On visiting the Korean comfort women memorial at the DMZ
Korea by a Korean-American "kyo-po": Part 4.
Part 2: Some traveling logistics
Reader discretion is advised.
The picture above is of me and my daughter, age 11, at the Korean comfort women memorial, or Statue of Peace, in South Korea’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). No one wants a picture of them on the Internet with their eyes closed, especially when that person is a tween. But after staring at it for a while, I kind of liked how my daughter’s eyes are closed in the picture, and that her hand is mid-swipe of her bangs. She’s oblivious to the situation around her at that moment, and that is how she should be.
The DMZ is located at the 38th parallel North, where North and South Korea have been divided since the Armistice at the end of the Korean War in 1953. Tourists can visit the DMZ via South Korean military-accompanied tours,1 and learn more about the history and aftermath of the War from local docents. This is as close to North Korea that most people can get, and it was packed when my family visited in late March.
The Statue of Peace is of a teenage Korean girl, upwards 100,000 of whom were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army during World War II. Girls from Australia, Burma, China, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Japan, and Indonesia were similarly enslaved. The Japanese government has been slow to recognize this part of their past, but there is reason to hope. There are numerous such memorials to comfort women throughout South Korea and the world, and the girl above actually has a partner statue just ten feet away, to symbolize both Koreas’ suffering at the hands of the Japanese.
I learned early on in my girlhood to treat sex with a certain fear, and even reverence. One of my earliest memories is just not liking how I felt at certain church or family gatherings, and over time, feeling that I myself was somehow dirty and vulnerable when around larger groups of Korean men.2 Premonition told me to follow a houseguest into my sister’s bedroom when he only had his underwear on, and to ask him what he was looking for. I think I may have been about ten years old. It also told me to lock the door at a friend’s sleepover, only for her dad to say that he noticed it was indeed locked when he came to check in on us after we had gone to bed. We were barely teenagers.
The story of the Korean comfort women also likely influenced my understanding of sex as a young girl, namely, that sex was something that men wanted from women, and they were willing to take it by force, often in secret. I thus learned to safeguard my own purity as if it was a superpower. I realized that if I didn’t do so, someone would likely try and take it from me.
Over time, I started to wonder if there were certain aspects of Korean culture that actually condoned sexual violence. In college, I went to a Korean nightclub for the first time near Oakland’s Koreatown, and apparently my girlfriends and I could dance and drink for free if we were “booking.” “Booking” is basically the Korean equivalent to “escort”; we girls could indeed dance and drink for free if we availed ourselves of the older Korean men at the club looking for attractive young women to date-rape. I chose not to do this, as it was a lot for me even to go clubbing, let alone put myself up for sale. I also didn’t drink, so there was zero appeal.
But I did see some of my peers do this, and it was as demeaning as you would think. Some seemed to think it was part of the deal, meaning they had surely done this before, likely in LA’s Koreatown (then much seedier), or Korea itself. The worst was when a friend from a different college told me that an acquaintance was actually raped in the parking lot of the club after going “booking.”
I went back home to my dorm that night thinking the experience was more or less what I expected from a Korean club. Thus when a friend’s dad tried to proposition me at said friend’s wedding a short time later, I looked straight back at him, no more, no less, as by that point, I knew how to take care of myself—by saying no, unequivocally. After the man left, I ended up having to reassure the young men at the table that I was indeed fine. And I was.
College passed, I got married and began graduate school. I then suffered a mental breakdown. I had the feeling that most of my life up to that point had been lived unto a purpose that was not my own, purity or no purity. After a few brushes with suicidal ideation, my husband took me to our local emergency department, and I was admitted into the psychiatric ward and put on a seven-day hold. I began medication and therapy almost immediately, and transferred to outpatient care upon discharge.
And thus began a journey. There was something very wrong with the way I was living my life, in that despite all my good fortune—a loving husband, our family and friends, a career path, and relative good health, I just didn’t want to live anymore. I got to work delving into my family history and began having difficult conversations with my life’s main characters. I did every bit of homework and reading that any counselor, therapist or psychiatrist told me to do, and much more. I devoted myself to believing that God wanted to heal me, and that my sorrows might have a deeper purpose. And from the start, it worked. I began managing my depression alongside my many helpers, and entered upon a new chapter in life.
Around that time, I came across a series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle by journalist Meredith May, called “Diary of a Sex Slave.” The series chronicled a young Korean woman by the name of You Mi who had been misled into illegally immigrating to the States to work as a waitress. What she thought was her big break into a better life ended up being a one-way ticket into sexual slavery, courtesy SF’s predominantly Asian-owned massage parlors. I was crushed by the idea of sexual slavery happening so close to me, and again to a Korean woman, and decided to commit my new self to somehow work against this reality.
San Francisco has always been a hotbed of both illegal activity and non-profits of varying efficaciousness, but I was able to find a sweet spot with a few survivor-led organizations. I was heartened to join young Asian-American kids leading a “That’s Not Love” campaign in their high schools, and a USF professor leading an anti-slavery organization from his campus office. I eventually met a woman named Jaida Im, who at the time was starting a shelter for victims of human trafficking called Freedom House. I joined her board and we, along with many others, built the shelter from the ground up.
Over the next decade I stayed very close to the problem of sexual trauma—its provenance, its aftermath, and its recovery. I began to notice how often an enslaved child’s parent can play a decisive role in their child’s story, and began following organizations that tried to get at the crux of the issue as a whole.3 I became familiar with the story of a young Cambodian girl by the name of Kieu, who was sold into sexual slavery by her mother after her family fell into severe medical debt. Kieu’s story, and so many others’, seemed to highlight the issue of power in parenting, which psychologist Alice Miller examines in The Drama of the Gifted Child.4
Miller writes that all children are “gifted” in that they have the innate “gift” of becoming who their parents need them to be, and that therein lies a parent’s ultimate victory or failure: Is your child who he or she is—well-behaved, poorly-behaved, very studious or not studious, musical, talented, athletic or lazy, difficult, rebellious, so on and so on, because he is those things for himself, or because that is who he knows his parents need him to be? Children must survive, and are smart enough to know when survival means doing what mom or dad needs them to do, in deed and in thought, for better or worse. They are as powerless in this psychic battle as the parent is powerful.
This is a dilemma for all families, and there are certainly gradations. I believe that most parents have absolutely no intention of abusing their children in this way, and therefore, do not. And, for example, just because I want my children to learn classical piano does not mean that I mean for them to requite my dreams. (I just want to them to know who Beethoven is.) And so on and so forth. But I also believe that when not kept in a healthy amount of awareness, this dilemma can beget a whole host of relational pain. And any relational pain will always hurt children the most.
In the case of a Kieu, she had the “gift” of becoming her parents’ literal slave. Not only did her mother, Neoung, sell her then 12-year old daughter’s virginity to a 50-year old man for $500, she dropped her off at a local brothel the next day to service up to six men a day in prison-like conditions. Kieu suffered through two more such brothels before running away from home, eventually finding freedom through a safe house and job training.
Kieu’s mother used her parental power to turn her powerless daughter into a commodity for her own profit. When asked about her actions, Neoung responded, “I know that I did wrong so I feel regret about it, but what can I do?" she says. "We cannot move back to the past." She says that she would never do it again. But why even the possibility?
Some traumatologists believe that sexual trauma is the number one public health issue the world over.5 I am not a psychologist or epidemiologist, but have been in some sort of “counselor” capacity since my mid-20’s, and I wholeheartedly agree. I cannot tell you how destructive becoming forced to be anything is, let alone someone else’s sexual tool. It is the deepest violation.
At some point my husband and I collected our experiences and decided to become foster parents. Though the spotlight can more often be on international trafficking victims, there are innumerable American boys and girls that succumb to sexual exploitation by the strongmen waiting for them.6 That there is a direct line from foster care to sexual exploitation should not surprise anyone, and we knew that this was one way we could make a difference.
Becoming a mother opened up another layer to understanding sexual trauma. Namely, that it can be prevented and healed, and the first step is to look inside one’s own self and bravely confront the abuse that may have occurred. I came across psychologist Michael Gurian’s work when I was reading about boys, and after blitzing thru most of his library,7 found that he himself had suffered sexual abuse as a child while his parents were working as anthropologists in Africa. Wow, I thought, what a hero, going from victim to victor.
Around the same time, I read Dr. Habib Sadeghi’s book, about how his quest to heal his testicular cancer brought him to confronting the sexual abuse he endured as a young boy in Iran. He ultimately learned to free himself from his past, and built an incredible medical practice based on self-love that’s still operating.8 Another survivor in the ring.
At some point I also came across Barry Lopez’s article in Harper’s called “Sliver of Sky.” The late Mr. Lopez, a celebrated nature writer, had suffered horrendous sexual abuse at the hands of his mother’s friend, a man named Dr. Harry Shier. Lopez describes the state of his family after his parents’ divorce, and how Dr. Shier took concrete steps to alleviate the financial pressure on his mother (among other things). Dr. Shier was also very successful and trusted in the larger community. Thus the young Mr. Lopez began to trust this abuser because he filled a need of his mother’s. Even after the abuse started, he did not tell his mother so as not to disturb her. If I recall correctly, he didn’t actually tell her until she was on her deathbed. Lopez also writes about how protective he was of his younger brother, and did not want Dr. Shier to abuse him as well, and thus took the abuse for himself only. Again, witness the child becoming that which his family needed—a protector of everyone else’s feelings, bodies, finances, no matter what the cost to him. And that’s what he took into the Arctic wilderness, bringing back what he thought of humans and nature.
I’ll close up here. We human beings can be horrible to one another. And we suffer this truth the most as children. Thus though I loved being in Korea with my family, I knew that it would be painful at times, as I might see a bit of how difficult life had been for my grandmother especially. There’s so much that my generation doesn’t even know, simply because our parents won’t tell us—it’s too painful even to bring it up. They want to leave it in the past. And why blame them? Life is difficult enough in the present.
All that to say, I visited the Korean comfort women memorial at the DMZ. I called my daughter in to take a picture with me, and she did. Thank you, sweetie.
And I’m so sorry that the girl next to us had to endure what she did. I’ve thought and thought about it, and the only workable conclusion I’ve come to is to live the best life that I can, with all the luxurious freedom that girls like her had to pay for with their lives. I refuse to waste one bit.
Korean-American author Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life is a fictional account of Korean comfort women during WWII. I often saw his titles in both Korean and English in the Korean households of my youth. I think I read this after his debut, called Native Speaker. I highly recommend both.
George Hicks’ The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War is a more academic treatment of the topic. I haven’t read it, but I think a girlfriend of mine read it in in college. Likely very good stuff.
Thank you for visiting.
In addition to writing, I am also a Certified Professional Life Coach with the International Coaching Federation.
Our tour guide joked that the Korean officers needed to be good looking in order to accompany tours. The Korean obsession with appearance strikes again.
All Korean men are not abusers. Nor are all men abusers. However Korean and male were the predominant human characteristics of people that I felt sexually threatened by when I was a kid.
Check out Agape International Missions based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, or the International Justice Mission.
I should share that Alice Miller’s life and ideas are not without controversy. I think that her arguments from Drama hold up very well, now almost fifty years after the book was first published in German.
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score is the authoritative text on this subject. It has helped so many people understand the body’s mechanisms in both protecting and healing itself. For me, it turned me toward the more Eastern philosophies of yoga, meditation and acupuncture in healing my own trauma. The West is great at mind-based modalities, but we can’t live on our minds alone—we aren’t meant to. I’ll write more on this later. And by golly are there so many people out there who care and want to help. Thank you, thank you, every last one of you.
I would check out survivor Nola Brantley’s website for more information on this. She once said that “Faith and fear do not go together” when fighting commercial sexual exploitation of children. Amen. Here’s her Insta.
His library is ridiculous, and I loved it all. But Love’s Journey has got to be the best book on relationships, ever. And I’ve read like all of them. I’m serious! Check it out!