Comfort Woman (37 page)

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

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.

“Okay,” my mother answers. “First salt.”

My daughter shakes invisible salt over the cabbage.

“Then garlic and red pepper sauce.” My mother stirs a pot over the stove and passes the mixture to my daughter, who pours it on the cabbage.

My daughter brings her fingers to her mouth. “Hot!” she says. Then she grabs the green plastic in her fist, holds the cabbage to my mother's lips, and gives her
halmoni
a taste.

“Mmmmm!” My mother grins as she chews the air. “Delicious! This is the best kimchee I ever ate.” My mother sees me peeking around the door.

“Come join us,” she calls out to me, and tells my daughter, who really is gnawing at the fake food, “Let your mommy have a bite.”

 

 

 

From “My Mother's Food.” Copyright ©1997 by Nora Okja Keller. First published in
New Woman,
September 1997. By permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York. All rights reserved.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Do you think that Akiko is “crazy”? Did she possess special powers? When Reno says, “Das how come she can read other people. Das how come she can see their wishes and their fears. Das how come she can travel out of dis world into hell, cause she already been there and back and know the way,” is she making a connection between the psychological trauma Akiko suffered as a result of her experiences as a comfort woman and her ability to communicate with spirits?

2. Both Akiko and Beccah seem to lead double lives. Akiko is torn between the spirit world and the world she occupies as a working single mother and Beccah between her life as an American teenager and as a person of Korean descent. How else is the theme of identity woven throughout the novel? Does either woman ever discover who she really is?

3. Why do you think Akiko keeps the truth about her past a secret from Beccah? How did this secret affect their relationship? How might it have changed their relationship had Akiko revealed the secret while she was alive?

4. There is so much tension between Akiko and Beccah, it's hard to detect the love that they share. How is theirs a typical mother daughter relationship? How are the normal conflicts that flare up between mothers and their—especially adolescent—daughters made more complicated in Akiko and Beccah's relationship?

5. Why do you think Akiko clings to her Japanese name—assigned to her in the army camp—instead of reclaiming her Korean name, Soon Hyo? What is significant about the fact that we don't learn of this Korean name until near the novel's ending?

6. Keller has set her novel in Hawaii, a place that is foreign to many Americans who associate it with images of pristine beaches and tropical delights. How is Keller's Hawaii different from these cliched images? What did you learn from her portrayal of this state that has its own dialect and richly varied culture?

7. Discuss the character of Auntie Reno. Is she a real friend to Akiko and Beccah? Does she take advantage of Akiko's vulnerability? What does she teach Beccah about her mother? How does she represent the clashing of cultures that is so prevalent in Hawaii?

8. Water, especially water that flows in rivers, is a recurring motif in the novel. What does it represent in Beccah's memories, and in her passage from youth to adulthood? What role does water play in Akiko's memories? Why do you think Beccah chooses to scatter her mother's ashes in the river behind their home?

9. What do you think of the novel's alternating narrative voices? Why do you think Keller chose to structure her novel this way? What are the advantages of knowing Akiko's story before Beccah learns it? Whom do you think we get to know better: Beccah or Akiko?

10. The term “comfort woman” is painfully ironic given the agonies endured by Akiko and the other women forced into prostitution by Japanese soldiers. How does Keller extend the irony of this term throughout the novel? To what extent are Beccah and Akiko uncomfortable? How are their lives devoid of comfort? And how does each learn, ultimately, to be a comfort to—and derive comfort from—the other?

NORA OKJA KELLER was born in Seoul, Korea, and now lives in Hawaii with her husband and two daughters. In 1995 she received the Pushcart Prize for “Mother Tongue,” a short story that is a part of
Comfort Woman.
In 1998 she received the American Book Award, and in 1999 the Elliot Cades Award for Literature. She is currently working on her second novel.

 

 

 

 

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Set in the aftermath of the Korean War, Fox Girl gives a powerful voice to the abandoned children of American GIs. Hyung Jin, “fox girl,” is disowned by her parents, but finds kinship in her fellow outcasts Sookie, a teenage prostitute kept by an American soldier, and Lobetto, who makes his living off the streets by pimping and running errands. Shunned by society, they dream of an American ideal that they will do anything to attain. Fox Girl is at once a rare portrait of the long-term consequences of a neglected aspect of war and a moving story of the fierce love between a mother and her daughter that will ultimately redeem Hyung Jin's life in America.