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INTERVIEW MARY LYNN BRACHT
10.11.17
www.thebookseller.com
Mary Lynn Bracht ‘‘
BY KATHERINE COWDREY
Women’s stories resonate with me. Powerful women. I feel like my mother and her friends
are survivors of their own histories,” Mary Lynn Bracht says, as she explains the inspiration behind her moving début, White Chrysanthemum (Chatto, January), which has seen her literary career come into bloom. Thrusting a forgotten corner of history into the light, and already eliciting comparisons with Memoirs of a Geisha and The Kite Runner, Bracht’s novel was pre-empted in the US and the UK for six-figure sums within hours of final edits at last year’s London Book Fair. The novel introduces 16-year-old Hana who, while
protecting her little sister Emi, is forcibly taken away by a Japanese soldier to become a “comfort woman” for the Japanese army. Reinforcing the book’s feminist thread, the women are from a fiercely proud lineage of haenyeo (female divers who harvest marine life from the ocean floor) on Japanese-occupied Jeju Island, Korea, where, unusually for the broader patriarchal society, they are the breadwinners. Despite the atrocities each is forced to suffer in the other’s absence during the war—as the narrative moves between Hana’s struggle to survive in the 1940s, and Emi’s struggle with survivor’s guilt as an elderly woman—their sense of self and sisterhood endures. “They had to keep going, they had no choice. I can’t
imagine . . . I can’t, and I can, all at the same time,” says Bracht. “For me, I had to think, who are the women who survived? Because out of 200,000 [registered “comfort women”], by the 1990s, only 250 were still alive. That’s a massive amount of dead women. What does it take to endure that kind of slavery and want to live? Who was that person? I knew it was the haenyeo.” But while Hana comes to represent the historical pain
of all “comfort women” (or “grandmothers”, as they were also known) coerced into military brothels, it is Emi, who avoids that fate, to whom Bracht feels she is closest. “She survives the war and continues to live in Korea, and is an example of the women who just got through it, sort of like my mother and her family,” she says. “When nothing happens to you except life, that can be just as hard.” Before resolving to become a writer, Bracht wanted to be a soldier like her father, who, when traveling in Korea in the 1970s as part of the US military, met Bracht’s mother. They would later move the family to suburban Texas, where Bracht grew up in an expat community
A literary historical début, the redemptive tale of two sisters torn apart by the Second World War, breaks the long-held silence on the plight of Korea’s “comfort women”
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