When My Name Was Keoko

Though extremely important, Park does not mention the setting very often. There are references to national plants, gardens, and trees that are common in Korea, but besides the location and historical time period of the book, there isn’t much reference to the land. Yet, when it appears, it often carries meaning, and represents the state of the nation’s internal condition. A rare description of the surrounding terrain reveals:

Our town was surrounded by mountains. Before the war those mountains had been covered with forests. When the Japanese took all the coal and oil for the war effort, we had to use wood for fuel. One after another, trees were chopped down, until at last there was hardly a tree anywhere. We used to be able to see green and pleasant slopes. Now they were brown, gray, dead (115).

The connotation of this loss, desolation, and hopelessness underscores the reality for Koreans.

With war taking hold, conflict in the family increases, and new strains appear both in the family and their community. They suffer their first major loss when Uncle has to flee due to the dangerous climate. This moment is a crucial element in the story’s rising action, which indicates that tensions are escalating and building towards a climax and resolution. Uncle’s departure is the biggest challenge for the family thus far, and since they are a close-knit family and unsure how to deal with his absence, it creates a rift. A sense of guilt and loss begins to emerge, especially for Sun-hee, who blames herself after Tae-yul accuses her of making a grave mistake.

An underlying theme in this gravitational moment is the weight of gender expectations, since Tae-yul believes his foolish young sister didn’t have the right to inform Uncle without first consulting him, the elder brother. Sun-hee’s character is bold, decisive, and fearless, but as a young Korean girl, these are attributes that seem to keep working against her. Unlike her brother—whose involvement in the “Japanese Youth Air Corps” indicates a rising interest in war activity—Sun-hee does not have an outlet to express her boldness. So she turns to her diary and begins to voice her anger, fear, and frustration in a way that is socially acceptable and secretive for a young Korean girl. This suppression of her character is perhaps representative of a larger suppression, layered with war, family, gender expectations, generational family norms, and cultural customs. Sun-hee, more than any other character, receives the brunt of all this. It’s no surprise then, that she must turn to small acts of rebellion to validate her own identity.

When soldiers burn her diary, the act magnifies how much loss she—and her people—must endure. The destroyed diary is, in symbolic fashion, the attempt to destroy her innermost privacy, her sense of self and comfort, and her Korean voice. Even though it endangers her family, she refuses this silence and begins to write again, evincing her character’s deep sense of justice, freedom, and pride. Her cultural and political awareness grows from her oppression, and she begins to understand the power of her language and voice: “But it was important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle’s newspaper. It was all about words. If words weren’t important, they wouldn’t try so hard to take them away” (127). More than any other character, Sun-hee is growing into herself, her community, and her power, and doing so through her passion for Korean identity and language.

But her lost diary isn’t the only form of inhumanity and destruction experienced during this section of the novel. The motif of Japanese abuse appears again and again, in various parts of characters’ memories. For Abuji and Uncle, they have witnessed it as children, when soldiers disrespected their father in his home. The scene of his “scholarly” ponytail as it is cut and then thrown into the kimchee pot is horrific imagery of how invasive and cruel the Japanese occupation is (124). The elderly father dies one month after, due to a “broken heart,” which suggests that Japanese imperialism causes more than psychological trauma—it literally consumes innocent Korean lives (125).

Each character must deal with this cruelty and abuse, yet they must also find ways to overcome with resilience, hope, and dreams of a brighter future. Though rare, these moments appear in these chapters in small ways. For Tae-yul, he seems to find it in his circumvention of the Japanese education system, electing to leave the classroom in order to work on the air strip outside of town. His enthusiasm and interest reignites his joy, as he is no longer learning about useless war propaganda but is instead applying his skills as a young man in a manual trade. There are undertones of his desire to become a pilot, even a “kamikaze,” and it gives him a new purpose. For Abuji, he must learn how to console his household in times of despair, and to provide guidance in darkness.

In the scene when American airplanes drop pamphlets into the streets—which the Japanese army forbids people taking home—the children disobey the law and bring it to Abuji. Instead of scolding them, he is able to translate the text since no one else can read Korean like him, and he shares the information before burning it. This reveals that Abuji, like other characters, is also able to resist Japanese occupation, just in smaller and less obvious ways. The message he reads brings hope to the children, who find comfort in the solidarity of American soldiers. Interestingly, this is a turning point in the tone of the story, when everyone, particularly Sun-hee, begin to regain a sense of Korea’s beauty:

What did it mean to be Korean, when for all my life Korea had been part of Japan? It took the words of a man I’d never heard of—a faraway American—to make me realize something that had been inside me all along. Korean was the jokes and stories Uncle told us. It was the flag he’d drawn. It was the rose of Sharon tree Omoni had saved, and the little circle Tae-yul had carved on the bottom of the gourd bowls. Korean was the thoughts of Mrs. Ahn, in her own language, not someone else’s (111).

The message from US Army General MacArthur helps everyone perceive hope more clearly and optimistically. Even Tae-yul begins to understand his father’s clandestine and quiet resistance more open-heartedly. At this point, the mood of the narrative begins to introduce hints of happiness and confidence in understanding how to fight against Japanese imperialism. In the words of Sun-hee, “You burn the paper but not the words. You silence the words but not the thoughts. You kill the thoughts only if you kill the man. And you will find that his thoughts rise again in the minds of others—twice as strong as before!” (126).