2 Recuperating Wretched Lives: Asian Sex Workers and the Underside of Nation Building

Remembering the Ah Ku

In This Place Called Absence, Lydia Kwa links this early period of migration and intensive globalization with the present moment by evoking the lives of these Chinese prostitutes who lived in Singapore at the beginning of the twentieth century through the imagination and reading of a contemporary clinical psychologist, the book’s protagonist, Wu Lan Lim. Kwa uses a double time scheme to suggest parallels between the lives of Wu Lan, a Singaporean immigrant who practices in Vancouver in the 1990s, and two ah ku women who lived almost a hundred years before her. Although Kwa herself says that she left Singapore in 1980 and does not return home often (Karamcheti, “Singapore on My Mind,” 24), the protagonist of her novel maintains many ties to her family in Singapore, which are facilitated by globality. For example, Wu Lan makes and receives long distance calls from her mother and brother, jet travel enables her to attend her father’s funeral in Singapore, and she is able to do research on nineteenth-century prostitutes in Malaysia in the state-of-the art Vancouver Public Library. In her mind, she constantly flits back and forth between her memories of her father and mother in Singapore and her present state of loneliness in Canada. She, like the two ah ku women, leads a transnational life, as defined by Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc. For them, transnationalism refers to the “processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement [ . . . ]. Many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders” (Nations Unbound, 7). Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc develop the term “transmigrants” to describe “immigrants who develop and maintain multiple relationships—familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political—that span borders” (7). Like Wu Lan, the two ah ku women can be called transmigrants. They have vivid memories of their childhoods and maintain strong ties to their families back in their country of origin. Lee Ah Choi, for example, sends money to her family, taking her “packet to the remittance man” every month and watching him translate her words into “neat, black strokes and dots” for her (This Place Called Absence, 57). In spite of her unpleasant life as a prostitute, she notes with some pride, “I haven’t forgotten my first family, their reliance on me” (57). Wimmer and Glick Schiller note that, in a pattern similar to that demonstrated by today’s transnational migrant workers, during the first phase of globalization, “remittances from abroad were understood to be a significant part of the economies of many regions” (“Methodological Nationalism and Beyond,” 315).

All three women in Kwa’s novel—Wu Lan and the two prostitutes from a century ago—are transnational sojourners who have been separated from their families, have moved way from their birthplaces, but still maintain close ties to their homeland. They are all travelers but are marginal figures in their adopted countries because they are lesbians and do not conform to the Confucian patriarchal norms of being dutiful wives and obedient daughters. Their lives are touched in some form or another by suicide, violence, and death. This structure, using the mix of past and present, infuses a sense of contemporaneity and relevance into the historical narrative of the forgotten ah ku prostitutes, women whose individual biographies have not been included in standard historical or fictional accounts of Singapore. Kwa uses the voices of these three women, occasionally interspersed by the narrative of Wu Lan’s mother, Mahmee, to tell intertwining stories of dislocation, desire, loss, and remembrance.

Although the life of contemporary Wu Lan in Vancouver is drastically different from the lives of the ah ku women in Singapore at the turn of the past century, Kwa links their narratives by employing a number of devices. She uses objects, such as the brocade slippers that appear in more than one narrative, and references to a time, such as the ghost month of August, or a place, such as a Buddhist temple, to link 1908 Singapore to 1994 Singapore and Vancouver. Additionally, motifs such as freedom, escape, and death recur. Family bonds—paternal and maternal love—are mentioned in each of the three narratives, but familial relations are depicted with some ambivalence. One central theme that further links the three stories is memory and remembering. When the novel opens, it is Remembrance Day 1994 in Canada, and Wu Lan is thinking about her father’s recent death by suicide as well as the meaning of the holiday.2 She says, “back home in Singapore, nobody commemorates the world wars” (This Place Called Absence, 3). Don Goellnicht insightfully notes: “It is not that Singapore did not experience World War II but that it did so as a colonial protectorate of Britain, occupied by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945; in other words it was doubly colonized during World War II, so military prowess cannot be manufactured into a national myth of maturing into a modern nation as it was in Canada” (“Forays into Acts of Transformation,” 173). Both individual and collective memory is important to Wu Lan and in the novel, because it is only through remembering the past that Wu Lan and the two prostitutes are able to make sense of their lives and able eventually to reconcile their losses. Through Kwa’s deliberate act of reconstructing this past, we become aware of these events in history. Significantly, the public act of remembrance does not always correlate with what one remembers in private. What Wu Lan recollects on Remembrance Day is not what the members of the Canadian Legion reflect upon, and what one remembers or knows about Singapore at the beginning of the past century is not what the ah ku women Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui are concerned about. What becomes important in the novel is the working of the characters’ inner subjectivity, and by focusing on the private and the everyday Kwa provides a place for the psychic survival of lost subjects. Kelly Oliver notes that “to conceive of oneself as a subject is to have the ability to address oneself to another, real or imaginary, actual or potential. Subjectivity is the result of, and depends on, the process of witnessing—address-ability and response-ability” (Witnessing, 17). Thus, for Wu Lan the act of remembrance functions as an act of witnessing, for we become the listeners and witnesses to the connected narratives of trauma that unfold in the novel.

Wu Lan is a reluctant witness, haunted by her own troubles. On medical leave after her father’s suicide, she is recovering from depression herself and questioning the validity of her career and life. She reflects, “I’d lost confidence in my ability to help people find a way past their powerlessness” (This Place Called Absence, 98). She feels that she has developed “an increasing resentment, an intolerance for the suffering of others,” and is envious of “others’ ability to express their needs” (98). On the brink of collapse and obsessed with ways to die, part of what haunts Wu Lan is a feeling of guilt, a nagging sense that she might have prevented her father’s “wordless, private suicide” (17). This seemingly inexplicable death leads her to probe and imagine other people’s wasted lives. She comes across James Francis Warren’s account of prostitutes who were bought, kidnapped, or lured away from mainland China and Japan to work in the brothels of Singapore. Warren’s version includes many facts and figures—on the extreme poverty in farming communities in southern China and in the Amakusa Islands of Japan, on the numbers of daughters sold to help the rest of the family survive; on the numbers of brothels and prostitutes in Singapore, on the numbers of those who became sick with diseases and why; and on those who committed suicide. In Wu Lan’s fantasy and in her re-creation of the lives of two of these prostitutes, whose names are found in Warren’s book, she not only changes the ending of the life of one of the prostitutes as given in the coroner’s records but fills in details of the prostitutes’ families, their past histories before arriving in Singapore, and their aspirations and yearnings while they work as ah ku. By so doing she preserves them from obscurity and rescues them from the seeming purposelessness of their lives as noted in the short entries on official documents. She renders nameless victims into heroes of a sort.

In his study of ah ku (Chinese prostitutes) and karayuki-san (Japanese prostitutes) in Singapore, Warren notes that more than three thousand girls and women were sent from China and Japan to work in brothels in the period between 1887 and 1894 (“Ah Ku” and “Karayukisan,” 74). By 1894, an average of about nine hundred Chinese women were entering the city’s brothels per year (74). Their working conditions were extremely poor; most of them were virtual slaves to their kwai po (brothel keepers), who were in charge of them and to whom they were indebted (53). Many of these women eventually caught sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and syphilis, and they were regarded as criminals. Warren notes that the medical profession at the time “showed little genuine interest or concern in the ah ku as real people, often condemning them as ‘prostitutes’—women who were morally degraded and unfit, and as such not worthy of their help or consideration under the circumstances” (144). In their reports “there is no sense of compassion or pity” (144). The doctors described Chinese women who contracted venereal diseases as “beasts, mindless and sub-human” (144). The attitude of the colonial government was mixed: these women were necessary to meet the needs of the male Chinese coolie laborers, but British, Dutch, and other European soldiers and seamen were warned against contracting diseases from them. For the most part, the Chinese women were largely confined to their brothels; their pastimes were restricted to gambling, their bodily pains lessened only by smoking opium. A large number of them died young, from disease, violence, or suicide.3

In her representation of these ah ku prostitutes, Kwa combats the Victorian paternalistic attitudes of the medical profession and the colonial government by allowing the ah ku to speak for themselves. Kwa uses the factual information from Warren and weaves out of it a convincing, realistic background and life for the two ah ku prostitutes. The tendency to see them as distant others is minimized through their first-person narratives, enabling us to see the way they negotiate the distance between their own desires, the expectations of their brothel keepers, and the nineteenth-century view of them as dispensable commodities who existed in society’s margins. For example, Lee Ah Choi, who appears in the appendix of Warren’s book as a Cantonese woman of twenty-two who worked for a year at 61 Upper Hokkien Street and died in 1908 (“Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 391), has dreams of living another life in Kwa’s version of her story. She is the eldest daughter of a poor farmer in a village near the town of Xiaolan who was sold for “three sacks of rice” (This Place Called Absence, 22). Although she is not proud of what she does, she does not wish to return to her village life of mosquitoes, caked mud, and watery gruel. She dreams of a life of luxury: “of saving enough for that lilac silk purse inlaid with pearls, eyes of the phoenix, and black velvet shoes from Shanghai, the kind women wear to banquets with their rich husbands [. . .], of gold bangles as thick as my thumb, of expensive hair ornaments that glitter like stars in my sea of black” (9). Her closely guarded secret, that she has saved some two hundred dollars in tips underneath the straw mat of her bed, is her means of asserting her independence but later becomes a source of misery for her. Every month, even though she dutifully sends her packet of money to her family in China, she hopes that a man will take her away from her life as a prostitute: “either a man who adores me, or a man who makes me pregnant and will maintain his honour to me and his child” (77).

In actuality, the transition from prostitute to wife was not that easy. Although some prostitutes were bought by prospective husbands, Warren writes of many cases in which these types of marriages failed because of incompatibility, abuse, violence, and disease. The ah ku who were taken at a young age were often illiterate and not trained to be wives and mothers. Many adjusted with difficulty to the Confucian expectations of marriage and family. Some left brothels but could not discontinue their habits of gambling, opium, and alcoholism (“Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 332). Thus, Lee Ah Choi’s dreams of being swept away by a gallant husband are more of a fantasy than a reality, as her friend Chow Chat Mui realizes. Chat Mui, who has been in the business longer, knows that not many “customers would want to marry an ah ku”; only the ones “insanely obsessed with their women” do (This Place Called Absence, 91). Chow Chat Mui also appears in the appendix of Warren’s book, identified simply as a Cantonese prostitute who lived at 64 Upper Hokkien Street and died at the age of thirty in 1909 (“Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 392). In Kwa’s version she, unlike Lee Ah Choi, is a voluntary prostitute, a tap tang, who enjoyed relatively more liberty than those sold by their families (“Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 56–57).

In This Place Called Absence Kwa endows Chow Chat Mui with an adventurous and a daring spirit that impels her to travel and seek other lands. Don Goellnicht, in an essay about the queer diaspora, observes, “The insistence on producing female protagonists with agency, however limited, [ . . . ] calls into question the masculinist root notion of ‘diaspora’ as a scattering of seeds from the father or the father-land. [The] lesbian diaspora is truly revolutionary, a blow against patriarchy and against the organicist metaphors that support patriarchy” (“Forays into Acts of Transformation,” 160). Chow Chat Mui’s life in the village with her alcoholic father, who physically abused her and her mother, was like that of a “captured animal, [ . . . ] a chicken in a wire cage, slaughtered nightly without bloodshed” (This Place Called Absence, 12). Like the contemporary protagonist Wu Lan, Chat Mui was a taller-than-average girl, an “anomaly” in the community because of her height (15). At twenty-one she grows tired of their complaints about her height, of waiting for a man to marry her; she disguises herself as a man and runs away with her cousin. On the boat to Southeast Asia, where she is crammed in with hundreds of sweating bodies, she feels no better than a pig being herded away. Her identity as a woman is discovered on-board, and she is raped by the seamen and human traffickers. After working for eight years as an ah ku, she has contracted a sexually transmitted disease and takes refuge in smoking. After meeting Lee Ah Choi, her secret desire is to be able to run away with her so the two can work independently and save money for themselves instead of working for their kwai po. It is through details like these that Kwa arouses our sympathy for and understanding of the difficult lives of prostitutes like Chat Mui in colonial Singapore.

Kwa’s most brilliant and innovative invention, however, is Wu Lan’s re-creation of these two ah ku prostitutes as queer lovers. Through this fictive intervention Kwa questions the heternormative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in colonial Singapore as well as in contemporary North America. She allows for the possibility that the prostitute’s body can be something other than a heterosexual body and that there are alternative sexualities within the dominant discourse of nation building and masculinity. She goes beyond the traditional narratives found in official accounts and history by her inclusion of lesbian lovers. Someone like Warren, for example, although aware of nontraditional, adoptive, and makeshift families in colonial Singapore,4 does not allude at all to queer sexualities or desires. The presence of queer sexualities, though imagined, in many ways subverts the unstated presumptions and fears of the colonial government. As revealed by the June 1894 document titled Correspondence Regarding the Measures to Be Adopted for Checking the Spread of Venereal Disease, Ceylon, Hong Kong and Striats Settlements, the government believed that in the absence of the possibility of marriage, prostitution or “unnatural and abominable vices” would proliferate, and it therefore represented prostitution as “a necessary evil” to save laborers from “something worse” (quoted by Manderson in “Colonial Desires,” 377). One of the reasons for the existence of brothels in Singapore at the turn of the past century was to prevent homosocial relations between the coolie laborers, because the gender ratio was “1 female to 14 males in 1860 and this gender imbalance was to continue to exist for the next seventy years” (Warren, “Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 34).

In Kwa’s novel, when Chow Chat Mui and Lee Ah Choi reflect on how they give each other pleasure, when they think of the parts of their bodies—their tongues, breasts, lips, and feet—that are not in the service of their kwai po and for the men but for themselves, they are performing acts of resistance against history and the narratives of development and progress that accompany such accounts. Through Wu Lan’s musings, Kwa enables them to retrieve the parts of their bodies that have been sold by their fathers and their brothel keepers, albeit temporarily, and use them as their own. What Gayatri Gopinath says of South Asian queer sexualities applies here:

A queer South Asian diasporic geography of desire and pleasure stages this critique on multiple levels: it rewrites colonial constructions of Asian sexualities as anterior, premodern, and in need of Western political development—constructions that are recirculated by contemporary gay and lesbian transnational politics—while simultaneously interrogating different South Asian nationalist narratives that imagine and consolidate the nation in terms of organic heterosexuality. (“Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora,” 473–474)

In Kwa’s version of the prostitutes’ lives, although the dream of a safe haven for the two women does not materialize, nevertheless there is a hopeful ending for one of the prostitutes, Chow Chat Mui. Lee Ah Choi, her lover, is not so fortunate and meets a tragic end. When her kwai po discovers her hidden money, she is beaten in front of the other prostitutes in the house. Too humiliated by this beating and deprived of her means of escape, she commits suicide. Chat Mui, however, is of a more resilient spirit. She accidentally kills her brothel keeper and former lover when he intrudes on her and laughs at her efforts to learn to write. Because of this murder, she is compelled to flee her brothel. With the help of a scholar at the temple, whom she has befriended earlier, she is able to escape the city as his wife. This scholar devises the plan to marry her because he, himself, is queer and wants to please his mother, who is eager to see him married. Interestingly, this happy ending is possible only through the intervention of a gay man, which adds to the possibility that other queer identities existed at that time and formed communities with each other.

Before her escape with the scholar, Chat Mui, though illiterate, is fascinated by words and tries to imitate his writing. She is particularly fascinated by the character he writes to stand for her, a Chinese word consisting of a heart underneath a field and signifying “contemplation.” This symbol becomes suggestive of the lives of the unnamed prostitutes and coolie laborers who were transported from mainland China and Japan to work in Southeast Asia during its time of development and modernization. Though these workers were largely from poor peasant families, they had hearts, minds, and spirits underneath their plainness and poverty. Symbolically, Chat Mui brings the scroll containing this character to Lee Ah Choi’s grave as a sign of her love for her before she leaves Singapore. Wu Lan, concluding her imagined narrative of the prostitutes’ lives with this memorializing gesture, is also able to come to terms with her father’s death in the late twentieth century. She asserts: “I am Wu Lan, an exorcist of hidden demons. I am the discoverer of secrets [ . . . ]. I prepare the dead for release” (This Place Called Absence, 208).

On the Margins of Camptown

In the same way, Nora Okja Keller retells prostitutes’ stories and opens up a largely secret aspect of Korean history. In an interview with Young-Oak Lee, Keller compared her first novel, Comfort Woman, to Fox Girl, saying, “It’s that same kind of voicelessness that drew me to these women. Even the books that I read in English that dealt with American military presence in Korea, if they talked about the camp towns, it wasn’t from the woman’s perspective (Lee, “Nora Okja Keller and the Silenced Woman”). Both Fox Girl and This Place Called Absence acknowledge and give voice to women who played a part in world military history that has not been acknowledged by the East or the West. In Fox Girl, as in This Place Called Absence, two of the dominant themes are those of confinement and inevitability. Like Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui, the protagonists of Fox Girl also struggle with the difficulty of escaping the lives into which they were born.

In Fox Girl, a sense of futility and hopelessness pervades the destitute lives of girls and women like the character Sookie’s mother who depend on military prostitution in Korea’s America Town in the years after the Korean War (1950–53). Set in Korea in the 1960s, the novel depicts a multiracial world of Koreans; white GIs, called “miguks”; black GIs, called “gomshis”; and their mixed-raced offspring. They inhabit a borderless world of globalized American culture that is neither fully Korea nor America but both. Hyung Jin, for example, talks about the Juicy Fruit and Coca-Cola given to kids, as well as the “Touch and Glow base foundation, Beach Peach and Swinging Pink lipsticks, Coty puff powder” given to women by the GIs (Fox Girl, 11). At the same time, she is able to sing “ka na da ra,” the Korean alphabet, and listen to her father’s Korean tales of “bears turning into women fit to marry the king of heaven, of beautiful princesses trapped for three hundred years in the form of centipedes, of girls haunting the earth as nine-tailed foxes” (5, 8–9).

From the start of the novel, Hyung Jin, the protagonist and the girl who narrates the story and later becomes a prostitute, notes that she is marked or stained. She has a disfiguring birthmark on her face and is conscious of having to tuck the “stained side of [her] face into [her] shoulder” (3) in order to avoid the taunts of the neighborhood boys. Her playmate and best friend, Sookie, is also set apart from others, teased for being ugly because she is “bulbous eyed and dark skinned” (3). As a child of an African American GI and a Korean mother, Sookie is called “blackie” and “black dog” by the other children (4), placed at the bottom of their social hierarchy. Hyung Jin and Sookie are thus set at a distance from the rest of the community because of these physical markings or black stains, but the stains have deeper signification. Hyung Jin’s birthmark and Sookie’s dark features place them in a no-man’sland between white America and Korea. The physical marks on their bodies are inscriptions of their otherness and difference from the rest of the people in Korea. In the cases of both, their differences stem from the accidents of their births. The taunts directed at them reveal that even a society at the margins, such as that of America Town, had its abject figures. The people of this society, marginalized by the larger Korean community, nevertheless were intolerant of those who were either racially or economically and socially disenfranchised and indifferent to the plights. In addition, what Hyung Jin has to fight is the belief, articulated by her adoptive mother, that “it’s in the blood. Everyone’s life is mapped from the moment of birth” (50).

In her study of military prostitution, Katharine Moon writes of children like Sookie, who were of Korean–African American descent and were ostracized from the rest of Korea: “They were fully aware that there was no Korea for them outside the small camptown. Because of their black skin and racial features, their marginalization from Korean society was most severe” (Sex among Allies, 6). Camptowns such as the one described in Fox Girl are where the kijich’on, or military prostitutes, lived, a “place of self-exile as well as a last resort for earning a livelihood” (3). Mainstream Korean society viewed the kijich’on women as trash, “a disgrace to themselves and their people,” because they had “mingled flesh and blood with foreigners (yangnom) in a society that has been racially and culturally homogeneous for thousands of years” (3). Once there, it was nearly impossible to reintegrate themselves into “normal” Korean society (3). Yet, as Katharine Moon argues, the work of the kijich’on women existed because of a complex web of international forces. Since the Korean War, the United States has stationed troops in South Korea and other parts of Asia. The Republic of Korea has been willing to allow its women to be “personal ambassadors” in order to improve U.S.-Korea civil-military relations and to secure U.S. military commitment to the Republic (12–13) in its efforts to combat the threat of North Korea.

What Hyung Jin’s adoptive mother attributes to her “blood” is, in fact, more complicated. When Hyung Jin and Sookie turn to prostitution, it is not because it is in their “blood” but because there is very little else for a young woman to do in order to subsist in the camptown, which caters primarily to the needs of the U.S. servicemen. For Sookie it is a means of survival. Unable to feed herself when her mother goes away in order to have an abortion, Sookie accepts the offers of her mother’s boyfriend, Chazu. In return for her sexual favors, he gives her American-style luxuries—candies, powdered milk, canned goods, and eventually a place to stay. Sookie is initiated into the ways of the club girls and stops attending school in her teens. For Hyung Jin, the turn to prostitution is part of a rebellious act of defiance against her parents, who already believe the worst of her because of her friendship with Sookie. Her life takes a downward turn in her teens. Initially, Hyung Jin was confident of her place in her middle-class family and in her society, taking pride in being “pure Korean” (Fox Girl, 4). However, when she discovered that her birth mother was actually Sookie’s mother, a prostitute, she felt betrayed by her and by her father. At that point, she felt, “Everything, everything that had once belonged to my old life, my old self—the daughter of these parents—fell into the street” (125). After this incident, she feels that she has nowhere else to turn and agrees to work for her biracial friend Lobetto without really understanding the consequences of the kind of work he is offering.

Hyung Jin’s first sexual experience is more like a rape than a trick. She is coerced into having sex with not one but three white GI Joes. Not knowing that she is a virgin, Lobetto sells her “three for the price of one” (151). One of the men who pays for the deal notices that “she looks young” but is reassured by the others that “them Orientals all look young” (151). Because of the culture of military camps, decent American men act like brutal animals toward Asian women. Katharine Moon notes that U.S. military officials and command policies contribute to the belief that prostitution in Asia is “a way of life for Asians and that Asians like prostitution” (Sex among Allies, 37). Contrary to the strict attitude of the command in places like Saudi Arabia, there is “overwhelming cultural pressure among enlisted men” to seek out prostitutes in places like the Philippines and Korea (37). Prostitution is even encouraged by some military officials, who have their own clubs and own women (37). Thus, even though Hyung Jin is whimpering and saying “Stop” in English and Korean, the men ignore her, believing that “it’s part of the game” (Fox Girl, 152).

In that scene and in several other instances, Keller criticizes American GIs for their inability to see Korean women for what they are rather than simply as bodies for their use and pleasure. Sookie’s mother says that it is possible for Korean women to be invisible to Americans: “Miguks [white foreigners] can’t see us [ . . . ] Korean faces blind them” (23). She believes that when a Korean woman of any age uses makeup, it becomes “magic—a disguise that lets [them] move through their world safely” (25). Old Korean grandmothers can get young men who are not able to gauge their age, but unfortunately, at the same time young teenagers like Sookie and Hyung Jin are seen as part of the undifferentiated pool of available women, treated as older and experienced prostitutes rather than as schoolgirls just barely past puberty. Before the three GIs assault Hyung Jin, one of them says encouragingly to another, who is hesitant, “We don’t need to look at her face” (151). It is not just because of her marked face that they feel they do not need to look at her; they also do not care about her pain or stop to listen to her wishes. It is this deliberate act of seeing only what they want to see that becomes symptomatic of much of the unequal relationships between American servicemen and Korean prostitutes. According to Moon, the consequences of the war, “the accompanying poverty, social and political chaos, separation of families, and millions of young orphans and widows, ‘mass-produced’ prostitutes” (Sex among Allies, 28), who gave up “normal” lives and had to mold themselves to the desires of U.S. servicemen for their livelihood.

Hyung Jin eventually succeeded as a prostitute by doing the things that other women dared not or did not want to do. Because of her birth-mark, she had to work harder at pleasing the men, who demanded new and different acts from the girls who danced at the clubs. Hyung Jin became the “Hunni Girl, the bar girl called on for requests, doing what the other girls didn’t want to do—at least not on stage” (Fox Girl, 192). She says: “I was the GIs’ life-size doll, always smiling, always bendable, always able. I had sex on stage with whoever and however many marched up. I poured beer and shot cherries from my vagina into men’s mouths. I got pissed and shit on. I had oral sex with a dog that someone pulled in from the streets” (192). Her act worked because the GIs wanted to see her as the brazen freak who would do anything. For them, Hyung Jin’s performance was the real thing. But what Keller continues to emphasize throughout the novel is what lies beneath or beyond the performance of the sex show—the physical pain in her body, the miscarried pregnancy, the struggle to continue with the improvised life she lived with Lobetto and his mother in their small house, and her friendship with Sookie.

Though she was able to earn a living as an entertainer, Hyung Jin was always conscious of her lack of status in the community as an “America Town girl” (192). She combated this sense of otherness and people’s condemnation by showing off her wealth: “Though the fishwives would look at me as if I were trash—they in their grimy, gut-stained rags—I flashed my money. Enough of it to make them hide their scorn and smile at me. Enough to make them greet me like a celebrity, and to compete for my attention” (192–93). The sense of abjection from the community, however, was never far removed from the prostitutes’ lives. They were treated like animals by the townspeople, by the U.S. servicemen, and by the government officials who ran services for them. In the novel, this debasement is evident in the discourse surrounding the prostitutes. The hospital where prostitutes went for abortions is called the “Monkey House” (46), while the shops in which the “hard-luck whores” danced are called “fish tanks”(77). The fish tanks, in which women were displayed, were really “rows of boxes” where women “danced naked in the glass doorways. As the GIs wandered in and out of the clubs, the women pressed themselves against the glass, and gyrating, touched themselves to get the men’s attention” (114). The animal imagery is not only used for prostitutes and the places they inhabit but also extends, in a rather regrettable way, to their children. Unwanted babies are given away or drowned, like cats. Sookie, who never wanted to keep her baby, tries at one point to get rid of the child, saying, “she’s better off dead than growing up as another black mutt in America Town” (223). The prostitutes’ own marginal position in society, in which they experience life as a constant fight to survive disease, poverty, and hunger, does not allow them the luxury of developing a strong sense of attachment and familial love. Treated like animals, they respond by treating their offspring like animals.

Nevertheless, in spite of these conditions, Keller presents a number of scenes depicting Hyung Jin’s maternal love and her efforts at mothering. She might not be a hero in the traditional sense, but she makes a heroic effort to create a decent life for herself and Sookie’s baby. These scenes work to counter the representations of sex work that are present in the novel and to remind readers of the other side of prostitutes’ lives. Hyung Jin is one of the few who defies the predictable pattern of the camptown woman. After having a miscarriage, she tries desperately to convince Sookie to carry Sookie’s baby to full term. She works at the club so that Sookie can stay home; she goes to the market looking for the “choicest and most succulent offerings for Sookie: fetal octopus, sea cucumber, abalone, and oysters” (193) and massages Sookie all through her labor and delivery. Because Sookie refuses to name or care for the baby, Hyung Jin takes the baby as her own, naming her Myu Myu, feeding her by grinding rice pellets in her mouth “into a soupy mush” (202), and even taking her to work when necessary. Hyung Jin is not a great mother, but given her desperate circumstances, what she accomplishes is praiseworthy: she manages to keep Myu Myu alive in adverse circumstances and even takes the baby along with her to Hawai’i when she gets a chance to leave Korea.

Hyung Jin’s transformation from “class leader” at school, “the one who led the line to the yard” (9) and knew all the answers, to the clever club dancer who can “work with the audience” (209), is both a story of victimization and a story of heroism. She is the “fox girl,” the mythical creature that takes the shape of a girl in order to regain the jewel of knowledge that it possessed before it was stolen by a young male scholar (27). In the novel both Sookie and Hyung Jin are associated with the myth of the fox girl, with wearing disguises that become “a shield over tender skin” (27). Their masks are “cool and deadly,” and they are “capable of swallowing the jewel of a man’s soul” (27). In the myth the fox, in her disguise as a girl, eats before she is eaten. Fox girl can be viewed as a destructive, evil creature, but as Sookie’s mother says, “It depends on who tells the story” (26). Sookie says, “The fox girl was only trying to regain what those boys stole from her” (26). Keller ends the novel with this note of ambivalence in the story that matches the myth. By the last chapter, Hyung Jin has given up prostitution and works legitimately as a gardener’s assistant in Hawai’i. She acts as mother to Myu Myu, in whom she places all her hopes. At the end of the novel, she has thwarted her adoptive mother’s warning about bad blood. Though born of a prostitute, she is able to live a decent life. In the child Myu Myu she sees “the best of Sookie, of Duk Hee [her birth mother], of Lobetto, of [herself]—everything [they] could have hoped for and wished to be” in the “jewel of a girl who holds the world in her hand and sees it, loves it, as her own” (290). In spite of those she has had to abandon and hurt to get here, Hyung Jin’s story is a story of triumph over the devastating consequences of prostitution, a story of the loss of childhood and selfhood because of historical, political, and social circumstances. It provides an example of the possibility of transformation and liberation.

By writing about these prostitutes’ lives, Kwa and Keller shift the focus of traditional historical discourse, which acknowledges the importance of the needs only of men, be they soldiers, sailors, or coolie laborers. Women, too, experienced mobility and were very much part of the building of the nation in the early to middle part of the twentieth century, but their pains, their desires, their dislocation from their places of birth, their estrangements from their parents and siblings were not areas of concern to the governments that were running the brothels, to the medical profession, to the history books, or to the field of international studies until very recently. Kwa’s story about turn-of-the-twentieth-century prostitutes and their yearnings took place some one hundred years before today’s growing sex tourism in countries such as Thailand, but the poignancy of the tale and the attempt to give voice to the unnamed are still very relevant in our globalized world. Keller’s narrative of prostitutes in the Korean camptown of the 1960s resonates today, because the areas around U.S. military bases from Guam and the Philippines to Okinawa still experience high rates of sex crimes, including rape and pedophilia (see Transnational Institute, “Sex Crimes and Prostitution”). Masculinity and the needs of men still tend to take precedence in the construction of the nation and of militarization. Kathy Miriam, who takes a radical feminist abolitionist approach to prostitution, argues that “coercion, consent and agency are intricately bound together in a shared paradigm of domination. Domination can be best described, not as coercion or force, but as a relation of access, a relation that is embedded within a range of institutions that tacitly presuppose the legitimacy of this relation” (“Stopping the Traffic in Women,” 13). For Miriam, what needs to be interrogated is “men’s (and other dominant groups’) politically and tacitly legitimized demand to have physical, sexual and emotional access to the capacities and bodies of other (e.g., gendered) groups of people” (13).

Although it is true that in almost all patriarchal societies the wishes of men are dominant in any case, in military prostitution and in colonial Singapore, femininity is hyperbolically reformulated to suit the needs of soldiers, sailors, and laborers. The desires of women to have children, to be wives and grandmothers, have no place in these societies created largely for the comfort of men. Although the soldiers and marines who use the brothels can always return home, there is no other home for the prostitutes. Admittedly, it was also hard for coolie laborers to establish traditional homes, but their lives were not as irreparably damaged by disease, by violence, by shame and abjection, as were the lives of the ah ku who serviced them. By incorporating the experiences of real women in their fiction, Kwa and Keller have performed the important act of revision. As Adrienne Rich writes, “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival [ . . . ]. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society” (On Lies, Secrets, and Silences, 35).