[Interview] One Korean-American author tells the story of comfort women

Posted on : 2017-05-28 11:04 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
In her writings, Nora Okja Keller explores “mixed blood” and Korean identity
Nora Okja Keller
Nora Okja Keller

Nora Okja Keller is a Korean-American author who received the American Book Award in 1998 for “Comfort Women,” a novel dealing with the women forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese imperial army. Born to a Korean woman and a German-American man and raised in Hawaii, Keller published a second novel, “Fox Girl,” in 2012, which focuses on biracial children and women working at “camp towns” near US military bases in South Korea. “For my third novel, I’m planning to write the back story to ‘Fox Girl,” which will be set in Hawaii in the 1980s,” Keller told the Hankyoreh in an interview on May 25. She is currently in Seoul to participate the Seoul International Forum for Literature, which is being organized by the Daesan Foundation.

Keller first learned about the comfort women during a human rights symposium held at the University of Hawaii in 1993. The testimony of Hwang Geum-ja, a former comfort woman, came as a huge shock to her. When she suggested writing an article about the comfort women to a reporter she knew, her friend responded that she should write it, since she was Korean. And thus her novel “Comfort Women” was born.

“I met the former comfort women when I was invited to visit Seoul for Women’s World 2005. I attended the protest in front of the Japanese embassy, and after the protest, I talked to the women. When I gave them my novel and told them that it was their courageous testimony that had enabled me to write it, one of them caressed my cheek and told me I had done a good job. That just make me cry even more,” Keller said.

The comfort women agreement reached by the governments of South Korea and Japan at the end of 2015 was “disappointing and disconcerting,” Keller said. “Even though decades have passed since the war, the Japanese government continues to deny its involvement in the recruitment of the comfort women and its responsibility for that. What the former comfort women really want isn’t money – it’s for the Japanese government to acknowledge what it did and to ask for forgiveness,” she said.

For quite a long time after “Fox Girl,” Keller wasn’t able to write another book because of her other responsibilities: teaching composition and raising her two daughters. But Keller said she didn’t regret this situation, despite the obstacles it presented to her career as a writer. “My second daughter is graduating this Saturday, and I think I might dedicate more time to writing now while teaching part-time instead of full-time,” she said.

Keller gave her daughters the Korean names “Tae” and “Sunhi.” While Keller’s own Korean name “Okja” is her middle name, she had her daughters put their Korean names first and put their American names in the middle. “Since half of my blood is Korean, you can tell I’m biracial just from my appearance, but my daughters are one-quarter Korean and three-quarters Caucasian by blood. So I wanted to emphasize their Korean identity even more, even if through their names. ‘Tae’ came from my mother’s name,” she said.

During the Seoul International Forum for Literature, Keller made a presentation titled “Thoughts about Being Hapa [a Hawaiian word meaning “mixed blood”]: Living on the Margins Both as ‘Self’ and ‘Other’” during a session called “Perceiving ‘Us’ and ‘Them.’” “Even if my full-grown daughter has a child that has just one-eighth Korean blood, that child is also fully Korean. The very distinction between the self and other is a false dichotomy,” she said during her presentation.

“The presentation that Korean writer Kim Soom made during the same session of the Seoul International Forum for Literature was really impressive. It felt incredibly poetic even while being about something that could feel very uncomfortable, and I also thought her writing resonated with my work. I actually found myself thinking, wow, I really like this woman, from the moment she started speaking,” Keller said.

Surprisingly enough, Keller made this remark without having heard about Kim Soom’s 2016 novel “One Person,” which is also about the comfort women. “That makes me more interested in her. I’ve got to read that book,” Keller said when told about the novel.

Finally, Keller was asked about the political situation in South Korea, in which the candlelight rallies led to the impeachment former President Park Geun-hye and the election of new President Moon Jae-in, and about the possibility of US President Donald Trump being impeached.

“Koreans have showed that they’re able to bring about positive change peacefully by making their voices heard. The first thing I thought when I heard about the impeachment was that it would be great if the same thing happened soon in the US. I think Trump could be impeached, too. But since I’m not an expert, that might be wishful thinking,” Keller said with a laugh.

By Choi Jae-bong, literature correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

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