War Trash Wu Jin Character Analysis

After the communist takeover in 1949, China was a new country and at peace within its borders (365). As their stability rose, China decided to take part in the Korean War to aid their communist neighbor North Korea. But China was not as stable as it seemed and instead put the life of young Yu Yuan in danger. The title of Yu Yaun’s story is, War Trash. Jin’s character Yaun experienced the war through the eyes of a Chinese soldier and a captured POW. He experienced China in the perspective of good and evil in order to survive yet in the end was condemned to be an outcast in society upon his return to China. Wilhelmus explains how this outcasting is caused, “When he became a prisoner, he is filled with chagrin because a standard dogma of the Communists was that allowing oneself to be captured already made a person disloyal” (171). One day he got the order to eliminate some of the American unit designations; with Yuan’s military education he reflected, “I had misgivings about that because our …show more content…
Yuan would find himself tangled in the mess of groups throughout the camps being constantly, “bullied, blackmailed, bribed and tortured, first by one group, then another, falling in and out of favor, in and out of protective custody, as it were, as the fortunes of each group rise and fall within the prison system” (Banks). Yuan became close to a priest who was able to get him an English bible so he could practice English. This Bible was the only reading material and his way to practice a language few people knew. Jin highlights the fact that he was desperate for the innocence of knowledge but later persecuted because of it. All of this stemmed from the fact that Communism was meant to have the Marxist teachings as its Bible (World History: The Modern Era). Yuan would end up giving up the Bible to show his allegiance to communism which would as always cause him