When Hana surfaces, she sees a Japanese soldier approaching her sister it seems inevitable that Emi must be kidnapped. One day in 1943, Hana has been diving, leaving Emi on the shore, to guard the catch. Diving, and resurfacing, are fitting metaphors for the characters’, and Korean society’s, suffering and survival. Descriptions of diving, and the haenyeo way of life, occur through the novel, from the opening description of captive Hana’s memories of the ceremony through which she became a fully-fledged haenyeo, to the closing description of Hana diving in a lake in Mongolia. At the opening of the novel, Hana is sixteen and her younger sister Emi is still too young to dive, although she too soon becomes a haenyeo. They are strong, independent women who harvest bounty from the ocean floor to feed their families. In her debut novel, London-based Korean-American writer Mary Lynn Bracht explores the effects of these women’s abductions on their families and on wider society, and celebrates the power of women to survive horrific circumstances.īracht’s protagonists are haenyeo, female free divers from the southern Korean island of Jeju Island. Moving between Hana in 1943 and Emi as an old woman today, White Chrysanthemum takes us into a dark and devastating corner of history - and two women whose love for one another is strong enough to triumph over the evils of war.W hite Chrysanthemum memorializes Korean comfort women-women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese occupying forces during World War Two.
So begins the story of two sisters suddenly and violently separated by war. Terrified for her sister, Hana swims as hard as she can for the shore. Her mother has told her again and again never to be caught alone with one. One day Hana sees a Japanese soldier heading for where Emi is guarding the day's catch on the beach. Hana and her little sister Emi are part of an island community of haenyo, women who make their living from diving deep into the sea off the southernmost tip of Korea.
Longlisted for the Authors' Club First Novel Award Winner of the Writers' Guild Award for B est Debut Novel
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