In 1991, Kim Hak-Sun became the first survivor of forced sexual labour under the Japanese imperialist regime to publicly come forward as a former comfort woman. Coerced and exploited into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperialist Army during World War II, an estimated 70,000 to 280,000 women from previous Japanese colonies were forced to serve the sexual needs of Japanese troops stationed throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Although there exists a gap in the official archive of the comfort woman, it is believed that 80% of the women that were abducted hailed from Korea’s rural and lower-class families.
With a cultural legacy imbued with the stain of a crippling patriarchal society, Korea has long had a history of encouraging sexual freedom among its men while strictly patrolling the female body by emphasizing chastity, marriage, and childbearing as their sole duty. Upon their return to a still unified Korea at the end of the war, and sullied by the forced touch of a foreign nation, these women were made to feel ashamed as victims of sexual slavery - ostracized by their own families, at times driven to suicide, and often laid to rest with the history of their traumatic past unakcnowledged. With Kim Hak-Sun bravely breaking the half-century silence over the atrocities inflicted upon her and thousands of other women, how does the residual trauma of a disparate patriarchal society reemerge in contemporary Korean diasporic literature?
Set in modern-day Seoul, Frances Cha’s debut novel If I Had Your Face follows the lives of four young women navigating the seeming impossibility of upward mobility in a gendered economic landscape that favors the offspring of the ultra-rich. All living in the same apartment building, each character experiences unique struggles as they attempt to overcome the trauma that has littered their lives. There is Kyuri, an “electrically beautiful” filial daughter who, after multiple surgeries, is employed at a high-end room salon where men pay for the company of beautiful women, often in the form of sex work; Ara, a K-Pop-obsessed hair stylist who is unable to speak after a traumatic childhood incident; Miho, an orphan and rising artist whose life intersects with the Korean elite after winning a scholarship to an art school in New York; and Wonna, abandoned by her mother and raised by an abusive grandmother, who must now contend with the realities of raising a child despite severe financial hardship.
With the World Economic Forum recently ranking South Korea 127th out of 153 countries for economic participation and opportunity for women, Cha’s novel is a stark reminder of the harsh realities that women in South Korea have consistently faced in order to progress within the myth of a meritocratic system. Kyuri, instilled with the values of a society that prioritizes aesthetic beauty, knew from a young age that in order to succeed she would need to undergo excruciating surgeries. Burdened with the mounting debt that accompanies these procedures, she laments her inability to seek opportunities outside of the world of room salons: “you work, work, work until your body is ruined and there is no way out but to keep working… you will move to a different shop in a different city with a different madam, but it will still be the same, and there is no escape.” This sentiment of helplessness in a community obsessed with production and profit is equally felt by Wonna. Finally pregnant after a handful of miscarriages, her meager income is threatened upon discovering the department she works for may cease to exist. With the additional news of a now jobless husband, she spends her hours day dreaming of providing her child with a bearable life, something she never had under the violent hand of her grandmother. Although Wonna does not explicitly display the physical wreckage of a traumatic past, Ara’s trauma reappears in the silence of her voice. During a trip back home to provincial Cheonju, she is compelled to relive the almost deadly beating she endured as a child after her mother urges her to meet the local hairdresser who witnessed the attack. When asked why she does not speak, she responds: “it was the price of surviving, things are a little different outside of Seoul.” Having grown up in the servant’s quarter of a historical family-owned estate, Ara has always operated within the power dynamics that exist between South Korea’s elite and poor working class. With those in power often wielding the loudest of voices, Ara is the embodiment of a powerless class living as voiceless vessels.
A year after Kim Hak-Sun spoke the past into the present, various Buddhist organizations throughout Korea raised funds to build what is now Nanum, in English, The House of Sharing. The facility houses and cares for the living victims of Japan’s sexual slavery, with many of the women cooking for each other, exchanging stories, and living for the future. Although at times Cha’s characters may seem stagnant in their progression towards a future governed by the expectations of a patriarchal system, much like the bond shared by the women who inhabit Nanum, there are undeniable feminist undertones that emerge through the camaraderie that each character shares.
With thousands of marginalized and oppressed communities struggling to survive in a neoliberal society that favors individual progress over collective action, perhaps we should allow the spectral figure of the comfort woman remind us of the power of female resiliency and the compassion that may emerge from traumatic pasts.