Miyoung has left her home in Japanese-occupied Korea to join her older sister in Kyoto to study. As what would be World War 2 begins to loom, and anti-Korean sentiment rises, Miyoung is caught between the need to pass as Japanese and a romance with an activist.
Author Rosa Kwon Easton’s family immigrated to the US from Korea when she was seven, but her family history involves more than just simply trading one country for another. Her father was born in Japan and spoke Japanese as a child. After she found her paternal grandmother’s nursing and midwife certificates from World War 2-era Japan, she wanted to know more about her father’s family. By the time her grandmother passed away in 2012, Kwon Easton had collected answers to many of these questions. Her father provided more information for what Kwon Easton thought might be a family memoir about her Korean grandmother’s decade and a half in Japan. What emerged instead was her debut novel, White Mulberry, named for the trees native to northern Korea, and a harrowing story of a Korean woman who passes as Japanese to protect her family.
White Mulberry begins in a northern Korean town not far from Pyongyang. The year is 1928 and Miyoung—based on Kwon Easton’s paternal grandmother—is eleven years old. Miyoung dreams of becoming a teacher. Miyoung’s mother, the second wife of a man who lives with his first wife and their children, wants Miyoung to end her education and work to raise money for the family. These plans change after Miyoung’s older sister Bohbeh is betrothed to a Korean man in Kyoto. Miyoung suddenly has a chance to continue her education as she’s allowed to follow Bohbeh to Kyoto and attend a Korean school there.
When Miyoung arrives in Kyoto at age thirteen in 1930, she learns she won’t be attending a Korean school after all, but a free, local Japanese public school. Miyoung becomes known as Miyoko. The Japanese students tease and taunt her for being Korean and she soon learns life will be easier if she can pass as Japanese, losing her Korean accent and dressing either in kimono or western clothes.
The longer she acted Japanese, the more her childhood self seemed to slip away, and the more her memories of her village faded. She looked in the mirror, turning her head from side to side, and the contours of her face blurred. She was becoming Japanese in other people’s eyes, but there was still something missing. A gap remained in her heart for her home and Mother, for the old Miyoung perched in her mulberry tree. A shadow of her former self lurked somewhere unseen.
Miyoko’s plans fall short when she cannot afford to pay tuition. It’s 1935 and she’s been in Japan for five years. The only job she can find is that of a nurse’s aide, so she takes it. She also attends a Korean church, attended by congregants who promote an independent Korea. At the church, she meets a Korean law student and journalist named Hojoon who is also an activist.
Hojoon is just as taken with Miyoko as she is with him. They marry despite Hojoon hailing from a wealthy family in Osaka. But tragedy strikes and Miyoko is left a single mother and after Japan attacks cities and military bases in Asia and, of course Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Miyoko receives notice from the Japanese army that she will soon be sent to Saipan to take care of injured Japanese soldiers there. She knows that Koreans in the Japanese army are treated as expendable, more so than the Japanese conscripts.
How could she possibly die for Japan? It was not her country, and she had never felt fully welcome here, even though she had lived here for more than half her life…What would happen when Ko-chan was old enough to be drafted? Would he be conscripted, too?
Kwon Easton balances the historical details of the time and place with a thrilling story of belonging, separation, and escape. And for readers interested in World War 2 history, her book provides a lesser known perspective.