Word: comforting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most of us, comfort isn't enough. In line with the famous contributions of Locke and Marx to the theory of labor, we value the creative element of the job. Work is important to us because it allows us to leave our mark on the world, to mix some part of ourselves with objective reality. This is the drive behind much of our anxiety. We want access to jobs that "make a difference," and these seem to be in short supply. Artists often think that they have cornered the market in this regard. They think that they are the only...
Pushing the Limits of Comfort...
Keller's book, Comfort Woman (Viking; 213 pages; $21.95), is one of a trio of powerful debut novels by Asian-American women to arrive in bookstores lately. The others: Monkey King (HarperCollins; 310 pages; $24) by Patricia Chao (of Chinese and Japanese descent) and The Necessary Hunger (Simon & Schuster; 365 pages; $23) by Nina Revoyr (whose mother and father are Japanese and Polish-American, respectively). Although these books share some themes--all of them deal with parents and children in conflict over such issues as cultural and sexual identity--each author has a sharp, specific vision...
Keller's story is the most harrowing. The book, narrated in the alternating voices of a Korean comfort woman named Akiko and her Korean-American daughter Beccah, delivers a wrenching view of war and its lasting intergenerational impact. Akiko, driven half-mad by the war, is haunted by the ghost of a woman from the camp and becomes a sought-after mystic after moving to America. But to call this a ghost story is to miss the point: Comfort Woman is really about pain, the kind that haunts and is handed down, like old, sad clothes. Writes Akiko: "I knew...
Keller says her own mother was not a comfort woman, but served as an inspiration. "My mom didn't really speak Korean to me," says Keller. "She was so conscious of her own difference that she didn't want me to learn Korean and make me something different, 'the other' ... I know I went through a period of feeling really embarrassed and alienated from things that were Korean. So I write now, in part, to go back to that Korean perspective and try to reclaim what I denied for so long...