Unwelcome Home

At first, I felt that the transition from reading War Trash to Home was a little bit rocky.  But looking back on my notes from the last couple of weeks, I’m actually seeing some pretty stark connections between these two protagonists’ dilemmas.  They both fought on what turned our to be an illegitimate “second front.”  

For Frank Money, the Korean War might be interpreted as a second front in America’s struggle against racism.  He tells us that Home is worse than the battlefield he faced in Korea, because at least in battle there is something to strive for -- “some chance of winning,” while in Lotus “there was no future . . . nothing to win” (83).  This might be interpreted as the illusion of upward mobility that many African-American integrated servicemen were led to believe in during the Korean War.  The chapter of Our Fight that we read explains this at length, and goes as far as to say that “when African Americans managed to secure promotions, they felt that they had beaten the odds and rejoiced that they had won ‘a battle in the continuing war against Jim Crow’” (171).  But as we saw in Home, the awards and promotions earned on the battlefield abroad failed to translate back in the U.S.  The medal that Frank won helped him evade the police once, but in general, he was not treated any more respect than when he left to go fight.  It was for this reason that some Americans, like Clarence Adams, decided not to return “home” after being released from POW camps.

Yuan from Ha Jin’s War Trash has a surprisingly similar struggle.  In his case, however, it is not race, but political ideology that separates him from most Chinese citizens.  In class we talked about the POW camps acting as a “second front” for the Korean War -- battles were waged and agreements made within them.  But when the troops returned to China, they were not given recognition by the Communist Party.  The narrator says: “In other words, he and we had all been chessmen on the Party’s board, though Pei had created his own board and placed his men on it as if his game had been identical with the Party’s.  In fact he too had been a mere pawn, not much different from any of us.  He too was war trash” (345).  Although it seemed that Pei’s actions in the camp were synonymous with Communist ideology, his accomplishments were ignored back in China and he was treated with distrust by the very people helped tried to support.  So in this case, like in Home, the second front turns out to be illegitimate.  Our narrator tells us, “... if only I had foreseen that home was no longer the same place.  Then at any cost I would have gone to a third country, where I could have lived as a countryless man . . .” (344).  For Yuan and Frank, Home is unwelcoming and they face it with many regrets.  This certainly tarnishes the popular portrayal of wars and the treatment of their veterans back home.

--Sarah T.