in the Chinese army, who leaves his mother and
fiancée to go to Korea as a member of the Chinese
People’s Volunteers. Due to poor leadership, his
division suffers numerous casualties, and Yu and
many of his comrades are captured and sent to
POW camps. However, the conflict is not merely
between the Chinese and their South Korean
and American enemies. The Chinese prisoners
themselves are bitterly divided between the Com-
munists, who wish to be repatriated to mainland
China, and the Nationalists, who want to be relo-
cated to Taiwan, from where they intend to wrest
power from the Communists.
Yu is neither a Communist nor a National-
ist, but, because of his knowledge of English, he
becomes an interpreter for both groups. The Na-
tionalists try to persuade, or compel, every POW
to follow them to Taiwan. Given his desire to be
reunited with his family, Yu deliberately keeps
himself away from the Nationalists, even after they
tattoo him with an anti-Communist slogan. But
when he witnesses the brutal manner in which the
Nationalists torture and kill the POWs who express
a desire to go back to the mainland, Yu reluctantly
announces that he too will go to Taiwan. However,
during the screening, he tells the officers that he
wants to return to the mainland and is transferred
to a camp controlled by the Communists. Yu then
attempts to gain the trust of the Communists by
actively participating in operations against their
American captors, in which the lives of many
POWs are sacrificed for ideological reasons. Fur-
thermore, he comes to question his decision to
side with the Communists when he realizes that
he is assigned to replace another POW on a dan-
gerous mission because the other soldier is a party
member. By the end of the narrative, Yu is repatri-
ated to the mainland with other Chinese POWs,
but they are condemned as traitors and punished
by the Communists. In addition, his homecoming
turns out to be anticlimactic, since his mother has
died and his fiancée has left him.
Ultimately, War Trash is a fictional exploration
of how an individual manages to survive in a “hell-
ish place” in which human beings are treated as
“war trash” by different ideological and national
groups. Ha Jin’s greatest achievement, though, is
the way he is able to capture the reality of the Ko-
rean War in a novel.
Jianwu Liu and Albert BrazWatanabe, Sylvia (1953– )
Born on the island of Maui, Sylvia Watanabe is
a third-generation Japanese-American writer of
fiction, essays, and memoirs, and a professor of
creative writing. Her collection of short stories,
Talking to the Dead (1992), won the PEN Oak-
land Josephine Miles Award. She has also won a
Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award and a National
Endowments for the Arts fellowship. Along with
Carol Bruchac, she has coedited two anthologies
of Asian-American literature: Home to Stay: Asian-
American Women’s Fiction (1990), and Into the Fire:
Asian-American Prose (1996).
Watanabe says that her extensive reading
turned her to writing, which she found adventure-
some. Though she initially wrote to record what
she thought was the eradication of Hawaiian cul-
ture, she soon discovered that the traditions she
deemed static were actually dynamic and evolving.
Exposed to different cultures and religious tradi-
tions from the East and the West, she writes about
the multicultural life of multiethnic people living
in multigenerational households on the Hawaiian
Islands. In her fiction she tries to imagine the pri-
vate struggles of people as they encounter differ-
ences in culture.
The stories in Talking to the Dead explore the
struggles of several generations of people in a Ha-
waiian village where the vast ocean is visible from
almost every window. Against this expansive physi-
cal setting, which demands a gaze into the distance
and occasionally a desire to escape, the rhythmic
tug and pull of family ties and the tensions aris-
ing thereby are articulated and resolved. Within
the family, there is a power struggle between the
stabilizing forces of the older generations and the
mobilizing forces of the younger generation with
its capitalistic culture. Characters tie the stories to-
gether through their relationships, appearing and310 Watanabe, Sylvia