Playwright examines lives of 'Comfort Women'

The tape recorder reminds Kim of an interview she did - or rather, tried to do - with an older woman in Korea when Kim returned to her homeland in 1995 to do research for her new play, "Hanako."The drama premiered Wednesday at the David Henry Hwang Theatre in downtown's Little Tokyo district, presented by East West Players.

Courtesy of The Los Angeles Times Chungmi Kim wrote "Comfort Women."

Kim wanted to interview the woman about her experiences as one of the "comfort women,"a deceptively delicate term used for as many as 200,000 Asian and European women, about 80 percent of them Korean, who were coerced or abducted to serve as sex slaves for soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Forces from the 1930s until the end of World War II in 1945.

Kim says that "slave"is the only word for women who were systematically transported as military supplies and tortured and raped by as many as 40 men per day. Many were killed; many others killed themselves.

"She was a good person, and she was in great pain. I wanted to get the story out of her, and she wanted to tell it,"Kim remembers. "We were sitting in her small room, and I said, `Do you want to talk?' And she tried, she really did, but after two meetings and many phone calls, she still couldn't do it.

"Finally, I gave her the tape recorder and said: 'Keep it for yourself - talk to yourself, into this tape recorder, and keep it for yourself. Let go of the memories.'"

The woman, a survivor of multiple failed suicide attempts, could not talk, even alone in her room, to a tape recorder. She insisted on returning the machine.

Ultimately, Kim decided that the tape recorder, or what the woman would have said to it, didn't really matter. After several attempts to interview former comfort women, she found that as a writer she was less interested in logging the details of camp life and individual atrocities than in examining the emotional scars of women who had survived 50 years of shame.

"They suffered during the war, they were tortured, beaten up, starved - and they survived,"Kim says. "And yet, when they came back to Korea, to their own country, they were ignored, neglected. They had to hide their identity. ... That suffering is, I think, more tragic than the deaths.

"In this society, we have sexual freedom - somewhat. If a woman is raped, she doesn't have to live with the shame, (victims) sue people, they speak up. But at that time, Korea was a Confucian society, and chastity was more precious than life itself."

The story of the comfort women was not generally known until 1991, when one survivor came forward and told her story to a Korean newspaper, confirming a truth that the Japanese government had long denied. Other women followed her lead, and, in 1991, six women brought a class-action suit against the Japanese government, demanding redress and monetary reparation.

In Los Angeles, community interest in the comfort women led to the 1994 opening of a memorial library in Koreatown, under the aegis of the Los Angeles-based Coalition Against Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, a group dedicated to the campaign for justice and reparations.

Kim's interest in the comfort women developed after coming to the United States, although she has never fully stopped researching issues on her own country. She came here more than 25 years ago, after receiving her bachelor's degree at Ewha University in Seoul, to study playwriting at UCLA. There she received a master's degree in theater arts and also studied television and screenwriting. She has written and produced for TV, including producing a nine-part news series, "Korea Today,"for Los Angeles' NBC affiliate, KNBC, and several documentaries on Korea. Also a noted poet, she is the author of "CHUNGMI - Selected Poems,"and her poetry has been published in numerous publications, including Amerasia Journal Between Ourselves and the San Francisco Examiner.

Kim also participated in the 1991-92 Mentor Playwrights Program at the Mark Taper Forum, where her play "The Temple of Mara"was presented as a staged reading as part of the Asian Pacific American Playwrights Reading Series. She became interested in the issue of the comfort women in 1993, after hearing a lecture by Chung-Ok Yun, a professor from Seoul and a co-chair of a similar Seoul-based coalition. As a result of the talk, Kim became involved in the local coalition.

She had been working on a new play when members of the coalition encouraged her to write something about comfort women. She took the idea to the University of Southern California's Professional Writing Program, where she was awarded a fellowship in the fall of 1994 to pursue the project. "In 1994, I was given a book of the testimonies of these women (published by the coalition),"Kim says. "I was in tears - I was so compelled to write about their experiences, but I didn't know how."Her USC professors encouraged her, and the resulting one-act play, "The Comfort Women,"won the grand prize at USC's One-Act Play Festival in May 1995.

After that play was presented, Kim returned to Korea at her own expense to continue her research for a different take on the issue; instead of recounting the horrors of war, "Hanako"focuses on a fictional meeting between some aged comfort women and a very traditional Korean grandmother of their generation who meets them when she emigrates to New York.

Conflict arises when the traditional grandmother makes clear that she wants to know nothing of that chapter of the past.

Kim sees the grandmother as a metaphor for what she believes is Japan's denial of the harsh realities of its history with these women, and Kim does not think any theater in Japan would be willing to produce her play. But, even though East

West Players has received much support from the Japanese community in Los Angeles, she makes clear she met with no resistance to the subject.

East West Players artistic director Tim Dang says he already was interested in the story of comfort women when Kim sent her script to the theater for consideration. And the play fit, too, because the theater had been looking for ways to reach out to Los Angeles' fast-growing Korean community.

"It was one of those scripts you couldn't put down; I was captivated by it, and devastated by it,"Dang says, and he hopes the play will foster the same type of dialogue between the Japanese American and Korean American communities as happened with another recent East West Players co-production, Philip Kan Gotanda's "Yohen,"about an aging Japanese and African American couple portrayed by Nobu McCarthy and Danny Glover.

"This is the kind of play, when you walk out of the theater, you have to talk about it,"Dang says. "Since the largest group among our season subscribers is Japanese American, it will put two communities together."

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