In a Korean-language interview, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim explains the book’s title:

The interviewer comments that people often use the metaphor of a broken flower to refer to “comfort women,” survivors of Japanese sexual violence during World War II.

Kim responds that Lee Ok-sun and other women survivors didn’t “live like flowers”—they lived without food or basic necessities. But, like blades of grass, the women always stood back up after being trampled.

For more from Keum Seuk Gendry-Kim, check out this exclusive interview titled “Imagining the Collective Memory of History” on Korean Literature Now.

“I gravitate toward stories that feature broken, imperfect people, the unremarkable, the odd, the neglected, the marginalized and the disenfranchised.” Get to know Janet Hong in an interview with the Global and Mail, or read the Twitter feed of the self-described “translator, writer, mama bear.”

Listen to pronunciations of the Korean terms in this story, read aloud by WWB Campus graduate intern Olan Munson.

(Listen on Soundcloud.)

As a teenager, Lee Ok-sun (the narrator of “Grass”) was kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese army.

Listen to a four-minute radio story featuring “Granny Ok-sun”—as she is now called—commenting on a California statue commemorating victims and survivors like herself.

Then, in the Emmy-nominated short documentary below, you’ll see how Granny Ok-sun and other former “comfort women” responded to a recent deal between Japan and South Korea. (Trigger warning—describes sexual violence.)

And look through a photo essay that also includes photographs of Ok-sun: “70 years on, the “comfort women” speak out so the truth won’t die,” published by Amnesty International. Photographer Paula Allen comments:

“I photographed them because they wanted me to. They were presenting evidence, remembering, both their voices and bodies speaking of the truth.”

(The essay includes descriptions of sexual violence.)

Finally, look at a map of the so-called “comfort stations” where girls and women were imprisoned and raped.

Brother Anthony of Taizé

Read what Brother Anthony of Taizé writes about “Grass” in his introduction to Korean literature:

In the section “Leaving Home,” the graphic oral history Grass opens with a rural family planning the adoption of the oldest daughter by another set of parents. In earlier times, farming families usually had many children: six, eight, or even more. Poverty often forced such families to put up children for adoption. Many Korean babies were sent abroad to affluent countries, but in Grass, the little girl will be living with a childless family in a large town. She thinks she will finally be able to go to school, but the drawings and text portend something much darker.

Read more in the introduction.

Find out why one reviewer of Grass believes it “should be read by the governments of all nations.” The review, which includes pages from a later chapter of Grass that depicts Ok-sun’s life as a forced laborer, appears in Pop Matters.

Then, read another excerpt of Grass on Korean Literature Now (Content warning: depicts sexual slavery).

Learn why oral histories matter and how to interpret them with these online resources:

• Understanding oral history: Why do it? (PDF) from Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History
• Interpreting Oral History from History Matters, a joint project from George Mason University and the City University of New York.

Ok-sun’s mother gives her up for adoption, saying, “At least you won’t go hungry now.” Why was life so hard for Ok-sun’s family? One reason lies in the Japanese occupation of Korea, which lasted from 1910 to 1945.

Get the facts about the occupation from a Lumen Learning list of “key takeaways,” or read an article from history.com.

The history.com article comments that the Japanese “view of Korea as backwards and primitive compared to Japan made it into textbooks, museums and even Koreans’ own perceptions of themselves.” You’ll see some of this attitude in the Japanese postcards of occupied Korea below. Yet, these postcards also give a sense of what life was like for families like Ok-sun’s:

The Work Children. Publisher: Hinode shoko (Firm : Keijo, Chosen.) NYPL Digital Archive.

Other postcards:

• Children at their work in a [sic] old fashioned school
• Tōyōken (travelers from Tokyo)
• Woman carrying water jar and baby
• The entire collection as a flip-book.

New to learning about Korea?

Read about the country’s history in an article from the Asia Society, where you’ll also learn the meaning of the Korean expression, “when whales fight, the shrimp’s back is broken. ”

For a “lighting-fast compression of Korean history” beginning in ancient times, watch the video below. (Modern history begins around 3:40.)

Finally, take a look at a detailed map of South Korea and its neighbors, including Japan.

Read the rest of Grass.

Know Korean? Read Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s book Alexandra Kim, Daughter of Siberia: Joseon’s First Bolshevik Revolutionary Who Dreamt of an Equal World for All. (Title translation from WWB Campus Graduate Intern Olan Munson.)

“Jinju is bad. She smokes, drinks, runs away from home, and has no qualms about making her parents worry.”

• Take a look at Bad Friends, a graphic novel about “the enduring quality of female friendship amid a gritty landscape of abuse,” translated by Janet Hong. Then, find a copy at a library near you.
• Then, read “Lament,” a short story about writer’s block, also translated by Hong, and her essay about translating this story.
• Finally, read Hong’s translation of “Thirteen,” about a girl entangled in street prostitution (Trigger warning: language, sexual violence).

• Find out how Janet Hong became a translator in this interview, where she comments, “It never even occurred to me that one could do [translation] as a profession.”
• Read Hong’s best advice on translating comics in The Arkansas International
• Finally, watch Hong read her translator’s note from The Impossible Fairytale, a “metafictional tale of murder.”

Left to right: Lee Hyemi, Oh Jung-hee, and Koo Byung-mo. Photo of Oh Jung-hee courtesy of Korean Literature Now, the world’s only free English-language quarterly of Korean literature.

For many more Korean women writers, see this list from smokingtigers.com.

In “Grass,” the narrator’s name is Lee Ok-sun, and her mother calls her “Ok-sun.” That’s because in Korean, the second name is the given name. The first name is the family name—what would be a “last name” in English.

Learn more about Korean names in this article, which also shows you how to choose your own Korean name.

Today, Ok-sun is often called by the honorific “Granny,” or Halmeoni Ok-sun. Learn more about Korean honorifics and family names in this blog post from lingodeer.com.

• Garden of My Childhood, also published on this site, is written from the point of view of a girl whose family of “wandering refugees” has fled the Korean War
• Ascending Scales, a contemporary short story about a girl growing up in a family without much money
• The fantastical film Okja is also centered around a Korean girl’s difficult experiences (with a genetically-engineered super-pig.) Read a Vulture article about the film’s “translation joke for Korean Americans” and watch the trailer.

Read an excerpt of a graphic novel that tells the story of a different kind of Korean War refugee: a young communist.

Watch the trailer for the 2019 documentary “My name is Kim Bok-dong,” about another woman survivor of the so-called “comfort stations,” now a leading activist.

Then, look through pictures telling the previously “untold stories” of woman survivors from Indonesia.

Next, read about the controversy surrounding statues commemorating victims and survivors of slavery under the Japanese during World War II:

• From Reuters, “‘Comfort woman’ statue pulled from Japan exhibit after threats“
• From Artforum, “Aichi Triennale Will Reopen Exhibition with ‘Comfort Woman’ Statue” about the restoration of the same statue
• From NPR, an article about “comfort woman” statues on Korean buses

Finally, read a BBC article asking “Why are so statues so powerful?” in the context of Black Lives Matter protests. Author Kelly Grovier writes, “From their earliest inception, statues were less about the individuals they depict than about how we see ourselves.”

. . . On Wednesdays, it rains.

for the children they bore. For the children
they could not bear. For the children
They were . . .

• Read and listen to poems from Emily Jungmin Yoon’s collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species, focused on issues of gender, race, and violence. The poem quoted above is entitled “Comfort.”
• Next, read a contemporary poem about “a girl labelled comfort” on the website of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
• Or look at the memoir Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood, by Richard Kim, or the autobiographical novel, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? by Park Wan-suh, trans. Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein

• Learn more about the “comfort women” in this list of 12 recommended books from Books & Bao.

Read about the Lai Dai Han, children who were conceived as a result of rape by South Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War, in a report from the BBC.

**For Teaching Idea 1

Interested in creating your own oral history? For guidance, you can use the following resources:

• Judith Moyer’s step-by-step guide
• Six Rules for Creating an Oral History, from lithub.com
• Tips and Tools for Oral History, from the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina
• Resources recommended by NPR’s StoryCorps

**For Teaching Idea 1

• The Wondrous Deer of the Eternal Hunt, an account from the wife of a man who was sent to the Soviet gulag as a teenager.
• An Interview with Wu Wenjian, a man’s story of his participation in the Tiananmen Square uprising.

Elsewhere:

• Edie: American Girl, by Jean Stein, a multi-perspective oral history of the life of Pop icon Edie Sedgewick
• Audio oral histories of trauma from StoryCorps, a National Public Radio program.

**For Teaching Idea 1

On WWB Campus:

• • Slaves of Moscow, “graphic reportage,” or illustrated journalism, about a contemporary slavery case
  • An Iranian Metamorphosis, a graphic memoir of a man’s Kafkaesque experiences of interrogation and imprisonment
  • Crocodiles Are Everywhere, graphic fiction about women’s experiences with sexual and street harassment in France, discussed in this blog post

Elsewhere: Maus, by Art Spiegelman, graphic oral history of the author’s father’s experience of the Holocaust

**For Teaching Idea 1

• Hunger, a personal essay about coming to punk-era L.A. from Iran as a teenager
• Sentimental Education, a story about a Japanese girl abandoned by her mother as an infant
• Grandmother’s Little Hut, a play about two runaway children in Stalin-era Russia
• The Gringo Champion, a story about a young migrant worker on the U.S.–Mexico border (includes violence and explicit language)
• Injeolmi Rice Cakes: a Korean poem in which the author remembers what it was like to be alone at home, missing his mother
• Wizard Bakery: a contemporary Korean story in which a boy finds a new home in an unlikely place

Literature Elsewhere:

Fiction:

• Homecoming, by Cynthia Voigt (YA)
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
• Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

Nonfiction on Family Separation in Korea and the U.S.:

• • A television show that reunited thousands of families separated during WWII and the Korean War, including Ok-sun’s own.

• The Southern Poverty Law Center’s timeline of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, a New York Times article about children’s daily lives in detention entitled Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules
• 3-minute Associated Press video about the risk of children who were taken from their families being permanently adopted away
• Children’s first-person accounts of family separation gathered by the Atlantic and Think Progress (may be triggering for some students)
• A Vox article on a new wave of separations in summer 2020; the choice faced by families in detention—”Separate or risk Covid-19″—is somewhat similar to the choice facing the Lees in “Grass”
• The book Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, by Valeria Luiselli.

**For Teaching Idea 2

Slaves of Moscow: also a work of graphic nonfiction, about a recent case in Russia

• U.N. resources on abolishing contemporary slavery
• Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  

  

Only known photograph of Harriet Jacobs (cropped), Gilbert Studios, Washington, D.C., 1894. Restored by Adam Cuerden. Public domain.

For more stories about living through a war, check out Jane Ciabattari’s list “Five Books about the Civilian Experience of War” on Literary Hub.