A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

advice as spells and protection rituals. Men are absent from their lives, and after her first
positive experience it is small wonder that Beccah should become aloof:
When Max took me home that night, I let myself into the house, my hair still
dripping the water of the stream. My body smelled clean, electric like a rainstorm
on the Ko’olaus. But when I walked through the door, my mother yelled, ‘Stink
poji-cunt!’ and charged forward with a knife. […] Now, after my subsequent
experiences with sex, I am almost positive I am mistaken about the intensity I
thought I felt when he slipped inside me, the way all sound and sight spiraled into
blackness so that the only thing I knew was the rhythm of our bodies, elemental as
the river’s song. […] And I began watching the two of us making love, the way
we groped and lunged, as if from another’s eyes (134-6. “The Ko’olaus” refers to
Oahu’s northeastern mountain range; poji is a Korean word for vagina).
Her mother is set up as a medium and fortune teller by Auntie Reno, an original Local
character drawn deftly with a sure Pidgin voice, who earns huge profits from this
arrangement. When Akiko dies, her grown-up daughter retreats to the mother’s Manoa
home to grieve, discovering a legacy of Korean newspaper clippings and a cassette tape
with her name on it:
Still, I listened, but only when I stopped concentrating did I realize my mother
was singing words, calling out names, telling a story. […] So many true names
unknown, dead in the heart. So many bodies left unprepared, lost in the river. […]
Chongshindae. I fit the words into my mouth, syllable by syllable, and flipped
through my Korean-English dictionary, sounding out a rough, possible translation:
Battalion slave. […] The Japanese believe they have destroyed an entire
generation of Koreans. That we are all dead and have taken the horrible truth
with us, but I am alive (192-4).
Unable to imagine her mother surviving what she has related, Beccah remembers an
overheard fight between mother and father that suddenly makes sense: “Forgive her,
Father. She knows not what she speaks.” “I know what I speak, for that is my given name.
Soon Hyo, the true voice, the pure tongue. I speak of laying down for a hundred men –
and each of them Saja, Death’s Demon Soldier – over and over, until I died” (195). A few
weeks after this fight, Beccah’s father died. Though the doctors spoke of “heart failure,”
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