I opened my mother’s box, sprinkling her ashes over the water. I held my fingers under the slow fall of ash, sifting, letting it coat my hand. I touched my fingers to my lips. “Your body in mine,” I told my mother, “so you will always be with me, even when your spirit finds its way home. To Korea. To Sulsulham. And across the river of heaven to the Seven Sisters.”
Later that night, I stepped into water again. In my dreams, I swam a deep river, trying to reach the far shore, where my mother danced around a ribbon of red. I swam for hours, for weeks, for years, and when I became too tired to swim any longer, I felt the pull on my legs. I struggled, flailing weak kicks, but when I turned and saw that it was my mother hanging on to me, I yielded. I opened my mouth to drown, expecting to suck in heavy water, but instead I breathed in air, clear and blue. Instead of ocean, I swam through sky, higher and higher, until, dizzy with the freedom of light and air, I looked down to see a thin blue river of light spiraling down to earth, where I lay sleeping in bed, coiled tight around a small seed planted by my mother, waiting to be born.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My love and thanks to the following people who helped make this book a reality:
My mother, Tae Im Beane, for her stories, true or not.
My sister, Dawn Myung Ja Chamness, and her friends who had a good time correcting my Korean.
The Bamboo Ridge Study Group, for helping me see the novel in a short story.
Cohorts Cathy Song, Juliet S. Kono, and especially Lois Ann Yamanaka for advice and inspiration on matters both professional and personal.
Leslie Bow, Elena Tajima Creef, and Laura Hyun Yi Kang for their sharp, savvy, and fast responses that helped pull everything together.
Alice Chai and Elaine Kim for their scholarship and activism in Korean and Korean American communities.
Keum Ja Hwang for speaking out.
Youngsook Kim Harvey for her research on Korean shamans, including her book Six Korean Women.
Susan Bergholz for keeping an eye on the small details and the big picture.
Kathryn Court and Beena Kamlani for their intensive readings and necessary tweaks.
My husband Jim, for his steadfast support and determined love, through the highs and the lows and always.
A PENGUIN READERS GUIDE TO
COMFORT WOMAN
Nora Okja Keller
INTRODUCTION
Comfort Woman
In Comfort Woman, Nora Okja Keller tells the devastating story of Akiko, a young Korean woman who was sold into prostitution in the Japanese “recreation camps” of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. Throughout the novel, Keller explores the legacy of Akiko’s pain, the manner in which she represses the wounds of her past, and its splintering effect on her relationship with Beccah.
Desperate to escape the scene of her torture, Akiko marries someone she does not love—an American missionary who takes her away from Japan, but mistakes her silence for devotion, and neither understands nor properly cares for her. Soon, she gives birth to Beccah, the child that she loves passionately, but to whom she will never reveal her traumatic past. As the novel unfolds, the two women are living in Honolulu, where Beccah must fend for herself when her “crazy” mother slips into trances, communicating with spirits of the dead. Akiko and Beccah are mother and daughter, but they have traded the roles of nurturer and nurtured. They speak the same two languages yet rarely communicate their true feelings. Akiko buries her pain, a choice that keeps her from enjoying a fully loving relationship with Beccah. In turn, Beccah resents her mother and isolates herself—so much so that while she spends her days writing the obituaries of strangers, she feels little when the time comes to measure the value of her own mother’s life.
What are the consequences of a life filled with secrets and repression? The spirit world becomes Akiko’s sanctuary, her ticket to survival. She escapes pain through her trances and, ultimately, through her death. As a result, Beccah must create her own rules for living and for loving, recognizing and translating the other gifts that her mother has left behind. By deciphering the foreign words uttered in the tape recordings that hold the key to her heritage, by preparing her mother’s dead body for a new life in the spirit world, and by learning the truth of her mother’s past, Beccah can move toward the future.
AUTHOR QUESTIONS
Fortunately for us, there has been a surge of Asian-American writing in this country, especially by women authors. Why do you think this is? How does your heritage as a Korean-American set you apart from writers ofJapanese, Chinese, Filipino, or Vietnamese descent?
Whenever I get a question that asks me to speak outside of myself, to speak authoritatively on historical and sociological issues, my first response is “How should I know?”
I don’t have the proper perspective to say, definitively, this is how being a Korean-American woman is different from being Vietnamese or Filipino or Polish or French or whatever. I can only speak from this one body, this one mind, this one life’s experiences.
But I do recognize that I am writing in a time that is more receptive to various voices than ever before. In the seventies, the big name in Asian-American literature was Maxine Hong Kingston. (What a gift The Woman Warrior, the first book I had ever read by an Asian-American writer, was to me; I began to realize I didn’t have to hide my ethnicity in order to become a writer.)
And the eighties were dominated by Amy Tan. The nice thing, the important thing, about the nineties is that there is no one writer that has become the tokenized “It” for Asian-American literature. Kingston and Tan helped push the door open for a new generation of Asian-American writers, both male and female.
Also, there are more Asian-American writers writing now because, generationally speaking, it is a matter of time. The majority of Asian-Americans currently writing are second- and third-generation. Writing is a luxury that is not often an option for the first-generation immigrants. It’s something that comes after food is put on the table; it comes after there is a home in which to put the table. My mother, who came to America in the sixties and raised five children here alone, never wished for me to become an artist. Like many immigrant parents, she was worried about her children’s security in this new country. She wanted me to be an X-ray technician or a dental hygienist (“They make steady money—Americans are always breaking bones and cleaning their teeth”) so I’d always be able to eat.
Growing up in Hawaii you must have been exposed to a wide variety of races and racial blends. How do you think your life in Hawaii shaped your experiences as an Asian-American and as a writer?
I used to think that I could live anywhere, that place didn’t matter because I could adapt, find a niche in any community. But I think that type of arrogance was born from the fact that I grew up secure and accepted in Hawai‘i. There are not many other places in the United States where a child who was half Korean and half German could have blended in. Being hapa, the Hawaiian term for mixed-race, was not just considered normal, but was celebrated. I had single-race friends say that when they grew up, one of their goals was to have hapa children. The funny thing is, I never considered that a strange thing for them to say.
It also wasn’t strange to see people of different races loving each other and hating each other, even in the same family. That’s just the way it is in Hawai‘i. It’s a small place where the differences between people have a tendency to seem petty and small next to the overwhelming richness of the land, which has its own stories and personalities and life.
And as a writer, I’ve been nurtured by the people from Bamboo Ridge, a press that for twenty years has been dedicated to publishing writers from Hawai‘i. I love these guys and the time we spend together. Every month we meet to discuss writing, books, and I have learned not just about things like narrative structure and plot, but about life and generosity of spirit.
Your novel is based on historical fact, and on a chapter in history that few people seem to be aware of. Obviously you felt
some responsibility to get the facts out about what happened to these Korean women during the Second World War. Did this responsibility ever feel like a burden? Did the facts ever get in the way of the fiction you wanted to write?
I first heard about “comfort women” in 1993. Keum Ju Hwang, a woman who survived the comfort camps of World War II, was speaking at several American universities in order to “bear witness,” to bring to light this chapter in history.
At that time, there was very little information about comfort women available in English. I contacted one of the professors who helped bring Hwang to the University of Hawai‘i—Alica Chai—and she was able to provide me with some documents and essays that she had translated from Korean.
With these documents, I had facts—proof that the camps existed, that hundreds of thousands of women were forced into prostitution there—but I had very little detail, very little personal testimony, about what it was actually like for the women in these camps. I had to imagine their daily lives, their physical and emotional anguish, the aftermath. Taking that leap was scary, and quite often I tried to resist it by postponing writing certain sections for weeks.
Spirits play an important role in your novel—but they’re not commonly a part of American cultural life. Can you tell us a little about the role spirits play in everyday Korean life? Would it be unusual for a young girl to find her mother setting out offerings for various spirits in order to ensure her well-being?
Again, I’m not an expert, an authority on daily Korean life. I don’t know about the “typical” Korean household, but mine was infested with ghosts. To name a few: There was my aunt who died in toddlerhood and somehow we children took to leaving offerings of candy for her spirit. Another ghost followed my sister home from school one day—it must have been a disruptive student in life; we’d sometimes hear that one running up and down the stairs in the middle of the night. And there was my mother’s ex-husband, who was killed by a drunk taxi driver in Pusan, and also my grand-parents, for whose thirsty spirits my mother set out bowls of water. Those were the ghosts particular to my family, but there were also larger spirits, such as the Birth Grandmother, prominent in Korea’s shamanic tradition. From what I understand, shamanism is still very much alive and relevant in Korea, so much so that there is a waiting list of a year and a half to consult the best shamans.
Dreams figure prominently in the lives of your characters. Did they play a role in the writing of this book?
Yes. I often tell people that my dreams were haunted after I attended the lecture given by Hwang. Throughout the writing of this book, my dreams were filled with images of war and women, of blood and birth. And the only way I could exorcise these images was through writing.
You have said that when you were younger you felt “embarrassed and alienated” from things that were Korean. How have your own experiences affected the ways you will teach your daughter about her ethnic heritage?
I didn’t want to be Korean when I was a teenager. Koreans were my uncle and mother, fresh off the boat, smelling like garlic, talking with tongues thick with accent or in a gutturally fast, spit-flying foreign language. I wanted to be American.
So I pretended I couldn’t understand what they said. I ignored them, and also part of who I was. I know I hurt my mother. I knew it then and I know it more so now, when I am a mother myself.
My writing, through which I both explore and reclaim my ethnic heritage, is also an apology to my mother and family for my adolescent shame; it is easier to write “I’m sorry” than to say it.
There is a certain rightness, a joy and a satisfaction, when I hear my older daughter define herself as Korean, when she begs my mother to speak to her in Korean, the language of her grandmother’s stories.
A few years ago, thinking about some of these same issues, I wrote an essay called “My Mother’s Food.” What follows is an excerpt.
A Bite of Kimchee
I became shamed by kimchee, by the shocking red-stained leaves that peeked out from between the loaf of white bread and carton of milk, by the stunning odor that, as I grew to realize, permeated the entire house despite strategically placed cartons of baking soda. When friends I invited to my home pointed at the kimchee jars lined up on the refrigerator shelves, squealing, “Gross! What’s that?” I’d mumble, “I don’t know, something my mom eats.”
Along with kimchee, I stopped eating the only three dishes my mother could cook: kalbi ribs, bi bim kooksoo, and Spam fried with eggs. (The first “American” food my mother ever ate was a Spam-and-egg sandwich; even now, she considers it one of her favorite foods and never gets tired of eating it. At one time in our lives, Spam was a staple. We ate it every day.)
I told my mother I was a vegetarian.
One of my sisters ate only McDonald’s Happy Meal cheese-burgers (no pickle), and the other survived for two years on a diet of processed-cheese sandwiches on white bread, Hostess Ding Dongs, and rice dunked in ketchup.
“How can you do this to me?” my mother wailed at her American-born children. “You are wasting away! Eat, eat!” My mother plopped helpings of kimchee and kalbi onto mounds of steaming rice. My sisters and I would grimace, poke at the food-and announce: “Too fattening.”
When we were small, my mother encouraged us to behave like proper Korean girls: quiet, respectful, hardworking. She said we gave her “heartaches” the way we fought and wrestled as children. “Worse than boys,” she used to say. “Why do you want to do things like soccer, scuba, swimming? How about piano?”
But worse than our tomboy activities were our various adolescent diets. My mother grieved at the food we rejected. “I don’t understand you girls,” she’d say. “When I was growing up, my family was so poor we could only dream of eating this kind of food. Now I can give my children meat every night and you don’t want it.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” we’d say as we pushed away the kimchee, pushed away the Korean-ness.
We pushed my mother, too, so much so she ended up leaving Hawai‘i. After she moved away, wanting to travel and explore the America she had once—as a new bride barraged with foreign language, customs, foods—been intimidated by, I ate kimchee only sporadically. I could go for months without a taste, then suddenly be hit with a craving so strong I ran to Sack-n-Save for a generic, watery brand that only hinted at the taste of home. Kimchee, I realized, was my comfort food.
When I became pregnant, the craving for my own mother accentuated my craving for kimchee. During the nights of my final trimester, my body foreign and heavy, restless with longing, I hungered for the food I myself had eaten in the womb, my first mother-memory.
The baby I carried in my body, in turn, does not look like me. Except for the slight tilt of her eyes, she does not look Korean.
As a mother totally in love with her daughter, I do not care what she looks like; she is perfect as herself. Yet, as a mother totally in love with her daughter, I worry that—partially because of what she looks tike—she will not be able to identify with the Korean in me, and in herself. I recognize that identifying herself as Korean, even in part, will be a choice for her—in a way it wasn’t for someone like me, someone recognizably Asian. It hit me then, what my own mother must have felt looking at each of her own mixed-race daughters: how strongly I do identify as a Korean-American woman, how strongly I want my child to identify with me.
Kimchee is an easily consumable representation of culture, digested and integrated by the body and hopefully—if we are to believe the lesson “You are what you eat” that episodes of “Mulligan Stew” taught us in elementary school—by the soul as well.
When my daughter was fifteen months old, she took her first bite of kimchee. I had taken a small bite in my own mouth, sucking the hot juice from its leaves, giving it “mother-taste” as my own mother had done for me. Still, my daughter’s eyes watered. “Hot, hot,” she said to her grandmother and me. But the taste must have been in some way familiar; instead of spitting up and crying for water, she pushed my hand
to the open jar for another bite.
“She likes it,” my mother said proudly. “She is Korean!” When she told me this, I realized that for my mother, too, the food we ate growing up had always been an indication of how Korean her “mixed-blood” children were—or weren‘t—at any given time. I remember hew intently she watched us eat, as if to catch a glimpse of herself as we chewed. “Eat, eat. Have some more,” she’d say, urging us to take another serving of kimchee, kalbi, seaweed soup, the food that was linked to Korea and to herself.
Now my mother watches the next generation. When she visits, my daughter cleaves to her, follows her from room to room. Grandmother and granddaughter run off together to play the games that only they know how to play. I can hear them in my daughter’s room, chattering and laughing. Sneaking to the doorway, I see them “cooking” plastic food in the Playskool kitchen.
“Look,” my mother says, offering her grandchild a plate of plastic spaghetti, “noodles is kooksoo.” She picks up steak. “This kalbi.” My mother is teaching her Korean, presenting words my daughter knows the taste of.
My girl joins the game, picking up a soft head of cabbage. “Let’s make kimchee, Halmoni,” she says, using the Korean word for “grandmother” like a name.
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