编辑推荐From Publishers WeeklyJin (Waiting; The Crazed; etc.) applies his steady gaze and stripped-bare storytelling to the violence and horrifying political uncertainty of the Korean War in this brave, complex and politically timely work, the story of a reluctant soldier trying to survive a POW camp and reunite with his family. Armed with reams of research, the National Book Award winner aims to give readers a tale that is as much historical record as examination of personal struggle. After his division is decimated by superior American forces, Chinese "volunteer" Yu Yuan, an English-speaking clerical officer with a largely pragmatic loyalty to the Communists, rejects revolutionary martyrdom and submits to capture. In the POW camp, his ability to communicate with the Americans thrusts him to the center of a disturbingly bloody power struggle between two factions of Chinese prisoners: the pro-Nationalists, led in part by the sadistic Liu Tai-an, who publicly guts and dissects one of his enemies; and the pro-Communists, commanded by the coldly manipulative Pei Shan, who wants to use Yu to save his own political skin. An unofficial fighter in a foreign war, shameful in the eyes of his own government for his failure to die, Yu can only stand and watch as his dreams of seeing his mother and fiancée again are eviscerated in what increasingly looks like a meaningless conflict. The parallels with America's current war on terrorism are obvious, but Jin, himself an ex-soldier, is not trying to make a political statement. His gaze is unfiltered, camera-like, and the images he records are all the more powerful for their simple honesty. It is one of the enduring frustrations of Jin's work that powerful passages of description are interspersed with somewhat wooden dialogue, but the force of this story, painted with starkly melancholy longing, pulls the reader inexorably along. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From The New Yorker Ha Jin's new novel is the fictional memoir of a Chinese People's Volunteer, dispatched by his government to fight for the Communist cause in the Korean War. Yu Yuan describes his ordeal after capture, when P.O.W.s in the prison camp have to make a wrenching choice: return to the mainland as disgraced captives, or leave their families and begin new lives in Taiwan. The subject is fascinating, but in execution the novel often seems burdened by voluminous research, and it strains dutifully to illustrate political truisms. In a prologue, Yuan claims to be telling his story in English because it is "the only gift a poor man like me can bequeath his American grandchildren." Ha Jin accurately reproduces the voice of a non-native speaker, but the labored prose is disappointing from an author whose previous work—"Waiting" and "Ocean of Words"—is notable for its vividness and its emotional precision. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker From The Washington Post The "war trash" of this hypnotic novel are Chinese soldiers who were taken prisoner by U.N. forces -- mainly American -- during the Korean War. Written in the modest, uninflected prose of a soldier's letter home, Ha Jin's story, a mixture of authentic historical detail and realistic invention, is a powerful work of the imagination whose psychic territory is not the hunger and humiliation of the prison camp but the haunted past that was the old, lost China and the mysterious future that is in the process of becoming Mao Zedong's chimerical new China. Caught between the two is the narrator, an instinctively decent young man named Yu Yuan, a cadet at Huangpu Military Academy, the West Point of Nationalist China. Though on the losing side, he feels "grateful to the Communists, who seemed finally to have brought peace to our war-battered land." Because Yu speaks English, the communists permit him to complete his studies. He soon finds himself crossing the Yalu River with the 180th Division of the People's Volunteer Army. He leaves behind his widowed mother and his young fiancée, for both of whom he feels deeply and worriedly responsible. The soldiers of the 180th Division are told to expect little resistance from the soft, spoiled Americans they will meet in combat. "At the mere sight of us, the Americans would go to their knees and surrender -- they were just pussycats." Poorly equipped with Soviet weapons they do not know how to use, incompetently led by Party hacks, the 180th soon encounters reality. Pounded by U.S. airpower and shattered by ferocious American ground attacks, the division is surrounded and destroyed. Thousands, including a grievously wounded Yu, are taken prisoner. After surgery in an American hospital, Yu is sent to a large, American-run prisoner-of-war camp on Koje Island in the Sea of Japan near Pusan. "Inside the compound," Yu tells us, "my first impression was that I had returned to the Chinese Nationalist army: everywhere I turned, I saw people wearing the sun emblem of the Nationalist Party." These men, who are in control of the camp by American consent and through sheer force of numbers, are still loyal to Chiang Kai-shek. They plan to go to Taiwan after the war. The communists, many fewer in number, are determined to return to the motherland. Each side competes fiercely for the loyalty of every new prisoner. Because of his value as an interpreter, Yu Yuan is a desirable prize. Though Yu is not a communist -- and realizes that he is likely to have an easier personal life in Taiwan than in a Maoist China that will always suspect his loyalty -- he opts for return to the mainland. His reasons are Confucian: An only child, he is the sole support of his old mother, and he also supposes that he must soon become a father as the result of a single night of lovemaking with his fiancée. When he declines to join the Nationalist faction, its enforcers knock him over the head and, while he is unconscious, tattoo the English words "[Expletive] COMMUNISM" on his belly. Thus indelibly branded as an enemy of the people, Yu Yuan struggles to elude the fate that political zealots have designed for him. But in his insistence on being the captain of his soul, he fashions a destiny with which it might have been impossible to live had he not, in the end, been able to live with himself -- and with the obscene tattoo that is a constant reminder that what is written is written. Reviewed by Charles McCarry Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition. |
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