From Grass. © Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. Translation © 2019 by Janet Hong. Forthcoming 2019 from Drawn & Quarterly. By arrangement with Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.
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From Grass. © Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. Translation © 2019 by Janet Hong. Forthcoming 2019 from Drawn & Quarterly. By arrangement with Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.
From Grass. © Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. Translation © 2019 by Janet Hong. Forthcoming 2019 from Drawn & Quarterly. By arrangement with Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.
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.
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:
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:
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.
Before and during World War II, the nation of Japan occupied Korea. The novel Grass tells the true story of a Korean girl’s life during that era, in her own words.
Ok-sun: Name of the narrator, the oldest daughter in the family.
Okja: Ok-sun’s sister.
Aigo: “Oh, dear” or “Oh, my gosh” in Korean, pronounced something like “a-eeko.” (See the Context tab for details.)
“Comfort woman”: A Japanese term for a girl or woman forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during World War II.
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was born in the town of Goheung in Jeolla Province, a town famous for its beautiful mountains and sea. Her graphic novels include The Song of My Father, Jiseul, and Kogaeyi, which have been translated and published in France. She also wrote and illustrated The Baby Hanyeo Okrang Goes to Dokdo, A Day with My Grandpa, and My Mother Kang Geumsun. She received the Best Creative Manhwa Award for her short manhwa “Sister Mija,” about a comfort woman. She has had exhibitions of her works in Korea and Europe since 2012, and her graphic novels and manhwa deal mostly with people who are outcasts or marginalized.
Photo credit: Laura Pak
Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. Her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale was a finalist for both the 2018 PEN Translation Prize and the 2018 National Translation Award. She has also translated Ha Seong-nan’s Flowers of Mold and Ancco’s Bad Friends.
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.”
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.
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:
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 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:
**For Teaching Idea 1
Elsewhere:
**For Teaching Idea 1
On WWB Campus:
Elsewhere: Maus, by Art Spiegelman, graphic oral history of the author’s father’s experience of the Holocaust
**For Teaching Idea 1
Literature Elsewhere:
Fiction:
Nonfiction on Family Separation in Korea and the U.S.:
**For Teaching Idea 2
Slaves of Moscow: also a work of graphic nonfiction, about a recent case in Russia
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.
From Grass. © Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. Translation © 2019 by Janet Hong. Forthcoming 2019 from Drawn & Quarterly. By arrangement with Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.