I’m so tired from reading this book that I’m not going to write too much about it. I will say that I enjoyed it much more than The Crazed, and clearly he did a shitload of historical research on the Chinese side of the Korean war. One little problem I often have with his narrators: they’re retarded. “It was then that I realized Comrade Pei was positioning himself as a leader within the camp; some of the men, particularly the younger ones, clung to his words like drowning men to wood planks.” Okay, I made that quote up, but you know what I mean. The plainspokenness is great; the stating the obvious, maybe not so much. I’m still waiting for Jin to write a novel about contemporary America. Or China. Contemporary anything.