A Chinese memoirist has accused Chinese-American writer Ha Jin of plagiarizing his work for scenes in the PEN-Faulkner award winning War Trash.
Zhang Zeshi, author of Notes of a POW and My Return From an American Camp, has said that certain chapters of War Trash bear a resemblance to his 2000 memoir My Korean War: the Personal Account of a Volunteer Army POW (pictured). When War Trash came out last year, Zhang’s American friends mentioned the similarities, and earlier this year a journalist translated the offending passages, amounting to about 10,000 words, into Chinese for Zhang to inspect himself.
In his list of references, Ha Jin acknowledges using an essay collection that Zhang edited as a source for his meticulously researched novel. He has denied reading My Korean War, but the passages he is alleged to have plagiarized are found in an essay in that was included in both the Zhang-edited volume and the later My Korean War.
The details in question concern the “Dodd Incident,” in which rioting POWs captured the camp commandant, Brig. Gen. Francis T. Dodd, and tried him for brutality. Zhang says:
In most histories, the “Dodd Incident” is given only a brief mention. All of the historical details were my own creation, and Ha Jin only changed a few words after translating my work into English. He also twisted the characters I described.
A report on Booktide gives a side-by-side comparison of a passage from the two books. The flow of the conversation between two officers is quite similar, and there are several places where the lines are identical. The several layers of translation the plagiarized portions would have gone through make it hard to tell for sure, though.
- Booktide (Chinese): Ha Jin’s War Trash accused of copying
- Good Books Electronic Versions (Chinese): Cover image