cern with visibility and presence for each other.
“A Final Thing” details a memory of the speaker’s
wife telling their son a story that is overheard in
the next room. The speaker notes the distance and
closeness that link each of the three and attempts
to preserve this moment in his memory. This sec-
tion’s poems move the speaker more into the pres-
ent and into the experience of his own life as he
tries to capture it in memory.
Section five, made up of one long poem, “The
Cleaving,” moves from concrete experiences such
as observing a butcher in a butcher shop cleaving
bodies of animals, to musings on how the butcher
and the speaker are similarly made and how the
speaker is also much like the various animals and
parts of animals on display. Xiaojing points out
how Lee’s “singing of the world and his people
must be preceded by embracing and understanding
both. His singing is made possible by transforma-
tions of the self and experience; the renewal of the
self is accompanied by a renewal of the traditional
poetic form and language.” Lee ends the poem with
a long dissertation on eating: to eat is to create and
to live, especially for the poet, who believes that
“God is the text.” By taking our experiences inside
ourselves, we are able to fully know what life is,
even as our ephemeral bodies pass away.
Bibliography
Lee, Li-Young. The City in Which I Love You. New
York: BOA Editions, 1990.
Xiaojing, Zhou. “Inheritance and Invention in Li-
Young Lee’s Poetry.” MELUS 21 (Spring 1996):
113–132.
Vanessa Rasmussen
Comfort Woman Nora Okja Keller (1997)
In 1993 NORA OKJA KELLER attended a symposium
on human rights at the University of Hawaii. It was
there that she listened to a visiting Korean woman,
Keum Ja Hwang, who spoke about her experience
as a young girl during World War II, enslaved by
the Japanese imperial army as a “comfort woman,”
or sex slave. Keller was deeply moved and haunted
by the woman’s story and felt compelled to con-
tribute through her writing to the growing move-
ment to elevate awareness about the neglected
history of the comfort women.
Until recently, within the last decade or so, the
plight of the comfort women had been virtually
unknown on an international level and certainly
not openly discussed. It has been estimated that
between 100,000 and 200,000 women, primarily
from Korea, which was then a Japanese colony,
were forced between 1932 to 1945 to serve Japa-
nese imperial soldiers as sex slaves in “recreation”
or “comfort” stations in Japanese military camps or
posts all over Asia. These women were frequently
confined to separate tiny cells, forbidden to speak,
sometimes bound to a bed, and raped by 30 to 40
men on an average day.
Keller’s novel, Comfort Woman, which won the
1998 American Book Award, evolved out of her
determination to work against the willingness of
society to forget or exclude the history of the com-
fort women from the record of official, historical
memory. Portraying the sufferings of Soon Hyo, a
fictional former Korean comfort woman living in
Honolulu, the novel focuses on the complex rela-
tionship between Soon Hyo and her adult daugh-
ter, Beccah, as they jointly attempt to come to
terms with Soon Hyo’s horrific past as a sex slave
in a Japanese military camp.
At the age of 12, Soon Hyo is taken to a comfort
camp where she is beaten, raped, and traumatized
by occupying Japanese soldiers. She is assigned the
name Akiko, a name that is given to all the women
who have inhabited her cell in order to divest
them of their individuality. Soon Hyo’s resilience
and ability to mentally disconnect herself from her
physical circumstances allow her to survive her or-
deal until she is able to escape and flee to Pyong-
yang, where she is taken into a Christian mission.
Here she meets and marries an abusive American
missionary, Richard, and decides to live with him
in America. Richard remains, for the duration of
their unhappy marriage, unaware of Soon Hyo’s
past experiences. In time, Beccah is born, Richard
dies, and mother and daughter are left to fend for
themselves in America.Comfort Woman 53