Comfort Woman (36 page)

“Fillings,” the mortician said, almost apologetically, when he noticed me staring at the bright specks.

I started to cry, thinking there was more to a body than there should be, and less.

“Don't worry, no worry,” he said, sounding worried himself. “I take care you. Wait, wait, okay? You can have one, watchucall, complimentary urn.” He bent down to open one of the counter's drawers and stood up, popping open a fold-out gift box like the ones on sale at Longs or Payless for a dollar fifty.

About to sprinkle my mother's ashes in the garden behind our house, I heard the song of the river. The music had always seemed faint to me, but now it drummed in my ears. I carried my mother through the break in the fence and traveled the path we took the year she blessed my wandering spirit.

I stepped into the stream, letting the water bite through my shoes, the cuffs of my jeans, with its cold teeth. Bending down, I cupped a handful of my mother's river and held it over her box of ashes. “Mommy,” I said as the water dribbled through my fingers. “Omoni, please drink. Share this meal with me, a sip to know how much I love you.”

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 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

Nora Okja Keller

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
writ
ing 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
vari
ety 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.

 

 

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.