Significantly, issues of language and the limits
of representation are addressed by Keller in her
depiction of Soon Hyo, not just in the comfort
station in which she was enslaved, but more im-
portant, throughout her life as she is tormented by
the memories of her past. Through trancelike epi-
sodes in which she returns to her past to reenact
her experiences, the reader is given glimpses of the
atrocities endured by the comfort women. Soon
Hyo’s ability to connect to the spirit world is ob-
served by Auntie Reno, a flamboyant and eccentric
friend who decides to promote her to the locals as
a spirit medium and fortune-teller, thereby pro-
viding Soon Hyo with a small income. Soon Hyo’s
inability, however, to articulate in the “real world”
the atrocities she has experienced is a mark of her
psychological wound as a victim of deep trauma.
She declares in one of her episodes that to survive
and be a mother to Beccah, she has had to kill the
part of her that was present in the comfort camp.
This part of her becomes accessible only through
the window of her memory, a place to which the
frustrated Beccah, throughout her childhood and
adolescence, cannot travel despite her desire to
bear witness to her mother’s trauma.
Soon Hyo finds herself deeply mistrustful of
language, unable to employ mere words to ex-
press her suffering, and turns to touch as her
primary means of communicating her emotions.
Even an adult Beccah, who works for a newspa-
per, on the occasion of her mother’s death, is un-
able to write her mother’s obituary, realizing that
ultimately she knows almost nothing about her
mother’s past, and that language is inadequate
and somehow inappropriate in imagining Soon
Hyo’s life. It is only after Soon Hyo’s death that
her secret life can be revealed through a cryptic
archive of memories she has stored up to share
with her daughter—memories that Beccah must
translate in order to piece together the truth of
her mother’s life. By having Soon Hyo speak in
this sense only from beyond the grave, Keller is
making a statement about the nature of repre-
senting the survivor of trauma. Soon Hyo’s voice
is a private, internal one that refuses full represen-
tation, and she goes to her death with her story
intact and unresolved. While Comfort Woman
provides a crucial site for communicating an
atrocious event previously denied acknowledg-
ment, Keller offers no easy answers or resolution
to the comfort woman’s pain and suffering. In so
doing, she questions the capacity of language to
represent the full experience of trauma, respect-
fully suggesting that often such experiences deny
representation of any kind.
Dana HansenConcubine’s Children, The
Denise Chong (1994)
DENISE CHONG’s best-known, award-winning
story, The Concubine’s Children: The Story of a
Chinese Family Living on Two Sides of the Globe
(1994), tells a story that transcends continental
and cultural borders. As a child, Chong suspected
she might have relatives in China. It was her inter-
est in finding out more about that extended fam-
ily, and her husband’s assignment to China as a
journalist, that resulted in her writing The Concu-
bine’s Children. Appearing first as a magazine ar-
ticle in Saturday Night, The Concubine’s Children
grew into a book of nonfiction steeped in family
traditions, transoceanic familial and marital re-
lationships, perseverance, determination and the
vestiges of gender.
This is the story of a family living on two conti-
nents and engaged in two distinctly different lives.
It is the story of May-ying, who at age 17 moved
to Canada to become a concubine to Chan Sam,
who had earlier migrated to Canada’s Gold Moun-
tain in order to earn enough money to provide
for his family back in China. May-ying, beautiful
and resourceful, is forced to live with a man she
does not love and is consigned to a life of hard-
ship as a teahouse waitress in Vancouver’s early
Chinatown.
On the other side of the world, Chan Sam’s
first wife, Huangbo, endures the hardship of liv-
ing without her husband and suffers under the po-
litical regime of Mao Zedong in war-torn China.
As she raises the two daughters of Chan Sam and54 Concubine’s Children, The