In the “Testimonies” section of A Cruelty to Our Species, Emily Jungmin Yoon draws directly upon the recorded accounts of former “comfort women” as preserved in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (ed. Sangmie Choi Schellstede) and True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (ed. Keith Howard). By interlacing the survivors’ words with her own poetic language, Yoon creates a dialogic form that both preserves and reframes these narratives. Her work functions not only as a literary rendering of testimonial material but also as an act of cultural memory, elevating the voices of women whose histories have been systematically marginalized, distorted, or effaced.
The following offers one example of Yoon’s reworking of testimony into poetic form.
Jin Kyung-paeng
my mother and I were picking cotton
when two Japanese Kempei passed by
she told me to lie flat
But they found me
kicked my mother
put me abopard a ship then a bigger ship
which arrived near Kinariyama, Taiwan
a place with many monkeys and snakes
potatoes, sweet potatoes, taro
50 women were not enough for these soldiers
I remember a few of them Kanemoto Hideo
He treated us okay also
Oono Nakamura, Yoshida Kanjiro
Yamaguchi Hugashi Inamochi
I stayed with them until
the end of the war One day in August
the soldiers gathered and wept
In March we sailed to Pusan
An American GI gave me a bag of candy and 1,000 won
We bought rice
a good meal
I was wianbu between 14 and 19
I became feverish I became infertile
I remember the children of my dead husband
I remember a good meal I am alone
I looked like a stranger at home in Hapchon with my darkened skin
my mother thought she was dreaming
About the poet:
Emily Jungmin Yoon is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar. She is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco | HarperCollins, 2018), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017). Her translation and editorial work includes Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019), and her second full-length collection, Find Me as the Creature I Am, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2024.
Her poetry and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. She has received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, and Ploughshares, among others. She is currently Assistant Professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She also serves as Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.