More than a decade ago, Keller and I took the same modern literature seminar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, “the only time I’ve lived outside of Hawai’i ,” she remembers. “No wonder your voice sounds so familiar!” “Oh, my goodness, I have your fingerprints in my house!” she laughs gleefully. The Dual Lives of Nora Okja Keller: An InterviewĪfter four or five conversations on the phone and numerous e-mails, Nora Okja Keller and I finally recognize one another. Hyun Jin is thrown out in the streets and forced to create a makeshift family with her childhood best friend, Sookie, who becomes a child prostitute, and Lobetto, a neighborhood pimp who is also just a young boy waiting in vain for his American father to claim him. At the center is Hyun Jin, the eponymous “fox girl,” a model student from a seemingly loving home. soldiers fought for bare survival and Korean women continued to service occupying GIs in order to put food on their shabby dinner tables. By retelling the tales, but with substantive changes, and emphasizing that a retelling is an interpretation, the novels challenge the inherited cultural and literary tradition and suggest ways in which history and tradition can be reread.Fox Girl takes readers back to post-Korean War “America Town,” where the abandoned, racially mixed children of U.S. This study considers three novels which relate traditional stories to gender issues, and especially mother-daughter relations: Mia Yun's House of the Winds (1998), and two novels by Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (1997) and Fox Girl (2002). As a store of cultural meanings that offer models for interpreting experience, folktales function as a form of cultural memory, but because they do so within a patriarchal culture, the type and range of meanings possible are challenged by focusing attention on women's perspectives. When contemporary Korean-American authors Mia Yun and Nora Okja Keller incorporate and retell folktales within their novels, they at once draw on the cultural assumptions conserved and disseminated through these tales and engage critically with their gendered discourses.
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