Nora Okja Keller

The Dual Lives of Nora Okja Keller

by Terry Hong
From AsianWeek
April 4 - April 10, 2002

For someone who writes with such eloquence and grace, Nora Okja Keller’s books are filled with horror and pain. In 1997, Keller, who is Korea-born and Hawai’i-raised, won nationwide praise with Comfort Woman, the story about a Korean woman who survives the unimaginable brutality of being a sex slave for Japanese soldiers and her relationship with her unknowing, Americanized young daughter. In spite of the nightmarish contents of the book, Keller was rightly lauded for her hauntingly lyrical prose.

Keller’s follow-up, Fox Girl, takes readers back to post-Korean War “America Town,” where the abandoned hapa children of U.S. soldiers fight for bare survival, and Korean women continue to service occupying G.I.s in order to put food on their shabby dinner tables. At the center is Hyun Jin, the eponymous “fox girl,” a model student from a seemingly loving home, who is thrown out in the streets and forced to create a makeshift family with her childhood best friend, Sookie, who becomes a child prostitute, and Lobetto, a neighborhood pimp who is just a young boy vainly waiting for his American father to claim him.

AW: How did you choose to be a writer?

Nora Okja Keller: Writing is something I’ve always done. Even as a little kid, I always kept notebooks of little stories, poems, illustrations. It was something on the side, a hobby. I don’t think I ever made the [conscious] choice that I was going to become a writer as a career. In part, this was because when I was growing up — and this is common in a lot of immigrant families — I felt I had to have a secure financial future for my mother’s sake, and anything artistic did not fit into that category. When I started writing Comfort Woman, I did so in my spare time, late at night. Writing was something I did in secret. So when the book came out, people were so surprised, “Oh gosh, I didn’t know you were a writer.” I was shocked that people called me a writer. It was a real shift in how I identified myself in terms of what I did. When I was on book tour and I had to say, “I’m a writer,” the first few times the words choked in my throat. I felt so pretentious saying it.

AW: Now do you feel like a writer?

NOK: I’m much more comfortable now saying that I’m a writer. But saying I’m a writer is still ironic, because I’m only really asked about this after a book is done, after I’m finished with the writing part. So when I say I’m a writer is usually when I’m not really writing — so there’s still a sense of awkwardness to it.

AW: How did Comfort Woman come about?

NOK: I hadn’t heard the term before 1993, which is when I went to a symposium on human rights at the University of Hawai’i. A friend called to tell me about this woman coming from Korea, a comfort woman. The former comfort woman spoke through a translator about her experiences as young a girl when she was stolen by the Japanese army and forced into becoming a comfort woman, a sex slave. I couldn’t believe that people didn’t know about this, that we don’t learn about this in history books, so I tried to get my friend to write an article about this. My friend turned it back on me and said, “You should write about this, you’re Korean.”

But the topic was too big, I couldn’t even find the words to express how horrified I was, much less find the vocabulary to talk about the pain in this woman’s life. But her story took hold of me. I felt so haunted, I began dreaming about images of blood and war, and waking with a start. Finally, I realized that the only way to exorcise these dreams and the story from my mind was to write them down. So I got up one night and began to write bits and pieces of my dreams and the comfort woman’s words. That became the short story “Mother-Tongue” [which won the prestigious Pushcart Prize in 1995] and later Chapter Two of Comfort Woman.

AW: And how did Fox Girl come about?

NOK: I see Fox Girl and Comfort Woman as being linked together. Fox Girl was the natural follow-up: What happened to these women after they served as comfort women? I feel the women in Fox Girl are the descendants of the comfort women. It’s a natural place to go — the “America Towns.” So many of the women who came back from Japan after World War II did not, could not, return to their families because they felt so ashamed and ostracized. They had no other choice but to continue to be prostitutes. And the children, especially the daughters, remained trapped in that cycle.

AW: You write about incredibly difficult subjects, about people with harrowing lives. Do your characters haunt you? If so, how do you co-exist with them?

NOK: I feel like I live a dual life. My waking life, which is my real life, is centered around my family — my two daughters, who are 8 and 2, the mother-daughter things we do, arts and crafts, piano lessons, school pageants. Then there’s my other life, my writing life, which usually takes place in the dark of night when the kids are sleeping. It really is as if I enter another world: I go to another place, inside of myself, and it is a dark place. I had trouble shaking that darkness when I got up in the morning, especially with Fox Girl. Towards the end of writing the book, I felt that parts of the characters were seeping into my own character — I was becoming more hard-edged, cynical. So the next book I write is going to be a happy book, a more balanced book.

AW: Does being hapa inform your work?

NOK: It’s not something I really think about when I write, but all those things — being hapa, being a Korean American woman, being “local” in Hawai’i — all that gets filtered through my work. I try and leave those identity labels behind and work on just the story, but when I go back, I can see how hapa characters come out in Fox Girl, for example, which is filled with hapa characters in a no-man’s land, who serve as the buffer between Korean and American societies. Only after I’ve written can I see the effect.

AW: What’s up next?

NOK: It’s a follow-up to Fox Girl — you can see a glimpse into a sequel in the epilogue. It will again be linked to both Fox Girl and Comfort Woman. I have to think about how it will be different, with a new perspective, a new shift. And I do I see the three as a trilogy.