important and timely book.... Striking.... Harrowingly realistic. . . . A soulful look at a largely ignored corner of the Cold War’s first hot war.” —The Miami Herald

  “I am enthralled by Ha Jin’s work. He is one of our most gifted and essential writers.” —Amy Tan

  “Ha Jin’s fiction . . . reminds one of the antic humanity of Kafka’s characters, and Gogol’s, too.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Remarkable.... Enlightening. . . . Ha Jin . . . reintroduc[es] us to a war we hardly remember and to a kind of heroism that never grabs the headlines.” —The Seattle Times

  “Fascinating. . . . You’ve never read a novel about prisoners of war quite like this one.” —The Baltimore Sun

  “Ha Jin is one of the finest writers in America.” —George Saunders, author of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

  “Nobody is better at illuminating the dark corners of China’s recent history.” —San Antonio Express-News

  “Riveting. . . . Powerful. . . . Reads like a diary, inescapably true.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “Poignant. . . . A skillful and unusual novel, sharply real, without an ounce of gilding sentimentality.” —The Oregonian

  “Magnificent.” —Robert D. Kaplan, author of Warrior Politics

  “The sights, sounds, and stench of war seem unshakable—but it’s both timeless and touching.” —Entertainment Weekly

  “Ha Jin’s novel is not a story of Korea, or POWs, or even Yu Yuan, but of what it means to be human.” —The Kansas City Star

  “War Trash . . . has the claustrophobia, tension and moral outrage of many Holocaust narratives [and a] great documentary heart [and] flashes of brilliant writing.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Ha Jin’s stark, evocative prose transports us to a harrowing world we have never before seen and which we will not soon forget.” —Michael Shapiro, author of The Shadow in the Sun: A Korean Year of Love and Sorrow

  “Spellbinding. . . . Evocative. . . . A mirror-like reflection of past and present conflicts and wars.” —The Roanoke Times

  “A very ambitious book, thoroughly researched and valuable as a window on the POW camps.” —The New York Sun

  “Splendid. . . . Compelling. . . . [A] fine book.... Ha Jin is a remarkable writer.” —The Star-Ledger (Newark)

  PROLOGUE

  Below my navel stretches a long tattoo that says “FUCK . . . U... S...” The skin above those dots has shriveled as though scarred by burns. Like a talisman, the tattoo has protected me in China for almost five decades. Before coming to the States, I wondered whether I should have it removed. I decided not to, not because I cherished it or was nervous about the surgery, but because if I had done that, word would have spread and the authorities, suspecting I wouldn’t return, might have revoked my passport. In addition, I was planning to bring with me all the material I had collected for this memoir, and couldn’t afford to attract the attention of the police, who might have confiscated my notes and files. Now I am here, and my tattoo has lost its charm; instead, it has become a constant concern. When I was clearing customs in Atlanta two weeks ago, my heart fluttered like a trapped pigeon, afraid that the husky, cheerful-voiced officer might suspect something—that he might lead me into a room and order me to undress. The tattoo could have caused me to be refused entry to the States.

  Sometimes when I walk along the streets here, a sudden consternation will overtake me, as though an invisible hand might grip the front of my shirt and pull it out of my belt to reveal my secret to passersby. However sultry a summer day it is, I won’t unbutton my shirt all the way down. When I run a hot bath in the evenings, which I’m very fond of doing and which I think is the best of American amenities, I carefully lock the bathroom, for fear that Karie, my Cambodian-born daughter-in-law, might by chance catch a glimpse of the words on my belly. She knows I fought in Korea and want to write a memoir of that war while I am here. Yet at this stage I don’t want to reveal any of its contents to others or I might lose my wind when I take up the pen.

  Last Friday as I was napping, Candie, my three-year-old grand-daughter, poked at my exposed belly and traced the contour of the words with her finger. She understood the meaning of “U ... S...” but not the verb before it. Feeling itchy, I woke up, only to find her tadpole-shaped eyes flickering. She grinned, then pursed her lips, her apple face tightening. Before I could say a word, she spun around and cried, “Mommy, Grandpa has a tattoo on his tummy!”

  I jumped out of bed and caught her before she could reach the door. Luckily her mother was not in. “Shh, Candie,” I said, putting my finger to my lips. “Don’t tell anybody. It’s our secret.”

  “Okay.” She smiled as if she had suspected this all along.

  That afternoon I took her to Asian Square on Buford Highway and bought her a chunk of hawthorn jelly and a box of taro crackers, for which she gleefully smacked me twice on the cheek. She promised not to breathe a word about my tattoo, not even to her brother, Bobby. But I doubt if she can keep her promise for long. Certainly she will remember seeing it and will rack her little brain trying to unravel the mystery.

  My grandson Bobby, a bright boy, is almost seven years old, and I often ask him what he will do when
he grows up. Shaking his chubby face, he answers, “Don’t know.”

  “How about being a doctor?” I suggest.

  “No, I want to be a scientist or an astronomer.”

  “An astronomer must spend a lot of time at an observatory, so it’s hard for him to keep a family.”

  His mother’s fruity voice breaks in: “Dad, don’t press him again.”

  “I’m not trying to make him do anything. It’s just a suggestion.”

  “He should follow his own interests,” my son calls out.

  So I shut up. They probably think I’m greedy, eager to see my grandson wallow in wealth. But my wish has nothing to do with money. From the depths of my heart I believe medicine is a noble, humane profession. If I were born again, I would study medical science devotedly. This thought has been rooted in my mind for five decades. I cannot explain in detail to my son and daughter-in-law why I often urge Bobby to think of becoming a doctor, because the story would involve too much horror and pain. In brief, this desire of mine has been bred by my memories of the wasted lives I saw in Korea and China. Doctors and nurses follow a different set of ethics, which enables them to transcend political nonsense and man-made enmity and to act with compassion and human decency.

  In eight or nine months I will go back to China, the land that has raised and nourished me and will retain my bones. Already seventy-three years old, with my wife and daughter and another grandson back home, I won’t be coming to the States again. Before I go, I must complete this memoir I have planned to write for more than half of my life. I’m going to do it in English, a language I started learning at the age of fourteen, and I’m going to tell my story in a documentary manner so as to preserve historical accuracy. I hope that someday Candie and Bobby and their parents will read these pages so that they can feel the full weight of the tattoo on my belly. I regard this memoir as the only gift a poor man like me can bequeath his American grandchildren.

  1. CROSSING THE YALU

  Before the Communists came to power in 1949, I was a sophomore at the Huangpu Military Academy, majoring in political education. The school, at that time based in Chengdu, the capital of Szechuan Province, had played a vital part in the Nationalist regime. Chiang Kai-shek had once been its principal, and many of his generals had graduated from it. In some ways, the role of the Huangpu in the Nationalist army was like that of West Point in the American military.

  The cadets at the Huangpu had been disgusted with the corruption of the Nationalists, so they readily surrendered to the People’s Liberation Army when the Communists arrived. The new government disbanded our academy and turned it into a part of the Southwestern University of Military and Political Sciences. We were encouraged to continue our studies and prepare ourselves to serve the new China. The Communists promised to treat us fairly, without any discrimination. Unlike most of my fellow students who specialized in military science, however, I dared not raise my hopes very high, because the political courses I had taken in the old academy were of no use to the People’s Liberation Army. I was more likely to be viewed as a backward case, if not a reactionary. At the university, established mainly for reindoctrinating the former Nationalist officers and cadets, we were taught the basic ideas of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong, and we had to write out our personal histories, confess our wrongdoings, and engage in self- and mutual criticism. A few stubborn officers from the old army wouldn’t relinquish their former outlook and were punished in the reeducation program—they were imprisoned in a small house at the northeastern corner of our campus. But since I had never resisted the Communists, I felt relatively safe. I didn’t learn much in the new school except for some principles of the proletarian revolution.

  At graduation the next fall, I was assigned to the 180th Division of the People’s Liberation Army, a unit noted for its battle achievements in the war against the Japanese invaders and in the civil war. I was happy because I started as a junior officer at its headquarters garrisoned in Chengdu City, where my mother was living. My father had passed away three years before, and my assignment would enable me to take care of my mother. Besides, I had just become engaged to a girl, a student of fine arts at Szechuan Teachers College, majoring in choreography. Her name was Tao Julan, and she lived in the same city. We planned to get married the next year, preferably in the fall after she graduated. In every direction I turned, life seemed to smile upon me. It was as if all the shadows were lifting. The Communists had brought order to our country and hope to the common people. I had never been so cheerful.

  Three times a week I had to attend political study sessions. We read and discussed documents issued by the Central Committee and writings by Stalin and Chairman Mao, such as The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, and On the Protracted War. Because about half of our division was composed of men from the Nationalist army, including hundreds of officers, the study sessions felt like a formality and didn’t bother me much. The commissar of the Eighteenth Army Group, Hu Yaobang, who thirty years later became the Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, even declared at a meeting that our division would never leave Szechuan and that from now on we must devote ourselves to rebuilding our country. I felt grateful to the Communists, who seemed finally to have brought peace to our war-battered land.

  Then the situation changed. Three weeks before the Spring Festival of 1951, we received orders to move to Hebei, a barren province adjacent to Manchuria, where we would prepare to enter Korea. This came as a surprise, because we were a poorly equipped division and the Korean War had been so far away that we hadn’t expected to participate. I wanted to have a photograph taken with my fiancée before I departed, but I couldn’t find the time, so we just exchanged snapshots. She promised to care for my mother while I was gone. My mother wept, telling me to obey orders and fight bravely, and saying, “I won’t close my eyes without seeing you back, my son.” I promised her that I would return, although in the back of my mind lingered the fear that I might fall on a battlefield.

  Julan wasn’t a pretty girl, but she was even-tempered and had a fine figure, a born dancer with long, supple limbs. She wore a pair of thick braids, and her clear eyes were innocently vivid. When she smiled, her straight teeth would flash. It was her radiant smile that had caught my heart. She was terribly upset by my imminent departure, but accepted our separation as a necessary sacrifice for our motherland. To most Chinese, it was obvious that MacArthur’s army intended to cross the Yalu River and seize Manchuria, the Northeast of China. As a serviceman I was obligated to go to the front and defend our country. Julan understood this, and in public she even took pride in me, though in private she often shed tears. I tried to comfort her, saying, “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a year or two.” We promised to wait for each other. She broke her jade barrette and gave me a half as a pledge of her love.

  After a four-day train ride, our division arrived at a villagelike town named Potou, in Cang County, Hebei Province. There we shed our assorted old weapons and were armed with burp guns and artillery pieces made in Russia. From now on all our equipment had to be standardized. Without delay we began to learn how to use the new weapons. The instructions were only in Russian, but nobody in our division understood the Cyrillic alphabet. Some units complained that they couldn’t figure out how to operate the antiaircraft machine guns effectively. Who could help them? They asked around but didn’t find any guidance. As a last resort, the commissar of our division, Pei Shan, consulted a Russian military attaché who could speak Chinese and who happened to share a table with Pei at a state dinner held in Tianjin City, but the Russian officer couldn’t help us either. So the soldiers were ordered: “Learn to master your weapons through using them.”

  As a clerical officer, I was given a brand-new Russian pistol to replace my German Mauser. This change didn’t bother me. Unlike the enlisted men, I didn’t have to go to the drill with my new handgun. By now I had realized that my appointment at the headquarters of th
e 180th Division might be a part of a large plan—I knew some English and could be useful in fighting the Americans. Probably our division had been under consideration for being sent into battle for quite a while. Before we left Szechuan, Commissar Pei had told me to bring along an English-Chinese dictionary. He said amiably, “Keep it handy, Comrade Yu Yuan. It will serve as a unique weapon.” He was a tall man of thirty-two, with a bronzed face and a receding hairline. Whenever I was with him, I could feel the inner strength of this man, who had been a dedicated revolutionary since his early teens.

  Before we moved northeast, all the officers who had originally served in the Nationalist army and now held positions at the regimental level and above were ordered to stay behind. More than a dozen of them surrendered their posts and were immediately replaced by Communist officers transferred from other units. This personnel shuffle indicated that men recruited from the old army were not trusted. Though the Communists may have had their reasons for dismissing those officers, replacing them right before battle later caused disasters in the chain of command when we were in Korea, because there wasn’t enough time for the new officers and their men to get to know one another.

  A week after the Spring Festival we entrained for Dandong, the frontier city on the Yalu River. The freight train carrying us departed early in the afternoon so that we could reach the border around midnight. Our division would rest and drill there for half a month before entering Korea.

  We stayed at a cotton mill in a northern suburb of Dandong. Inside the city, military offices and supply stations were everywhere, the streets crowded with trucks and animal-drawn vehicles. Some residential houses near the riverbank had collapsed, apparently knocked down by American bombs. The Yalu had thawed, though there were still gray patches of ice and snow along the shore. I had once seen the river in a documentary film, but now, viewed up close, it looked different from what I had expected. It was much narrower but more turbulent, frothy in places and full of small eddies. The water was slightly green—“Yalu” means “duck green” in Chinese. A beardless old man selling spiced pumpkin seeds on the street told me that in summertime the river often overflowed and washed away crops, apple trees, houses. Sometimes the flood drowned livestock and people.