Reeling from a bitter divorce and grieving the loss of her mother by suicide, Angelina Lee leaves the U.S. and her children for a summer to travel to Korea, her cultural homeland. Longing to rekindle a connection to a place that shaped her own history and to better understand her mother, Angelina instead finds herself feeling fractured and full of questions. Who had her mother been before moving to the U.S. from Korea? What grief had her mother carried for so many years of her life? Why was the history of their family shrouded in secrecy and a strict code of silence?
During her time in Korea, Angelina connects with an estranged relative who shares a secret so jarring that Angelina is forced to reevaluate everything she knows about her mother, her family, and even herself. Her mother’s sister, Sunyuh, had been kidnapped, kept captive, and subjected to sexual violence by the Japanese Imperial Army.
Told through the alternating perspectives of Angelina, her mother, Gongju, and Gongju’s sister, Sunyuh, Helena Rho’s Stone Angels is a revelatory and important novel about a legacy of familial silence across generations and the way that one woman’s search for truth means bearing witness to a host of systemic silences and violences, many of which had previously been denied by governing bodies and excised from formal histories.
I had the opportunity to speak with Rho, who previously published the memoir American Seoul, about the power of testimony, the complicated love that exists between mothers and daughters, and the way that distances––whether geographic, emotional, or cultural––can strain relationships and also forge new understandings.
Jacqueline Alnes: A significant thread in this novel is that of Sunyuh, Angelina’s aunt who was subjected to sex trafficking by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. What drew you to this part of history?
Helena Rho: By the summer of 2006, I had already abandoned the practice of pediatrics and was in Seoul relearning the language of my ancestors at Konkuk University, just like my character, Angelina Lee. This was my first return to Seoul since leaving as a six year old. My father was a surgeon and had been recruited by Idi Amin, of all people, the notorious dictator in Uganda.
While studying at Konkuk University, I was trying to reconnect with my mother’s family. It was a really emotional time for me and that’s when I first learned about the victims of sexual slavery by Japan––that’s the formal terminology––during the Asia-Pacific War from 1941-1945. I was completely shocked that systematic, institutionalized sex trafficking by a government had occurred and that history had ignored these victims.
I was doing an MFA in nonfiction at the time, so I thought eventually I would write a longform piece about them. Instead, after my summer, I returned to Pittsburgh, where I was living at the time, and found myself crying every single day. I woke up every single day crying for a month. It might have had something to do with jetlag, but it was also emotional overwhelm. I did not research the history further until I was given a very special book,
