Nora Keller - Comfort Woman

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Comfort Woman: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller
Possessing a wisdom and maturity rarely found in a first novelist, Korean-American writer Nora Okja Keller tells a heartwrenching and enthralling tale in this, her literary debut.
Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. The two women are living on the edge of society—and sanity—in Honolulu, plagued by Akiko’s periodic encounters with the spirits of the dead, and by Beccah’s struggles to reclaim her mother from her past. Slowly and painfully Akiko reveals her tragic story and the horrifying years she was forced to serve as a “comfort woman” to Japanese soldiers. As Beccah uncovers these truths, she discovers her own strength and the secret of the powers she herself possessed—the precious gifts her mother has given her.
Nora Okja Keller, author of Fox Girl, was born in Seoul, Korea, and now lives in Hawaii. In 1995, Keller received the Pushcart Prize for “Mother Tongue,” a piece that is a part of Comfort Woman.

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Fascinating, he said thoughtfully as he left the tent. Perhaps it is the differences in geography that make the women of our two countries so morally incompatible.

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He did not bother tying me down, securing me for the night. Maybe he thought I was too sick to run. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t want to. Maybe he knew I had died and that ropes and guards couldn’t keep me anyway.

That night, with the blood-soaked rags still wedged between my thighs, I slipped out of the tent, out of the camp. Following the sound of my mother beating clothes against the rocks, I floated along the trails made by deer and found a nameless stream that led in the end, like all the mountain streams, to the Yalu.

3

BECCAH

I record the lives of the dead:

Severino Santos Agopada, 65, retired plumber and member of the Botanical Garden Society of Hawaii, died March 13, 1995.

Gladys Malia Leiatua-Smith, 81, died April 9, 1995. Formerly of Western Samoa, she is survived by sons Jacob, Nathaniel, Luke, Matthew, and Siu Junior; daughters Hope, Grace, Faith, and Nellie; 19 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.

Lawrence Ching III of Honolulu, died April 15, 1995. Survived by wife, Rose, and son Lawrence IV. Services Saturday, Aloha attire.

When I first started writing the obits for the Honolulu Star Bulletin —as a graduating journalism major in awe of my first adult lover, U of H legend and the Bulletin’s managing editor, Sanford Dingman—I read the certificates of death, faxed fresh from the mortuaries, with imagination: creating adventures for those born far from their place of death, picturing the grief of parents having to bury a child, feeling satisfaction when someone died old, surrounded by the two or three generations that came from his body.

Now, however, after six years of death detail, treading water in both my relationship and my job, I no longer see people, families, lives lived and wasted. I no longer struggle over the script, thesaurus in one hand, hoping to utilize obscure synonyms for “die” so that my obits would illuminate my potential, attracting praise and admiration from the great Mr. Dingman. Now I deal only in words and statistics that need to be typed into the system. The first thing I do each day after I log on is to count how many inches I have to fill, computing how many names and death dates need to be processed.

I have recorded so many deaths that the formula is templated in my brain: Name, age, date of death, survivors, services. And yet, when it came time for me to write my own mother’s obituary, as I held a copy of her death certificate in my hand, I found that I did not have the facts for even the most basic, skeletal obituary. And I found I did not know how to start imagining her life.

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When I was a child, it did not occur to me that my mother had a life before me. Always, when I asked for stories about her past, they were about me, starting from my conception. “How did you and Daddy meet?” I would ask her. “When did you know you were in love? When did you decide to have me?”

In those days, I believed my mother’s story that my parents met when she was a famous singer in Korea. “Once on a time, I sang on stage,” my mother would boast, “and your father came to see me. He was in love.”

I imagined hot spotlights blinding her eyes, a large stage empty except for my mother, dressed in stripes and glittering sequins. When I was in elementary school, and easily influenced by Auntie Reno’s sense of fashion, that was my idea of glamour. The first outfit I chose for myself was a plaid and denim bell-bottom pantsuit, which I wore three times a week in the fourth grade. I wore it despite the hoots of the boys and the stink-eye and snub-nose from Janice “Toots” Tutivena and her Entourage, until the crisscrossing stripes faded at the knees and the bell-bottoms flapped above my ankles.

I believed my mother’s story, even though when I heard her singing to the spirits, I thought not of music but of crying, her songs long wails of complaints and demands and wishes for the dead.

I believed it because I wanted to believe that my voice would rescue me, transport me to a new world. I lived with the secret hope that I had inherited my mother’s talent and that I would soon be discovered—perhaps singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in our school’s Xmas Xtravaganza. When my class took its place in the cafetorium and began singing our carol, I knew my voice would float out above the voices of the other students. Slowly, one by one, the rest of the singers would fall silent. One by one, the parents and teachers in the audience would rise to their feet, drawn closer to the stage by my voice, as pure as a bell. Then, when the song came to a close, the audience would erupt into cheers and applause, and one man—prererably Toots’s father (who in real life sold vacuum cleaners at Sears but in my perfect daydream was a movie agent)—would point to me and shout, “What a voice! What poise! What a smile! The new Marie Osmond!”

Whenever I was alone, I’d sing—usually something by the Carpenters or Elvis—in preparation for my discovery. I would sing so hard I’d get tears in my eyes. My singing moved me.

One afternoon I crawled into the bathtub, pulled the curtain to make a private cave for myself, lay down, and sang “Let It Be,” over and over again. Somewhere between my third and seventh renditions, my mother came in to use the toilet.

“What’s wrong?” she shouted.

“Nothing,” I growled. “I’m singing.”

My mother yanked open the shower curtain so hard the bar fell onto the floor.

“Hey!” I squealed as I sat up. My mother loomed over me, the curtain clutched in her hands and pooling into the tub. The bar, suspended by the curtain’s rings, knocked against her thighs. I almost asked, “Are you crazy?” but stopped myself before the words escaped and became concrete, heavy enough to break into the real world.

“Are the spirits after you too?” she panted. “Do you hear them singing, always singing?”

“No!” I shouted at her.

“Sometimes they cry so loud, just like a cat cry, so full of wanting, that I worry you will begin to hear them, too.” My mother closed her eyes and started rocking. “Waaaooo, waaaaoooo,” she wailed. “Just like that.” She stopped rocking and glared at me. “You have to fight it.”

I put my hands over my ears. “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,” I sang over and over again. “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,” I chanted each time she opened her mouth to add something else.

Finally she shut her mouth and didn’t open it again. Then she shook her head, just looking at me lying in the tub with my hands plugging my ears, singing tonelessly, “I can’t hear you I can’t hear you I can’t hear you.” When she turned and walked away, kicking the curtain out in front of her, I was still chanting, “I can’t hear you,” though the words had lost their meaning.

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I was discovered not during Ala Wai E’s Xmas Xtravaganza but during the tryouts for the May Day Pageant. And not by Toots’s father but by Toots herself.

I was not naive enough to try out for May Day Queen or her court. I knew that I never had a chance, since I wasn’t part Hawaiian and didn’t have long hair. But I did want to be in the chorus that stood next to the stage and sang “Hawai’i Pono’i” as they ascended their thrones.

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