Graphic Nonfiction by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong

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. In the chapter that appears here, Lee Ok-sun's parents give her away for adoption, hoping she will have enough to eat and a chance to attend school.

However, later in the book, it turns out that Ok-sun's "new parents" treat her more like a servant than a daughter, and she doesn't get to go to school after all. Still later, the Japanese army kidnaps Ok-sun while she is out running an errand. Ok-sun is taken to a Japanese army base in occupied China, where she is forced into sexual slavery and must serve as a "comfort woman."

(For the visually impaired, there are captions below the page numbers.)

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Definitions

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.)

First published in English in Words Without Borders' February 2019 issue: International Graphic Novels: Volume XIII.

for Grass
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/grass

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

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.

Image: Self-portrait by the author

Janet Hong (translator)

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.

Photo credit: Laura Pak

Links available online only

Meet the Author

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.

Meet the Translator

“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."

Hear the Names

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

Words Without Borders Campus · Grass Audio

(Listen on Soundcloud.)

Meet the Subject—and Other Women Survivors

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.

A Scholar's Notes

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.

More of the Story

Cover of the book Grass, showing three girls looking through barbed wire.

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).

Reading Oral Histories

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.

A Korean Family under Japanese Occupation

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.

Background on Korea

New to learning about Korea?

Read a country profile from the Korean Ministry of Culture.

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.

Links available online only

More from the Author

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.)

More About the Translator

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."
Learn how Hong approaches graphic novel translation in the Chicago Review of Books
Finally, watch Hong read her translator’s note from The Impossible Fairytale, a "metafictional tale of murder."

More Korean Women Writers

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.

Names in Korean

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.

More Girls' Voices from Korea

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.

Another Graphic Novel from Korea

The demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Photo by Driedprawns, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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

Survivors, Statues, and Monuments

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."

The "Lai Dai Han" of Vietnam**

St. James's Square, Mother & Child by Rebecca Hawkins. AndyScott / CC BY-SA

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

Creating Oral Histories**

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

More Oral Histories**

On WWB Campus:

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

More Graphic Literature**

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

Panel from "Heat Wave," by Juliette Boutant and Thomas Mathieu. Translated by Edward Gauvin, published in February 2020 issue of Words Without Borders as part of a series entitled "Crocodiles Are Everywhere."

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

**For Teaching Idea 1

More Children on Their Own**

Literature on WWB Campus:

Salar Abdoh, author of "Hunger," at age 15 and today.

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

More about Life During Wartime

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.

Reading Grade Level(s): 3, 4, 5 and up

Key Points
1. Oral History, Illustrated
2. Children Alone

To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

Related Reading

The Wondrous Deer of the Eternal Hunt - Nonfiction

Injeolmi Rice Cakes - Poetry

An Iranian Metamorphosis - Graphic Nonfiction