Posted on: Friday, April 5, 2002
Author tackles tough topic with Hawai'i ties
| • | 'Fox Girl' tells skillful tale of prostitute's gloomy life |
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Book Editor
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| Nora Okja Keller's new novel "Fox Girl" looks at the hard life in South Korea's "America Town."
. . . Nora Okja Keller readings • 7 p.m. tomorrow, Barnes & Noble, Kahala
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Nora Okja Keller, Honolulu-based author of the critically acclaimed 1997 novel "Comfort Woman," delves into forbidden territory again in her new novel, "Fox Girl."
But this time the subject matter is not so far removed from us, either in time or in space. It is a book about mama-sans and bar girls, in South Korea's "America Town" and Hawai'i's hostess bars. And if it provokes some uncomfortable conversations or comes a little too close to home for some, Keller is fine with that.
"I would love it if it made people talk. That's kind of my thing — to bring these secrets to light, to ask why are we hiding these things?" said Keller, 36, who lives in Waikele with her husband, Jim, and her two daughters, Tae, 8, and Sunhi, 2 1/2. "With 'Comfort Woman' (about Korean women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese conquerors), there was this big cloak of secrecy for all those years. The novel gave people another entryway into the issue."
>In the case of "Fox Girl," the subject is one familiar to any South Korean, and to any American serviceman who has served in South Korea, but less well known to the rest of this country. The setting for much of the novel is the chillingly matter-of-fact, government-sanctioned world of "America Town" outside a military base near Seoul in the 1960s and '70s — a makeshift village of bars, strip clubs, street cubicles where women dance in front of glass walls, and apartments maintained by GIs for their "mama-sans." Such camp towns grew up around most U.S. bases in South Korea.
In Keller's book, America Town is also a place where club owners from Hawai'i recruit new "hostesses" and dancers to be warehoused in futon-lined dormitories and expected to work until they pay off their debts — an eventuality that won't come for most unless they capture the attention of a wealthy benefactor.
In contrast to the "Comfort Woman" story, "we can't just say, 'It's terrible, but it's over there.'
It's right here on Ke'eaumoku," said Keller, who was born in South Korea of a Korean mother and an American father, and moved to Hawai'i when she was about 3.
Although she visited South Korea occasionally as a child, Keller first learned of the America Town phenomenon in the 1995 documentary, "Camp Arirang" by Diana S. Lee and Grace Yoon-Kung Lee. Keller visited South Korea several times in the late 1990s; she was told the camps still exist, though they have been cleaned up. Following up, she found a body of rather dry and clinical material on the camp towns, but, she said, "The women were just backdrops, scenery, and the point of view was that of the men."
The writer was intrigued. What would such a woman's life be like? How would she tell her story?
"To me, the true story has got to come from the heart," she said.
"Fox Girl" is Hyung Jin, a young woman who considers herself just a cut above her best friend Sookie, because Sookie is the daughter of a "GI girl."
Hyung Jin is caught up in being first in her class at school, basking in the indulgence of her doting father, striving for the approval of her corrosive mother. Despite living on the fringes of America Town, she is so naive that when Duk Hee, Sookie's mother, introduces the preteens to a condom (in their government-sponsored "etiquette classes," the prostitutes were taught to regard "kon dom" as a "reliable choice" but "kon don(g)" means dirtied or smeared in Korean), Hyung Jin mistakes it for a protective talisman, and wears one on a string around her neck.
But the "kon dom" fails to do its job. Hyung Jin learns that her own past is clouded, and her mother's prediction that "blood will always tell" seems to doom her, drawing her into the street life as the only way to protect her friend, and her own dreams.
In Korean myth, the fox is a dark and bloody character, a demon who, in one tale, wraps himself in the skin of a beautiful young girl, then kisses away the lives of young men in their sleep. "I do not want to become a fox girl," Hyung Jin says. But she has no choice. And Sookie points out that what the fox does is not so bad — if you consider it from the fox's point of view.
Keller's America Town is ugly and seedy, a place where literally anything goes once money has changed hands. It is a no man's land — neither South Korea nor America — where women shunned by their own culture mimic the ways of their "Joes," with the vain aim of being taken along as American wives when the military men leave.
The writer acknowledges that this is difficult material. "It was very hard to write this book; it got very depressing. At one point, I thought. 'I don't want to write anymore,' " she recalled. But friends in her writing group begged her to finish the book so they could at least find out what happened to the characters they had come to know so well.
She struggled to make Hyung Jin a multilayered character, one that even people who would never darken the door of a hostess bar could believe in, and find at least a bit sympathetic. "I didn't want her to be this nice, sweet thing, this total victim," Keller said. "My challenge was to keep an edge for her. She needed the edge to survive."
As her two daughters colored on the floor nearby, Keller reflected on what she would like their generation to take from the book (so far, she has shared only the "G-rated" parts with them). She said she hoped the children would see how writing and storytelling can be an integral part of life, a way to record life and work things through.
She added, "I hope that they get a sense of empowerment in different ways, that the character was able to survive and even find a certain sort of redemption at the end."
