Posted on: Friday, April 5, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
'Fox Girl' tells skillful tale of prostitute's gloomy life
| • | Author tackles tough topic with Hawai'i ties |
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Book Editor
Reading about prostitutes and teenage procurers, people with dead-end lives and fractured families, cannot be anyone's idea of mere amusement.
But Nora Okja Keller's skillful rendering of such a painful story in "Fox Girl" (Viking, hardback, $23.95) makes reading the book worthwhile.
The venery and depravity that rule South Korea's America Town, a red-light district near an American military base, is countered by the strength of the human spirit and the will to do good found in even the book's most lost characters.
Keller furnishes the landscape with the kind of detail that makes it come true: puns that emerge from the Korea-glish that the bar girls speak, deftly sketched characters like the Kitchen Auntie at Club Foxa who will do a favor — but only for a price. And she offers enough quickly telegraphed history to place the story in context even for those unfamiliar with Korea.
The lead character, Hyung Jin, who sells herself to make a life for another, personifies the impossible choices that faced her father and mother before her, her closest friends and seemingly all the residents of America Town: to survive and by doing so become a "trash person" or to stand on principle and die — or see a loved one do so.
The bar girl/mama san phenomenon is an "elephant in the room" — a thing of which we do not speak — for many first- and second-generation Korean Americans, who know that any woman who marries an American or immigrates to the United States may be tainted by the stereotype.
Keller's aim is to give the elephant substance by telling its story not with feminist or sociopolitical rhetoric, but from the heart.
