Mary Lynn Bracht Meet the Author

happen.

That is one thing that has

been shown.

Yes, indeed.

Now its time for Meet the Author.

Mary Lynn Bracht's first novel is a

journey into her career and

heritage. Two sisters separated in a

country that has for their whole

lives been occupied by Japan. White

Chrysanthemum takes its name from

the traditional flow of warning in

Korea. The book is an evocative

version of loss and an account of

how one of the deepest human bonds

can survive almost anything.

For your first venture into fiction,

you choose to go back to the country

of your mother's birth to a period

long before you were born. To what

extent was it for you personally a

voyage of discovery?

It was very

much a voyage of discovery, I had to

do a lot of research into history I

had never heard of. I grew up in

America so history of Korea is very

minimal. I started with stories my

mother had told me, my grandmother

had mentioned and I went from there.

Many people picking up the book in

this country will be startled to

realise that anybody going into the

Second World War as a Korean had

been living under what we might call

Japanese occupation for 25 years.

Definitely. My grandfather was a boy

during the Japanese occupation so he

grew up speaking Japanese and had a

Japanese name. This is he couldn't

express anything in Korean and had

to hide that.

The two sisters at the

centre of this book who live by the

sea and do all the things you do to

keep yourself going, to find things

that can be sold and make a living,

they are in a sense holding onto a

culture which they feel inside

themselves as permanently under

threat.

It actually was. They are

really the only divers on the island

and the Japanese prise them, so they

would take a lot of them to Japan to

dive, so to stay in that small area

they were lucky and to be able to do

it themselves.

Lucky but we have to

see what happens to them on this

story cannot be described as lucky,

they undergo appalling deprivation

and are taken effectively to a

brothel for Japanese soldiers. We

see what happens to one of them

there and it is a very seeding

expedients for a young girl. Your

call theme is the relationship

between these two can triumph over

even disaster.

I feel like the bonds

between the two, one taken to a

brothel, keeps her going and gives

her hope, whereas for her sister,

being left behind and having to go

through the Korean War without her

sister, give said a lot of survivors

guilt, so that wine is the story

together.

And we should see that the

sister you speak of, we meet in the

21st-century looking back on this

experience, and thinking about it

and reflecting on it, although a

tragic story with elements of hope.

I hope so. I am glad you say that,

because the comfort women's story is

very dark. A lot of these women

didn't survive, 200,000 I think were

sent away to these brothels.

Which

is a story most evil here want now.

You didn't even know.

I didn't, I

was in my 20s by the time I heard

this. I was very confused and spoke

to my mother.

Effectively a couple

of hundred thousand women who were

used as sex slaves.

And didn't make

it back home. There were only around

250 registered voter at large

number.

It is curious timing that

this because a at the moment when

people are trying to find out more

about the Korean Peninsula for

obvious reasons to do with

contemporary politics. It is a

curious accident of timing. Korea is

on more people's let's than it has

for a long time.

Which for me is

great because I grew up in a small

suburb of Texas and people saw me

and thought Japanese, Chinese. This

I always thought one day I will

write about Korea and people will

know where it is and who looks

Korean! It is a story of truth that

occurs that there is still some

question about. For me, it is very

important to remember these women

who are now in their 80s.

A

forgotten tribe, almost.

And they

are not in the history books. Before

the last one passes away it would be

wonderful if all these books have

that in there.

You talk about your

mother being born just at the end of

the Korean War in the 1950s. How

much did she know and when did she

know it about what happened to match

this I don't think she's ever talked

about it.

When I found out I asked

and she said well everybody knows

about that, it is not news.

It was

known but not spoken of?

Yes. Under

the dictatorships, they were not

allowed to speak about the

atrocities of the past whether the

Second World War of the Korean War.

It was frowned upon, you could get

into trouble and sent to jail and it

wasn't until the 1980s when you had

democracy and freedom that it

started coming out and you had one

in's groups coming forward.

The

families must have known and they

must have had to imagine, a very

cruel thing to imagine, they must

have had to picture what happened to

their children for example but

without really knowing.

A lot of

them also had to ignore it. They

couldn't think about it, so taboo.

What sort of Germany was it for you

yourself, we talked about the

exploration into Korean history.

What about the emotional feeling,

when you had written this story and

try to imagine how Emi felt, looking

back to innocent days with her

sister and then what had happened,

emotionally what to do you?

It was a

bit course, at Lansdowne, because

customer happy moments. Also just

the melancholy and sadness. As a

writer I have to pretend like I am

looking through it in order to get

backbone.

-- but down. That is also

the potential of guilt and feeling I

have never had to experience

anything like this. How can I

presume to picture the emotional

state of people who have gone

through something I cannot even

imagine, it is quite a tricky thing

to do, doing it for the first time.

Very much so. This I was a unique

situation. I got to listen to them

tell their stories and see how they

reacted and how they felt and the

emotion they went through.

That's my

entire childhood. We should see the

title of the book, White

Chrysanthemum, is a reference to the

traditional flower of morning in

Korea. If you see any funerals they

have a picture of the deceased,

chrysanthemums left next to the

picture.

Mary Lynn Bracht, thank you very

much.