Devastating Tale of War Is Distressing but Vital

FOX GIRL

A Novel

By Nora Okja Keller

Viking

290 pages, $24.95

There are stories you’d be foolish to enter without steeling yourself emotionally beforehand. “Schindler’s List” and “Sophie’s Choice” come to mind, both on page and screen, as does Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” all of which require a shoring up in order to delve into the narrative and not be destroyed by what you find there.

Equally disturbing, riveting and necessary is Nora Okja Keller’s “Fox Girl,” the tale of throwaway children and prostitutes stranded in the aftermath of the Korean War. Following up on her first novel, “Comfort Woman,” in which Keller mined the same difficult terrain of war, sex and power, “Fox Girl” tells the distressing first-person account of Hyun Jin, a young Korean girl on the cusp of maturity whose face is inscribed with a large birthmark and whose mother shows her nothing but contempt.

Yet compared to her friends, Hyun Jin is lucky. She’s a stellar student often put in charge of her classmates and has a doting father who owns a shop and thus has an income. She is blissfully unaware of what exactly goes on in America Town, an area where women prostitute themselves and even their children to be able to buy food, where Coke and other American products are the envy of all, and where, as Hyun Jin comes to realize, “no one’s free.”

Hyun Jin’s best friend Sookie is a castaway child--the daughter of a prostitute and some unknown GI--as is Lobetto, the son of an African American solider who left with promises to bring him to America but hasn’t been heard from since. Lobetto has only the years-old, worn-thin letter he carries as a talisman. Scorned by his community for his mixed race, Lobetto works as a courier and pimp for the women of America Town, including his mother.

Hyun Jin knows herself to be better than these friends and in quiet ways, lords her superiority over them. It is through Sookie and Lobetto, though, that she slowly begins to understand the world into which she’s been born and the harsh realities that are about to overtake her. Sookie’s prostitute mother, Duk Hee, tries to prepare Sookie and Hyun Jin for the rapacious, violent sex they can expect from the American GIs. When Duk Hee gives Hyun Jin a package of condoms for “protection,” Hyun Jin makes a necklace with hers, wearing it around her neck under her school uniform. “During tests, I would touch my chest and feel the packet crinkle against my skin.” Such is the only type of protection she can envisage. But when Sookie’s mother fails to return from her weekly checkup at Dr. Pak’s Love Clinic No. 5 (Dr. Pak gives clearance examinations for “women working as patriots of the Republic of Korea”) and Hyun Jin begins sneaking what little food she can to her abandoned friend, it isn’t long before these three young lives--Hyun Jin’s, Sookie’s and Lobetto’s--begin their rapid descent into the grown-up world of hustling, heinous sex and constant hunger.

All that Hyun Jin had previously known of this hostile world had come from a parable of the fox who, by wrapping herself in the skin of a dead girl, steals life from the boys she kisses, “trying to regain what those boys stole from her.” Both girls must now become like fox girls, Sookie tells her after Hyun Jin is disowned by her parents, if they are to survive.

A brutal coming-of-age tale, “Fox Girl” is devastating, and yet is leavened by moments of redemptory closeness among the three friends. Through Keller’s use of crisp writing, razor-sharp metaphors and utter narrative command, we witness the destruction of Hyun Jin’s innocence by greed, bad luck and forces beyond her control, as she, like innumerable others, becomes yet another unacknowledged victim of war. Still, her spirit continues to demand a better life.

Told in stark, painful, sexually graphic and heart-rending images, “Fox Girl” is a story that haunts, with scenes that replay long after the book is closed. Steel yourself before opening the pages, but, surely, open them. This is a vital, urgent work, reminding us not only of the horrors of war, but, as Sookie sees it, how “only Americans believe in happy endings.”