Q. Comfort Woman, is a novel which is dealing with some very strong themes. One of them is, of course, mother-daughter. And, also, it's about the story of a comfort woman.

A. Well it's essentially, as you mentioned, a mother-daughter story with the voices of both the mother and daughter taking turns telling the story. The novel begins in Korea during World War II when the mother, as a young girl, is taken into the comfort camps by the Japanese soldiers and forced into sexual slavery. The story continues into present day in Hawaii where her daughter, American born Becca, discovers this part of her mother's history only after the mother's death. And in doing so, Becca comes to a greater place of compassion for her mother, a greater sence of understanding for this woman who she always thought was crazy or given to insane bouts of trances and spells.

Q. It's also the story of a Korean-American girl growing up, and trying to understand her roots and her background.

A. I think so, and I think part of the book is -- maybe it's not so much her struggle to come to acceptance of it because during the first part of the novel, I think Becca struggles against it. She kind of denies her mother. She denies the Korean -- what she sees as the Koreanness of her mother, the foreignness of her mother. And it's only at the end that she comes to some kind of understanding for her mother, and that way she comes to some sort of peace within herself.

Q. Now you've based this on the experiences that we're finding out about from the Korean war. It struck me that somehow this is a story of the female side of what happens during wartime, and so often I think that one of the problems with these stories is that the women who experience them don't particularly want to talk about their experiences. Do you consider them heroines of a war? I mean, how would you talk about these women and place them in history?

A. I think that's a beautiful way to put it, and that's so true that there was so much silence surrounding the whole issue of comfort women, and it's only been within the past few years that the women who survived the comfort camps have begun speaking out, like in Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia. They're all beginning to speak out now. You know, it's what -- almost 50 years -- 40, 50 years before they started speaking out. And I think, you know, it's so incredibly brave of them to come forward and speak out now. I think when you speak out about something, or you tell a story about something, it brings back that event, the trauma, so that each time you tell the story, you relive it in a sense, you know. It becomes emotionally real again. So I think it's very brave and very moving that they're all beginning to talk.

Q. Do you think it's important? I mean, what ramifications does this have for all of us? When we speak about war heroes, men that go to war, those soldiers went home to their wives and their families. So there's all sorts of different ramifications of just accepting the reality of those camps, both for the Japanese and for the Koreans. Do you think that your book is playing a role in this, or do you prefer not to step into that kind of role?

A. I don't know what role this book plays. Women don't glorify war I don't think generally. This book started because I heard a woman who survived the camps tell her story. She was about 70 years old, and she said she had decided to speak out after all these years because, well for one, any family that she might have had left had died and so there was no one to shame. So she carried shame about this, you know, what had happened to her and this guilt about what had happened to her. And, also, anger that she had lost her life in that camp. But she also said she was speaking out because before she died she wanted to speak the truth and to bear witness for all the women who had died during the war. And her estimate was, there were between 100,000 to 200,000 women taken into the camps. About ninety percent died in the camps. So she said her reason for speaking out was to demand justice for those women who had died, who didn't survive. And to make sure that something like this became a part of history so that we could fight against it, fight against something like that ever happening again.

Q. So the first thing to do is to admit that it was real and that it happened.

A. Exactly. And to make people aware that that happened. And this woman was traveling to different countries and speaking at universities and speaking at symposiums in part to demand an apology from the Japanese government because at that time, in the early nineties, the Japanese government was denying that there was any such thing as the comfort camps, and, you know, secondly, if there were, they had nothing to do with it. Right. But since then they have admitted that there were camps and that they were government sanctioned.

Q. But it's been pretty limited really what they've done, hasn't it?

A. Right. They have not offered compensation. Whatever compensation came through Japan came from individual sources and private enterprises. And even that I've since heard has started to dry up from lack of interest, lack of support.

Q. The young woman in the story, the daughter, she's growing up as an American, and not only overwhelmed with what she perceives as her mother's craziness, but, also, taking in bits and pieces of Korean culture from her mother. I'm wondering what your experience is as a Korean American and how you've brought the two cultures together in your own mind and are living with it in the present day.

A. In some ways my childhood parallels Becca's in that as I was growing up, when my family first came to America, it was in places like Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, so there weren't very many Korean people my mother could talk to. She was very conscious of what she saw as her language disability or her barriers, and she didn't want to teach me Korean language because she felt like I would be stigmatized. She believed that the best thing for me was to bring me up, you know, "purely American." And so I grew up for many years without knowing very much about Korean language or Korean culture. And when I hit that point of adolescence, you know, everybody goes through a period where you rebel against your parents, and you think, "Oh, my parents are so geeky," you know, and you just want to have nothing to do with them. So my rebellion against my mother was also in part a rebellion against any part of me that was Korean identity. But through writing I've been able to go back, and I think that's why I'm so fascinated by -- not fascinated. I'm so -- all my work involves the Korean aspect of this joining American and Korean -- this whole process of kind of bridging that Korean-American identity because that's what I've tried to do and tried to go back and reconstruct. My writing becomes a way that I can go back and reclaim what I had denied for so long.

Q. You're writing novels, and you're pulling Korean culture into what you're doing. You're also using American and European culture and so on, and there's many writers doing that from many different backgrounds. Where do you see yourself fitting in as a writer, and where do you see writing going in this very multi-cultural sort of melting literary pot that's going on in America?

A. I think we're at a very exciting time. But I remember when I was growing up and going to school I didn't read any of these, you know, what we call ethnic literature or writing, and I really grew up believing that writers were like Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, and you know, Falkner a white male, and that was what American literature was. So that when I hit college, and I read Maxine Hong Kingston's "Woman Warrior" for the first time, it was like a knock on the head. You know, it really opened my eyes, and I said, "Ah, there are other kinds of writers out there." You know writers whose experiences paralleled mine in some ways, who look more like me. So I really began on this quest to search out writers who I felt a certain affinity with, and I just began feeding myself, consuming all this writing, and I really looked towards writers -- I looked for Korean-American writers like Teresa Chaw, I read Peter Huin's "Monsatt". "Clay Walls" by Ron Young. Cathy Sung's "Picture Bride". So I fed myself, and it wasn't limited to Asian-America. I also really read a lot of Tony Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor. And when I look back on all of this intense reading that I did, I really feel like I was creating a type of literary genealogy, you know, like a personal or literary family tree that I could draw on for what would later become my own writing.

Q. Okay. And what are you up to now? This book is published, it's out, you're traveling around promoting it, but I imagine that you're working on something new?

A. Yes. I have started a second one, and I started it shortly after I finished "Comfort Woman". I just started chapter one, but chapter one started getting more and more complicated, and it was like, you know, 75-pages long, and it's chapter one, but there's all these people, more subplots and more subtext. Than I finally realized that it was actually -- should be two novels. So what I've been doing lately is kind of an operation to separate Siamese twins, you know, placing some characters that belong in one story in one book and then putting the other characters in a third book and trying to find out which places and which themes belong in which book.

Q. So we can expect two books to be coming up.

A. I hope so. Knock on wood.

Q. How have people been responding to this book? You've been going out and reading -- what kind of audiences are you getting, and how are they talking to you about the book?

A. Yeah, that's been the best part about this, going around and doing the readings, because I can meet the people who are actually reading the book. And, you know, I've heard -- different people have categorized by book in certain ways. Like, um -- I don't mean the people I meet, but the media has categorized my book in certain ways, like, oh, Asia-American book or a women's book. But when I go out to the readings, and I see the people who are actually there, I've been really happy to see that it's been a mix of people. So, you know, in one sense I've heard people say, "Oh, it's just a woman's book." But then I see men in the audience, so that's very nice. And then I see just a big mix of different people. And it's really nice to have them come up and say, "I've read this book, and I really relate to it in this way." And it's fascinating to me to see all the different ways that people have made connections to this book. Like, you know, some people connect to it -- feel a real connection with the mother-daughter story. And other people will say, "Oh, I like the historical aspect of the novel." And other people will feel like they enjoyed the mystical or the spiritual aspects of the novel. And another person will say "Oh, the feminist. I really read it as feminist." So it's been fun to see the ways that they come to this novel and the relationship that they make to this book.

Q. Let's talk about that mystical aspect for a moment. The mother really goes off into a world of her own sometimes, but when she does, she's drawing on in a way what little she knew of Korean culture. She was very young when she was brought into the camp, and she didn't have the benefit of instruction, and her family instilling whatever values into her, so it almost struck me as a sort of improvised culture that she used for herself to hold herself up. And perhaps that's a bit of what any Korean American is doing.

A. That's exactly right. Right. When Akiko leaves the camp, she feels like she is so dead to the girl that she was, before she entered the camp. So because of this feeling like she's so dislocated from the physical world, she feels like she can go into the spirit world. And the spirits from the camp, all the women who had died in the camp, follow her throughout her life. I tried to parallel her experiences of her spirit travel with the Korean tradition of women shamans. Korea has this really long, centuries old, and fascinating tradition of shamanism. In Korea, only the women can be shamans, so that the few handful of men that are shamans have to be transvestites. They have to dress as women and talk as women, speak as women to lure the spirits down. But all the women that feel like they have been called to shamanism all experience this type of dislocation from life, like they've experienced some sort of trauma, either like a physical sickness, an emotional trauma, or something that separates them from their body for awhile, and they feel like that has left an opening in them to let the spirits come in to talk through their bodies, so I try to parallel Akiko's experience with the traditional initiation into shamanism.

Q. Well that was a very powerful part of the book, and I have to say when I came to the end, I was crying. The book really moved me, but it's not simply a tragedy. I think there's a message of hope in there. Do you see yourself in some way in that role as a shaman?

A. You know, that's a really interesting question because as I was writing this, I really felt that sometimes I entered a type of trance, that I was really connected to something higher then myself. And that when I was really intensely focused on the writing, you know, I lost myself in a sense, and became so infused with the book, I was almost like a medium. It was really an intense experience.

A. No. You know, I feel like I don't want to interfere with the relationship that each reader comes to the book with. Like I said, it's so varied, and it's so individual, so I don't like to tell people, "Oh, this is how the book should be read, or this is what I meant when I said this." I'm more interested in people coming with their own interpretation and their own insight into the book, and I feel that connection between the reader and the text is so -- it's almost sacred in a way, and it should be honored. That kind of personal relationship should be honored.