NO MAN'S LAND

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Nora Okja Keller used to think real writers looked like Ernest Hemingway. Gruff, bearded, white, male. She was none of those. She was an immigrant, born in Seoul to a Korean mother and a white American father, and raised in Hawaii. But Keller's image of herself started to change in 1993, when she went to a symposium on human rights at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; there she heard an elderly Korean woman tell her true story of being a "comfort woman" during World War II, when she was one of the many foreigners forced by the Japanese into prostitution camps that serviced their soldiers. The story haunted Keller. Who would pass it on? Who would write it down? The old woman came to her in nightmares. "Finally, I got up in the middle of the night and started to write down my dreams," says Keller. Those notes became a book. And she became a writer.

Keller's book, Comfort Woman (Viking; 213 pages; $21.95), is one of a trio of powerful debut novels by Asian-American women to arrive in bookstores lately. The others: Monkey King (HarperCollins; 310 pages; $24) by Patricia Chao (of Chinese and Japanese descent) and The Necessary Hunger (Simon & Schuster; 365 pages; $23) by Nina Revoyr (whose mother and father are Japanese and Polish-American, respectively). Although these books share some themes--all of them deal with parents and children in conflict over such issues as cultural and sexual identity--each author has a sharp, specific vision.

Keller's story is the most harrowing. The book, narrated in the alternating voices of a Korean comfort woman named Akiko and her Korean-American daughter Beccah, delivers a wrenching view of war and its lasting intergenerational impact. Akiko, driven half-mad by the war, is haunted by the ghost of a woman from the camp and becomes a sought-after mystic after moving to America. But to call this a ghost story is to miss the point: Comfort Woman is really about pain, the kind that haunts and is handed down, like old, sad clothes. Writes Akiko: "I knew what it felt like to stretch open for many men ... about pain sharp enough to cut your body from your mind." Although Keller's prose, at a few points, has more ambition than lyricism, overall this is a sturdy, eloquent book.

Keller says her own mother was not a comfort woman, but served as an inspiration. "My mom didn't really speak Korean to me," says Keller. "She was so conscious of her own difference that she didn't want me to learn Korean and make me something different, 'the other' ... I know I went through a period of feeling really embarrassed and alienated from things that were Korean. So I write now, in part, to go back to that Korean perspective and try to reclaim what I denied for so long."

Chao's intermittently witty and highly readable Monkey King also deals with mental illness, mysticism and sexual abuse. The narrator, 28-year-old Sally Wang, is a Chinese-American woman who has just suffered a mental breakdown. The book's power comes not from some wild psychological portrait of a mind in turmoil but from its careful detailing of Sally's life at the mental institution in which she attempts a recovery. Sally's family history is also nuanced and believable; small observations add up. Recalling her childhood, Sally says, "Because my parents had not been prepared for a girl, I had no name for the first two months of my life."

Sally's breakdown is prompted partly by her assimilation anxiety as the child of Chinese-American immigrants; by book's end, however, she is a universal character whose struggle for identity anyone can identify with. "At my readings there's been an interesting mix," says Chao. "Out of, say, 35 people, there will be about five Asians. I also thought when I was writing it that it was a 'chick book.' But my audience has been divided about fifty-fifty between men and women."

The Necessary Hunger is the kind of irresistible read you start on the subway at 6 p.m. on the way home from work and keep plowing through until you've turned the last page at 3 a.m. in bed. The setup: a Japanese-American high school basketball player falls in love with a rival African-American player. Complication No. 1: Both are girls. Complication No. 2: Their single parents (one's dad and the other's mom) fall for each other too. Revoyr's great accomplishment is that her story is never strained. It beats with the pulse of life and ends with a strong, heart-churning rumination on love and longing. Apart from a silly subplot involving a grade-inflation scandal, this is a smooth, insightful read. American writers dealing with race relations tend to focus on black-white or Asian-white situations; Revoyr has the imagination to depict racial issues in which whites are not the reference point.

"I don't fit anywhere," says Revoyr. "I'm not completely Japanese. I don't feel completely American. I feel caught between countries, caught between races. Because I have my foot in so many areas, I probably have a good perspective on all of them." All three of these Asian-American writers, in fact, have managed to use their mixed cultural backgrounds to create worlds all their own.