A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

all. But we were fast learners and creative. […] We taught ourselves to
communicate through eye movements, body posture, tilts of the head, or – when
we could not see each other – through rhythmic rustlings between our stalls; in
this way we could speak, in this way we kept our sanity. The Japanese say
Koreans have an inherent gift for languages, proving that we are a natural colony,
meant to be dominated. […] I would sing to the women as I braided their hair or
walked by their compartments to check their pots. When I hummed certain
sections, the women knew to take those unsung words for their message. 308
One woman, however, refused to be quiet:
In Korean and Japanese, she denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop their
invasion of her country and her body. Even as they mounted her, she shouted: I
am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive. I am seventeen, I had a family just like you
do, I am a daughter, I am a sister. Men left her stall quickly, some crying, most
angrily joining the line for the woman next door. All through the night she talked,
reclaiming her Korean name, reciting her family genealogy, even chanting the
recipes her mother had passed on to her (20).
Language becomes a secret, an anchor, a shield, and a weapon. The Japanese drag the
vocal Induk (renamed Akiko 40) away and kill her, and the girl has to replace her and
become Akiko 41. After endless men and a bungled abortion, she manages to run away.
Nursed back to health by American missionaries, the fugitive agrees to marry the minister
who can take her to America, far away from the place of her suffering. Repulsed by her
husband’s repressed lust and surprised at being able to have another child, she focuses all
her love on her baby daughter, Beccah. On a figurative level, the child resurrects her from
the dead: “My body feels cold against her sleep-flushed warmth, yet she still snuggles,
roots against me. As she nurses, her heat invades me and becomes mine, her heart beats
against mine, becoming mine, becoming me, and gives me life” (55).
Her account of the past alternates with Beccah’s memories of growing up in a
poor neighborhood in Honolulu. On top of the usual problems of an American teenager,
Beccah has to handle a mother who communes with spirits and falls into trances that can
last for days. Warring with the ghosts of her past life, Akiko dresses her concern and
308 Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman, New York 1998: 16, 20.
102