I Would Cry for You, Mommy

A Korean American Daughter's Response-Ability in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman

Bibliographic Data

ID12469168
AuthorsKodai Abe (corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume23
Issue1
Pages125-147
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Asian American Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1096-8598 • E-ISSN: 1097-2129
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jaas.2020.0000
OpenAlexW3007022452
LanguageEN
References cited14

Shedding light on a Korean American daughter's sense of guilt toward her mother, a former Korean comfort woman, this essay reads Nora Okja Keller's novel Comfort Woman (1997) as a text that addresses not so much responsibility as legal duty, but rather response-ability as ethical capacity. After her mother's death, the protagonist Beccah recognizes her own unwitting complicity in American neocolonial violence under the Cold War regime that silences Asian wartime victims, including her mother, which evokes within her the need for engagement with the temporally and geographically distanced war legacy of the comfort women issue. The novel, I will argue, critically reconfigures the idea of postwar responsibility, paving a way for us outsiders toward the possibility of response-ability that grows from within ourselves

Comfort women · Complicity · Daughter · Duty · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · History · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology

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