Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Bruce Cumings says: Ha Jin’s novel is obviously based on either his experience or his father’s experience of the Korean War. There are some very stark and striking descriptions.
Harry Wu says: War Trash is about a young Chinese army officer sent by Mao to help the Communist side in Korea. When the Americans capture Yu, his knowledge of English means that he becomes the unofficial interpreter in the POW camp. All he wants to do is return to his fiancée and widowed mother, but he’s trapped by politics.
Your next book is all about dilemmas.
War Trash is about a young Chinese army officer sent by Mao to help the Communist side in Korea. When the Americans capture Yu, his knowledge of English means that he becomes the unofficial interpreter in the POW camp. All he wants to do is return to his fiancée and widowed mother, but he’s trapped by politics.
Tell me about the author.
It’s written by a young Chinese author who came to the United States. He wrote this book in his second language and still won lots of awards for it, which is very impressive. I think this is a really good book to show the West more about what is going on in China. People think that it’s all about economic growth but there is so much more to our history than that.
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Harry Wu was a 21-year-old student in Chairman Mao's China. He was arrested as a “rightist counter revolutionary” and sentenced to life in a labour camp or laogai. It was only after Chairman Mao's death 19 years later that Harry was released in 1979. He fled to the United States to start a new life. But he never forgot the horrors he endured and has dedicated much of his life to a campaign for greater recognition of the millions of Chinese people who suffered and died in the laogai. He claims that even today forced labour is still very much a part of the Chinese economic boom.
Your next book is actually a novel – Ha Jin’sWar Trash.
Ha Jin’s novel is obviously based on either his experience or his father’s experience of the Korean War. There are some very stark and striking descriptions. He didn’t have access to South Korea, but he has this wonderful ability to treat everybody fairly and to listen to the songs of women guerrillas that were captured by South Korean prison camps and enjoy listening to them. He does the same thing with North Korean and Chinese soldiers and the civilians who were caught up in the battle.
I just thought that it was a very clear-eyed, true account. It rings very true when you know what is in the archives, even though he didn’t do archive research at all. It was based on a very truthful account of soldiers – particularly Chinese – coming to Korea and fighting there for two and a half years.
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Bruce Cumings' research and teaching focus on modern Korean history, 20th century international history, U.S.-East Asian relations, East Asian political economy and American foreign relations. His first book, The Origins of the Korean War, won the John King Fairbank Book Award of the American Historical Association, and the second volume of this study won the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association. He is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea (forthcoming), and is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Nation, Current History, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Le Monde Diplomatique.
