Posted by Vivian Lin
First a little hoop-jumping, and then something else.

The "Songs of the Korean Comfort Women" Lecture back in March (I think) gave historical background on the "comfort women" who were sex slaves (notably, not a term the women themselves would like anyone to use) to Japanese soldiers during World War II. However, the focus and goal of the talk was not to dissect the lives of these women or disassemble their stories into statistics and numbers, which is so often the case; the main concern for most people researching the Korean comfort women appeared to be the facts of what happened to them. In contrast, the lecturer had gone to Korea to speak with these women in order to get to know them personally, to learn about them as people, not just victims. As Professor Suh pointed out in class, the songs composed or adapted by the women were not meant to convey a hidden message, but were rather a means of coping with the trauma they had gone through. These songs were sometimes original compositions, or folk songs and other works that were modified in subtle ways; this allowed the women to speak about their experiences without directly declaring what had happened, as this would go against acceptable public/social behavior.

One thing I noticed about the speaker was that he began the lecture reading from the paper he had written on the subject; ultimately, while it was highly informative, the paper content did not lend itself as well to the subject because it seemed theoretical/analytical in many ways. Once the speaker moved away from reading his paper, the talk became much more natural and showed his attachment to the women and his admiration and appreciation for the songs, music, and stories.

Switching topics, I'd like to share a couple of the reasons why I, like several other people in the class, thought The Gangster We Are All Looking For was something we'd like to see on a future syllabus for this course. First off, I just happened to really enjoy reading the book, mostly for the aesthetic appeal of the prose, as Sam had mentioned in class. I told Professor Suh in my brief writing conference with her on Monday that the book resonated with me personally. This will seem silly, but I actually played with glass animals as a child (colored turtles, whales, dogs, cats, horses, fish with tiny features detailed on to them), and these animals did reside in a glass case (I didn't smash the case though). Also, when my family was making the move from North Carolina to Washington State, my sister and mother went on ahead, and I stayed behind with just my father in NC for a couple of months. The narrator's relationship with her father, watching him struggle with English, for a job, and with his own inner demons, spoke to me on many levels.

Obviously I'm not saying my life is like the narrator's or author's life. I didn't lose a sibling, immigrate to the United States, fool around in a "kissing box," etc. Rather, I felt that the experiences of the narrator, particularly her "child's eye," was something that sparked a memory of what it was like to be a child--that silly but strangely familiar idea of illogical, inexplicable "magical" things, talking to things that don't exist or aren't alive, and also uncertainty of what will happen in the future, why things are they way they are, inability to understand the "adult world," and so on. The Gangster We Are All Looking For was easy to read, simple in its word choice and presentation, and maybe we like it for those reasons, too. It certainly makes it easier to understand the storyline and recognize the characters when the form is straightforward. I don't know how well I can comment of the academic or scholarly worthiness of this book, since I like it for what it is, which is probably a really bad reason for wanting it included in this course in the future. In any case, I think sometimes it's hard to put into words what qualities make a piece of literature valuable to you.