A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

At a reading of Fox Girl, Keller related that she came across references to ‘America
Towns’ when researching for another project. 311 She took to writing the novel because the
stories of these women were missing from the official record. In contrast to her difficult
research for Comfort Woman, though, G.I. bars were not a denied and silenced subject.
Moreover, she said she grew up with some women who had lived such lives. In an
interview the author added that the violence she depicted could not be left out of the
stories she had chosen to tell. Having held back the extremes she had come across in her
research, she still felt she had to be real, true to the ugliness and inhumanity of
imperialism and neo-colonialism. 312 Asked about the relationship between research and
imagination, between history and story, she replied that she is not able to separate them
neatly. Both are equally necessary in her work, but she is confident that readers will be
more forgiving about the accuracy of details than about a lack of emotional truth. Keller
thinks that to look for some ‘Great Hawaiian Novel’ would be too limiting a perspective,
shutting out other, minor voices. She mentioned the token position of Maxine Hong
Kingston’s work as the Asian American text. For her, The Woman Warrior functioned as
an eye opener in college, making her realize that “I didn’t have to hide my ethnicity in
order to become a writer.” 313 Still, she recognizes the necessity/extravagance problem
identified by Wong in her own life:
Writing is a luxury that is not often an option for the first-generation immigrants.
It’s something that comes after food is put on the table; it comes after there is a
home in which to put the table. My mother, who came to America in the sixties
and raised five children here alone, never wished for me to become an artist.
Keller has responded to that dilemma by giving a voice to the denied and the repressed,
adding that she had to make up for her adolesent rejection of things Korean: “My writing,
through which I both explore and reclaim my ethnic heritage, is also an apology to my
mother and family.”
311 Reading at University of Hawai’i Manoa Art Auditorium, 04/08/2002, personal attendance. The flyer for
this reading quoted a pointed Poets and Writers Magazine review: “Once again, Keller has chosen to walk
the fine line that separates historical imagination from sensationalism to expose another underimagined era
of military occupation.”
312 Personal interview with Nora Okja Keller at The Haunt, 05/10/2002.
313 Quoted from the Penguin Reader’s Guide in the back of Comfort Woman: 3. The following two
quotations are also taken from this text (4, 7).
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