“…they carried these shameful secrets hidden in the folds of their skirts for fifty years” (Cho, p.121).

If the women of the Korean diaspora must remain silent about their pasts in order to “assimilate” into American culture, can there be true healing of their trauma? What happens when there is no safe space for one to tell one’s story? Did the imperative to tell haunt them?

“Like the stories of untold numbers of others before her, my mother’s personal history no doubt remained in silence and shadow because she was a commoner and because she was a woman. But I think she complied with the erasure because she did not want to unveil herself and her mother as “bad women”… I like to think that she was motivated by a wish to protect me from the legacy by not letting me know that I come from a long line of “bad women” (exp: Elaine Kim, “Bad Women,” quoted in Cho, p. 145).

What did it mean for these women to comply with the erasure? Did they compartmentalize, shut out the trauma? Refuse to look back? What about the trauma of the “American Dream;” of assimilation? Can we ever truly shut out trauma? “This is a history she cannot speak, and the unspoken is passed down from flesh to flesh, the unspoken already lining the inside of the womb” (Cho, p.121). It would seem from Cho’s book that even if we try- if we never speak of it- it still finds ways to manifest in our lives and the lives of those around us.

I found the distinction between “comfort women” and “camptown women” disturbing. Is there actually any agency in sex for survival? Does one truly shift from “sex slave” to “willing whore” (Cho, p.122)? “She was not forced by human hands or imperial guns, but walked with her own two feet to meet her destiny. She walked willingly from the labor camp to the camptown…” (Cho, p.121). I think, similar to prostitution everywhere, it’s not so much an issue of choice, as it is a lack of choices. I don’t think she would have “willingly” walked to this destiny if there had been any viable alternatives for her survival. And yet, she never seemed to have permission- not from herself or others- to frame her experience in this way. I think the inability to compose a narrative of trauma could easily have stolen any notions of agency she may have felt.

Even within the camptowns when GI’s proposed to these women, was it really a choice to marry them? When the only alternative to a “choice” is death- is there actually agency in that? Cho writes, “Does this trajectory of marriage and migration indeed represent a way out of the camptown, and if so, to what escape does it lead” (p.133). Research has shown that military sex workers view marriage to an American as the primary means out of the camptown, ““an escape from prostitution and its stigma.” The fictional and autobiographical work about camptown life tells of another way out—death. This alternative to marriage suggests that these avenues are not disarticulated from one another…” (Cho, p.133).

How then, to heal? “To awaken is thus to bear the imperative to survive…as the one who must tell what it means to not see.” (Cathy Caruth, quoted by Cho, p.168). Is the imperative to survive not realized if we do not “awaken”? Can one “awaken” in silence? Was there choice and agency in deciding to remain silent? Can one find healing in silence?