I finished the first draft of the book in September 1996. Then, I launched a documentary film on the same subject. For the film, I talked with some of the same women and added others. It has so much more than I could condense in a 90 minute documentary. I wanted to hear their stories, fully aware that whatever they could tell me was subjective.
Human memories are by nature limited and subjective.
Oral history is a subjective recollection of the past. What's more, my response was not objective. I listened and responded to their stories as a woman born in Korea, and with overflowing sorrow, outraged by the violations inflicted by the Japanese on Koreans, by men on women, by the rich on the poor, and by the powerful on the weak. Nobody can swear by the truth and accuracy of a single story in its entirety, yet bound together individual accounts can form a collective truth, or certainly a version of truth. General readers who know little about the topic.