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. Suspenseful, hopeful, and ultimately redemptive, White Chrysanthemum tells a story of two sisters whose love for each other is strong enough to triumph over the grim evils of war.W hite Chrysanthemum memorializes Korean comfort women-women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese occupying forces during World War Two. Seeing the healing of her children and her country, can Emi move beyond the legacy of war to find forgiveness? Emi has spent more than sixty years trying to forget the sacrifice her sister made, but she must confront the past to discover peace.
But haenyeo are women of power and strength. There she is forced to become a “comfort woman” in a Japanese military brothel. Until the day Hana saves her younger sister from a Japanese soldier and is herself captured and transported to Manchuria. As a haenyeo, a female diver of the sea, she enjoys an independence that few other Koreans can still claim. Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation. In the spirit of Lilac Girls, the heartbreaking history of Korea is brought to life in this deeply moving and redemptive debut that follows two sisters separated by World War II.
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