Baring the Scars of Shame

Usually, when it comes to conducting interviews, a tape recorder is merely a tool of the trade. In the case of South Korea-born playwright Chungmi Kim, however, the inexpensive little machine placed on the table at Du Par’s, tucked between the playwright’s healthy plate of fresh fish and her interviewer’s slab of pie, triggers a surprising flood of emotions.

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 will have its world premiere Wednesday at the David Henry Hwang Theatre in downtown’s Little Tokyo, presented by East West Players.

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% 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 1995, Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama issued an apology to the former comfort women, and the Japanese government initiated a special fund, to be made up of individual and corporate donations, to collect enough money to pay each woman who had served as a sex slave slightly less than $23,000--a sum close to the amount paid by the United States to citizens of Japanese descent who had been placed in internment camps during World War II.

Through the fund, Japan paid about $760,000 to former sex slaves, but many refused to take the money, believing that the private funding arrangement allowed Japan to sidestep its official responsibility. Then, in April 1998, a Japanese court ruled that the government must pay compensation of $2,272 to three South Korean sex slaves. One of the plaintiffs, 79-year-old Lee Sun Dok, called the amount an “insult,” and attorneys for the three women plan an appeal.

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 continuing 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 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 USC’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.

“This is not easy subject matter for any theater to do,” Kim says, adding that East West Players has many Japanese American board members and the majority of its subscribers are of Japanese and Chinese descent.

“I was nervous about it, but I was surprised to find that these Japanese Americans were more than willing to work with this play, because they know it’s an important issue. They are Americans--they are Japanese Americans--and they look at this as a human rights issue. I love America, because it is still the freest country, especially for women. Also, this is a humanitarian society. That is why this play is getting attention from the mainstream.”

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.

The theater plans several audience discussions after Thursday night performances, and the theater has invited a former comfort woman, who will be in the United States to speak at Stanford University, to attend the opening-night performance and after-party.

“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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As much as playwright Kim is dedicated to her role as the voice of the silent comfort women, she is nearly as skittish about tape recorders and revealing details of her own life as the women she tried to interview in Korea. “I am such a secretive person,” she confesses.

What at first appears to be secretiveness, however, later reveals itself as fear of being misunderstood in a culture that tends to see her through her race and gender before anything else. She does not like to dwell on racial discrimination, but offers limited comment to explain why she made the decision to devote her life to writing about her native country in English--as a cultural ambassador dedicated to eradicating prejudice by attacking ignorance.

“I did not grow up in a country with any racial discrimination, because we have just one race,” she says. “Unfortunately, the L.A. riots taught me something. It forced me to see how other people viewed the Korean Americans, and me--no matter how long I have lived in this country, no matter how hard I have tried to assimilate, and how I wanted to be accepted by the society, meaning the mainstream.

“I’m a foreigner to them. I have an accent, my value system is different, my face is Asian.”

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Kim has struggled to learn how to express herself in a second language. “I spoke so little English, how am I going to write?” she says of her decision to study playwriting at UCLA.

“At that time, I had to develop my own style and my own methods to express what I wanted to say. When you are not fluent in a foreign language, you have to write it simply, with emotion. I think even to this day, this is my way of writing--I take something that is very complex and boil it down to its simplest form.”

The youngest daughter among nine children of a wealthy businessman, Kim had no contact with comfort women until she began her research. But she has reason to empathize with the pain of keeping secrets. She tells of a family tragedy hidden so deep it is almost forgotten.

An older sister, who also dreamed of attending a university and becoming a writer, committed suicide when Kim was in her teens. Kim believes that the family pressure and rigid societal tradition that dictated her sister become a wife and mother led to her death.

In the closed Confucian society of the time, suicide was something forbidden to be discussed. Kim’s father felt betrayed and shamed by his daughter’s defiant act.

By the time Kim was college age, her father had died, and she was the only one of five daughters allowed to attend college and pursue a career.

“My father was a Buddhist and very much influenced by the Confucian creed,” Kim says. “He was very devoted to the family, but very, very strict. [My sister] was kind of trapped, and she rebelled against that society.

“Even though my writing career started from a dream, my sister’s death had something to do with it,” Kim says thoughtfully. “I was in my teens, and very, very sensitive, and the tragedy of her death was imprinted on me for the rest of my life.

“I was not ashamed of her, but I think I had this silent rage in me. It is how I could get at the emotions, the depth, I needed to write this play.”

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“Hanako,” David Henry Hwang Theatre at the Union Center for the Arts, 120 N. Judge John Aiso St., Little Tokyo. Wednesday-April 25, Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m.; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets, $17-$27. Telecharge, (800) 233-3123.