0:00:00 > 0:00:03happen.That is one thing that has been shown.Yes, indeed.
0:00:03 > 0:00:08Now its time for Meet the Author.
0:00:08 > 0:00:14Mary Lynn Bracht's first novel is a journey into her career and
0:00:14 > 0:00:22heritage. Two sisters separated in a country that has for their whole
0:00:22 > 0:00:27lives been occupied by Japan. White Chrysanthemum takes its name from
0:00:27 > 0:00:32the traditional flow of warning in Korea. The book is an evocative
0:00:32 > 0:00:37version of loss and an account of how one of the deepest human bonds
0:00:37 > 0:00:41can survive almost anything.
0:00:56 > 0:01:01For your first venture into fiction, you choose to go back to the country
0:01:01 > 0:01:08of your mother's birth to a period long before you were born. To what
0:01:08 > 0:01:14extent was it for you personally a voyage of discovery?It was very
0:01:14 > 0:01:17much a voyage of discovery, I had to do a lot of research into history I
0:01:17 > 0:01:23had never heard of. I grew up in America so history of Korea is very
0:01:23 > 0:01:31minimal. I started with stories my mother had told me, my grandmother
0:01:31 > 0:01:36had mentioned and I went from there. Many people picking up the book in
0:01:36 > 0:01:39this country will be startled to realise that anybody going into the
0:01:39 > 0:01:46Second World War as a Korean had been living under what we might call
0:01:46 > 0:01:52Japanese occupation for 25 years. Definitely. My grandfather was a boy
0:01:52 > 0:01:56during the Japanese occupation so he grew up speaking Japanese and had a
0:01:56 > 0:02:02Japanese name. This is he couldn't express anything in Korean and had
0:02:02 > 0:02:09to hide that.The two sisters at the centre of this book who live by the
0:02:09 > 0:02:14sea and do all the things you do to keep yourself going, to find things
0:02:14 > 0:02:19that can be sold and make a living, they are in a sense holding onto a
0:02:19 > 0:02:24culture which they feel inside themselves as permanently under
0:02:24 > 0:02:32threat.It actually was. They are really the only divers on the island
0:02:32 > 0:02:38and the Japanese prise them, so they would take a lot of them to Japan to
0:02:38 > 0:02:43dive, so to stay in that small area they were lucky and to be able to do
0:02:43 > 0:02:48it themselves.Lucky but we have to see what happens to them on this
0:02:48 > 0:02:53story cannot be described as lucky, they undergo appalling deprivation
0:02:53 > 0:02:58and are taken effectively to a brothel for Japanese soldiers. We
0:02:58 > 0:03:02see what happens to one of them there and it is a very seeding
0:03:02 > 0:03:09expedients for a young girl. Your call theme is the relationship
0:03:09 > 0:03:18between these two can triumph over even disaster.I feel like the bonds
0:03:18 > 0:03:25between the two, one taken to a brothel, keeps her going and gives
0:03:25 > 0:03:30her hope, whereas for her sister, being left behind and having to go
0:03:30 > 0:03:35through the Korean War without her sister, give said a lot of survivors
0:03:35 > 0:03:41guilt, so that wine is the story together.And we should see that the
0:03:41 > 0:03:45sister you speak of, we meet in the 21st-century looking back on this
0:03:45 > 0:03:51experience, and thinking about it and reflecting on it, although a
0:03:51 > 0:03:58tragic story with elements of hope. I hope so. I am glad you say that,
0:03:58 > 0:04:05because the comfort women's story is very dark. A lot of these women
0:04:05 > 0:04:10didn't survive, 200,000 I think were sent away to these brothels.Which
0:04:10 > 0:04:16is a story most evil here want now. You didn't even know.I didn't, I
0:04:16 > 0:04:21was in my 20s by the time I heard this. I was very confused and spoke
0:04:21 > 0:04:27to my mother.Effectively a couple of hundred thousand women who were
0:04:27 > 0:04:34used as sex slaves.And didn't make it back home. There were only around
0:04:34 > 0:04:38250 registered voter at large number.It is curious timing that
0:04:38 > 0:04:42this because a at the moment when people are trying to find out more
0:04:42 > 0:04:47about the Korean Peninsula for obvious reasons to do with
0:04:47 > 0:04:54contemporary politics. It is a curious accident of timing. Korea is
0:04:54 > 0:05:00on more people's let's than it has for a long time.Which for me is
0:05:00 > 0:05:04great because I grew up in a small suburb of Texas and people saw me
0:05:04 > 0:05:12and thought Japanese, Chinese. This I always thought one day I will
0:05:12 > 0:05:15write about Korea and people will know where it is and who looks
0:05:15 > 0:05:21Korean! It is a story of truth that occurs that there is still some
0:05:21 > 0:05:25question about. For me, it is very important to remember these women
0:05:25 > 0:05:31who are now in their 80s.A forgotten tribe, almost.And they
0:05:31 > 0:05:39are not in the history books. Before the last one passes away it would be
0:05:39 > 0:05:43wonderful if all these books have that in there.You talk about your
0:05:43 > 0:05:49mother being born just at the end of the Korean War in the 1950s. How
0:05:49 > 0:05:55much did she know and when did she know it about what happened to match
0:05:55 > 0:06:01this I don't think she's ever talked about it.When I found out I asked
0:06:01 > 0:06:06and she said well everybody knows about that, it is not news.It was
0:06:06 > 0:06:13known but not spoken of?Yes. Under the dictatorships, they were not
0:06:13 > 0:06:17allowed to speak about the atrocities of the past whether the
0:06:17 > 0:06:22Second World War of the Korean War. It was frowned upon, you could get
0:06:22 > 0:06:28into trouble and sent to jail and it wasn't until the 1980s when you had
0:06:28 > 0:06:30democracy and freedom that it started coming out and you had one
0:06:30 > 0:06:36in's groups coming forward.The families must have known and they
0:06:36 > 0:06:43must have had to imagine, a very cruel thing to imagine, they must
0:06:43 > 0:06:47have had to picture what happened to their children for example but
0:06:47 > 0:06:53without really knowing.A lot of them also had to ignore it. They
0:06:53 > 0:06:59couldn't think about it, so taboo. What sort of Germany was it for you
0:06:59 > 0:07:07yourself, we talked about the exploration into Korean history.
0:07:07 > 0:07:12What about the emotional feeling, when you had written this story and
0:07:12 > 0:07:19try to imagine how Emi felt, looking back to innocent days with her
0:07:19 > 0:07:28sister and then what had happened, emotionally what to do you?It was a
0:07:28 > 0:07:33bit course, at Lansdowne, because customer happy moments. Also just
0:07:33 > 0:07:39the melancholy and sadness. As a writer I have to pretend like I am
0:07:39 > 0:07:49looking through it in order to get backbone.-- but down. That is also
0:07:49 > 0:07:52the potential of guilt and feeling I have never had to experience
0:07:52 > 0:07:58anything like this. How can I presume to picture the emotional
0:07:58 > 0:08:01state of people who have gone through something I cannot even
0:08:01 > 0:08:05imagine, it is quite a tricky thing to do, doing it for the first time.
0:08:05 > 0:08:16Very much so. This I was a unique situation. I got to listen to them
0:08:16 > 0:08:19tell their stories and see how they reacted and how they felt and the
0:08:19 > 0:08:29emotion they went through.That's my entire childhood. We should see the
0:08:29 > 0:08:32title of the book, White Chrysanthemum, is a reference to the
0:08:32 > 0:08:38traditional flower of morning in Korea. If you see any funerals they
0:08:38 > 0:08:44have a picture of the deceased, chrysanthemums left next to the
0:08:44 > 0:08:49picture. Mary Lynn Bracht, thank you very
0:08:49 > 0:08:58much.