THIS TITLE WON THE 2005 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD

One of the 10 best books of 2004 according to The New York Times
“A powerfully apposite moral fable whose suffering hero passes from delusion to clarity as a Chinese P.O.W. in Korea.”

“In reading Ha Jin's powerfully moving War Trash, one might be forgiven for forgetting that it's a work of imaginative fiction and not a nonfiction account by an elderly Chinese man writing in fastidious, plain-spoken English of his years as a P.O.W. in United States and South Korean military prisons during the Korean War. (...) War Trash, though it appears to be a realistic portrait of a particular time and place, is at bottom a moral fable, timeless and universal. Set for the most part in the years when Yu Yuan was a P.O.W., 1951-53, with brief summaries of the years that precede and follow, it's an episodic first-person account of pain, oppression and deprivation, a classic prison narrative that leads the sufferer step by step from an initial state of delusion and self-centered conformism through stages of partial enlightenment all the way to spiritual clarity and freedom. (...) 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. It is a Buddhist calm. (...) War Trash is not a large novel, but it is a nearly perfect one.”

Russell Banks (The New York Times)
author of Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter, Cloudsplitter and The Darling