In “Stone Angels,” a Korean-American Confronts Atrocity and Generational Silence

Reeling from a bitter divorce and grieving the loss of her mother by suicide, Angelina Lee leaves the U.S. and her children for a summer to travel to Korea, her cultural homeland. Longing to rekindle a connection to a place that shaped her own history and to better understand her mother, Angelina instead finds herself feeling fractured and full of questions. Who had her mother been before moving to the U.S. from Korea? What grief had her mother carried for so many years of her life? Why was the history of their family shrouded in secrecy and a strict code of silence? 

During her time in Korea, Angelina connects with an estranged relative who shares a secret so jarring that Angelina is forced to reevaluate everything she knows about her mother, her family, and even herself. Her mother’s sister, Sunyuh, had been kidnapped, kept captive, and subjected to sexual violence by the Japanese Imperial Army. 

Told through the alternating perspectives of Angelina, her mother, Gongju, and Gongju’s sister, Sunyuh, Helena Rho’s Stone Angels is a revelatory and important novel about a legacy of familial silence across generations and the way that one woman’s search for truth means bearing witness to a host of systemic silences and violences, many of which had previously been denied by governing bodies and excised from formal histories. 

I had the opportunity to speak with Rho, who previously published the memoir American Seoul, about the power of testimony, the complicated love that exists between mothers and daughters, and the way that distances––whether geographic, emotional, or cultural––can strain relationships and also forge new understandings. 

Jacqueline Alnes: A significant thread in this novel is that of Sunyuh, Angelina’s aunt who was subjected to sex trafficking by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. What drew you to this part of history? 

Helena Rho: By the summer of 2006, I had already abandoned the practice of pediatrics and was in Seoul relearning the language of my ancestors at Konkuk University, just like my character, Angelina Lee. This was my first return to Seoul since leaving as a six year old. My father was a surgeon and had been recruited by Idi Amin, of all people, the notorious dictator in Uganda. 

While studying at Konkuk University, I was trying to reconnect with my mother’s family. It was a really emotional time for me and that’s when I first learned about the victims of sexual slavery by Japan––that’s the formal terminology––during the Asia-Pacific War from 1941-1945. I was completely shocked that systematic, institutionalized sex trafficking by a government had occurred and that history had ignored these victims.

I was doing an MFA in nonfiction at the time, so I thought eventually I would write a longform piece about them. Instead, after my summer, I returned to Pittsburgh, where I was living at the time, and found myself crying every single day. I woke up every single day crying for a month. It might have had something to do with jetlag, but it was also emotional overwhelm. I did not research the history further until I was given a very special book, Can You Hear Us? It’s a collection of oral histories by the Korean victims that was published and translated into English. These twelve harrowing narratives took me a year to read. I became so overcome, at times, that I had to put the book away. 

JA: The language used to describe Korean women subjected to sexual violence by the Japanese Imperial Army during the war varies, as you write in the novel. For instance, terms like “comfort women” versus “sexual slavery” versus “enslavement” reflect which perspective we are receiving information from. 

The violent reality of these women’s lives was masked or softened by terminology, which allows characters, like the Japanese soldiers in the novel, to believe that the women had chosen to be there. How did you consider this language while writing? 

HR: I’m a writer. Language is important to me. How language is used is important. Language can be used as propaganda, but language can also be used in story. I get emotional when I talk about this. There are so many narratives on YouTube, testimonies by these women, and at one point I thought about abandoning the Sunyuh storyline because it was too dark.

I wanted language in its most honest form to depict how the victims talked to each other about what was happening to them. I used quite graphic language to talk about the sexual violence that had been perpetrated upon them. But, I also wanted to show, and I’m so glad you picked up on this, that language was used to soften this horrific trauma, to hide it, and to blame the victims. They were not pure, they allowed themselves to do this for money, which is so untrue. They were assigned debts—as I tried to put in the novel—for their living expenses, clothes, toiletries. Most of them never made money. 

I wanted language in its most honest form to depict how the victims talked to each other about what was happening to them.

They were called “The Girl Army” because they literally were dragged into battlefields. Anywhere that the Japanese soldiers had a garrison or a tent on a battlefield, they were dragged there. They were called “The Girl Army” before they were called “comfort women.” And, thinking back to language again, the “comfort women” started because that’s what the Japanese called them. In some ways, at least the Korean comfort women have reclaimed that name in a way. They want to be called Halmoni, which means grandmother, because that is what they would have been, if they had lived normal lives and had married and had children and grandchildren. They don’t want to be called “sexual slaves” because their generation carries so much shame. It’s too blunt and direct, so they prefer to be called Halmoni.   

Of course, there isn’t a single story for all the victims. I tried to show that in the novel as well.

JA: Your novel made me think, on a wider scale, about the systemic way that Japan sought to erase the existence of these women, both bodily, through murder, and in testimony, by destroying any records related to the women. What was it like to try to break open that silence?

HR: I was afraid of writing this story because there are so many history deniers in Japan and, surprisingly, in Korea—there were a lot of collaborators who worked with the Japanese colonial government that stayed in power after the U.S. took over the occupation. These history deniers are very vitriolic. At times, I wanted to abandon this story, but I saw the scholars and historians still toiling away in this field, trying to make the truth known to the world. 

In 1996, there was a report by the Special Rapporteur to the U.N. on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. She mentioned, very specifically, that we don’t know everything because the Japanese government is still hiding records. I was convinced that there was a record of these girls, their names, where they came from, how old they were. After all, the Nazis kept records of their victims. And then, in 2023, when I was doing the last bit of research, I was like, please tell me that we are eventually going to get these records. One of the historians told me the records did not exist, but still, I persisted. I thought it was just one historian’s view. Then, a Korean scholar, Dr. Han HyeIn, I’m so grateful to her, explained that they weren’t human to the Japanese, these girls were things, and the records had been destroyed. 

There is a treasure trove of documents that the U.S. government took back with them to the National Archives. Some Korean historians went to try to look at these, and they said there was a giant room with documents filled up to the ceiling, not arranged or organized in any fashion. They said it would take years to go through these documents. They were documents without names, documents in which the Japanese Ministry talked about how these girls were so important for the morale of their troops, documents that show this is what they did. Still, the Japanese government has stuck with the lie that it was private citizens who recruited these girls. And recruited sounds so benevolent. How about coerced or lured. 

JA: Again, the importance of language. Hearing this emphasizes to me, which comes through in the novel as well, the way that the silence around this is another form of violence. 

HR: Yes. These victims have been so brutalized by the Japanese, by their own government, by their own country, by their families, by the U.N. Even though the U.N. did a report in 1996, these victims still do not have an apology, and what they want is so simple. They just want a governmental apology from Japan, acknowledging their war crimes and an offer of reparations. That’s what you should do when a government has done something this terrible. People might say that several Japanese government officials have apologized, but all of the Japanese Prime Ministers were specific that these were personal apologies, not government apologies or an acknowledgement of the war crimes committed. 

Germany has, however imperfectly, acknowledged its role in the war crimes that the Nazis committed. It is educating its citizens. On my last visit to the House of Sharing, a museum and nursing home for some victims, I met a Japanese student there who happened to be studying in Korea, and had never heard of the victims of sexual slavery. These were victims in the hundreds of thousands, all across the Pacific. We first learned about this history because of a woman named Kim Hak-sun, in 1991, who came forward with her story. It was televised and people were shocked, but not really, I think, because there had been rumors of what was happening. People just wanted to deny that. When Kim Hak-sun came forward, the Japanese government said she was making it up and that she was a liar. 

JA: A line that stood out to me in the book, in relation to this silence, is when Angelina’s cousin Una says, “You are not Korean. You do not understand. For our grandmother, having a daughter who was a sexual slave for the Imperial Japanese Army is worse than a daughter who died.” I wondered if you could talk about the way that shame influenced the silence around this history. 

HR: Again, there is no single story, but I think it was very prevalent in that generation that women were supposed to be pure. If they brought dishonor on themselves, it meant that they tainted their families. I really leaned into my mother’s personal experience. She is one of five siblings and she is the only one who came to the United States. She divorced my father. She could not even tell her family she was divorced, because of the stigma. And this was divorce. She couldn’t tell her family. She basically cut herself off from her family and would not contact them, because she would not bring that shame on herself or on them. Her own mother, her own sister, her brothers, she couldn’t do it. I was basically an Americanized Korean living in this country and I didn’t understand. How do you do this? This is your family. They will support you. But she wouldn’t do it. 

JA: There are several significant threads about mothers in the book––mothers who experience unfathomable losses, mothers who do not pursue their dreams because of their role within the family, mothers who are shunned because of their inability to bear male children. I appreciate that you allow motherhood a complexity in this novel—one character describes her role as a “suffocating burden.” And then there’s Angelina, who leaves her children for a month to study in Korea. What did you learn about motherhood through writing these different characters?

HR: Thank you for picking up on the fact that I was writing about motherhood! It’s such a rich and complex statehood. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but there is no single story about motherhood. As a younger woman, I bought into this idea that motherhood should be idyllic, easy, and lovely, and that I should be grateful for every second with my toddler, even when I am bored out of my mind. I just thought, I’m really tired of just one story of motherhood being out there. I wanted complexity. I wanted Gongju to have this suffocating sense of motherhood with the obligations and duties that it brought her, without any reward, and how that impacted her daughters. Angelina, I wanted her to have more agency. I did go to Korea in 2006 and left my children for 8 weeks, so I wanted her to do the same. 

I think that when women sacrifice and don’t think of themselves, they are not just hurting themselves, they are actually hurting their family. It’s okay to be selfish, it’s actually a good thing to think of yourself. I think I’ve only started to lean into that as an older woman. 

JA: The way you weave together timelines—one set in 2006 from Angelina’s perspective, one set in 1960 from Gongju’s perspective and one set in 1945 from Sunyuh’s—means that we witness a sister, mother, and daughter move through the world in very different ways. Despite their best attempts to remain connected, we start to see distances forming between characters, whether due to geography, time, upbringings, or culture. What about those distances intrigues you?

When women sacrifice and don’t think of themselves, they are not just hurting themselves, they are actually hurting their family.

HR: I saw firsthand the effect that distance had on my mother. We left Korea in 1972 and my mother did not return for a visit until decades later. My father got into legal trouble, they divorced, and then she never went back to the country of her birth. I found that to be such a tragedy. I wanted to show how physical distance can impact psychic distance and emotional distance. It was very important to me that Angelina come back to the country of her birth. Why had her mother died by suicide? What was the family story? 

JA: There is a lot of grief in this novel—mother-loss, child-loss, loss of a home, loss of someone without closure, and loss of marriage, among other losses. What did writing about these griefs teach you about grief itself? 

HR: You know, because I wrote a memoir, people used to ask me: What makes a good memoir? To me, a good memoir is about the processing of grief. In 2015, when I was given the book Can You Hear Us, I was also going through a very ugly divorce. I was thinking a lot about the questions: How do you survive the unspeakable? How do you go on? I was being melodramatic in regard to my own situation—mine was only a divorce—but these girls had lived through hell and survived unspeakable horrors. At the core of it was a desire to understand how to process grief and how to come out the other side in some kind of functional shape. I think so many people get lost in that grief. 

JA: It seems like these characters are trying to move toward healing, whether personal, familial, or cultural. Reading this book made me wonder: Do you think true healing is ever really possible? Or is bearing witness the best we can hope to do?

HR: Should I even answer that question? I don’t know if healing is ever really possible. 

Phyllis Kim, the director of Comfort Women Action for Redress & Education (CARE), has had very close contact with many victims. Yong-soo Lee Halmoni, or Grandma Lee, as she is known in the West, is now 96 and is the only documented Korean victim who still has all of her faculties. She still continues to advocate for justice. She has petitioned the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, to hear this issue of comfort women and make the government of Japan apologize and acknowledge their war crimes. She is so driven by justice, yet there is a cost. There is always a cost.

I wish that this was a movie where, at the end, people are happy. But a happily ever after does not exist. The journey toward healing is a journey. There are many stops, a few steps forward, a couple steps back. I think it’s a lifelong journey, honestly. 

All we can do about these horrific crimes against humanity is to bear witness. I don’t presume to think that my little novel will bring justice for the Halmoni. I don’t. But I think it is one more voice for justice.

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