06.28.11 | SPOTLIGHT ON: Tiffany Hsiung, Documentary Filmmaker of Within Every Woman
SOHO, New York – Plopping down at the café table, a raspberry tart served, Tiffany Hsiung, director of Within Every Woman, after a last minute red-eye drive from Toronto and then straight into a series of community events around the boroughs, had the look of one battling an internal tug-of-war. In the midst of traveling and logistical shuffles, food has been the constant and appreciated 4th member of the Toronto-based group. Chris Kang, producer of the film, kept his discipline. Lucy Zhao, Community Engagement Officer, succumbed to my offers first. Before long, the tart have become, as I had hoped, a collective meal. “Okay, just to try,” as Hsiung sheepishly takes a bite of the crust I tried to insidiously push into her fork.
A documentary film in the making under Golden Nugget Productions, Within Every Woman, digs gently into the story of comfort women. In WWII, at least 200,000 young women, mainly from South Korea, China, the Philippines, and Japan, were abducted from their homes or lured with promise of work in factories. Put and imprisoned in “comfort stations,” these young women were forced into institutionalized sexual slavery by the occupying Japanese military, some raped as many as forty times as day. Only a quarter of the women were said to have survived after the war as a consequence of the violence they endured or the diseases they contracted. Many of those who survived were unable to bear children. Today, these women are in their 80s and 90s. Denied any legal reparation by the Japanese government, they suffer shame in even greater depth as most of their families shunned them after the war in the name of disgrace. Most who were able to start families kept their history hidden. Many, upon speaking, were disowned by their families, including their children born after the war.
“I never had any idea that I would ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever in my lifetime…ever delve into a topic like this…It fell upon me, like fate, like destiny,” Hsiung says.
And so it did. A journey that started at a charity fundraiser bound for Nairobi, Kenya, Hsuing’s course was rerouted, somehow taking her to Asia with 30 Canadian teachers, revisiting sites and calling on survivors from the Second World War. It was in Shanghai that she met an 84-year-old former comfort woman. “I was blown away. It was like, you’ve never heard of this story before. How come I never heard about this? Why didn’t my parents talk about this? Why wasn’t I taught this [in school]? I got really frustrated and angry that I was cheated out of this big part of history…After the first two weeks, I decided that I was going to stay in Asia by myself. I wanted to visit other survivors.”
What emerged from this hunt is this deeply moving, deeply personal film. The project features the story of three women – three Grandmothers – from Korea, China, and the Philippines. In between takes, Hsuing experienced terrifying typhoons over Taiwan, the lack of community organizations in China, the cultural unfamiliarity of the Philippines, and the unyielding energy in Korea.
“Of course it’s about these grandmothers and what they’ve gone through. But just the topic of sex, and rape, and sexual violence is such a taboo conversation that it always seems to only be in discussion with the people who’ve gone through it, and maybe their therapist or their psychiatrist. It’s always in that institution. [E]ven if it’s never happened to you personally, you’re still connected to this idea around shame and silence.”
Among other elements, this vigilant, ready vigor comes from her own history. In her early 20s, straight out of film school, Hsiung visited Asia for the first time in search of the mother’s biological parents. “My mother, at the age of 6, was given up. And she was taken in by my grandmother, [now] in Toronto. She never knew her parents. She always wondered why her parents gave her up…[S]o she took a napkin, we were at a Mexican restaurant, wrote down these two names, folded it up, and gave it to me.” Filming the whole adventure with two friends, the story attracted local Taiwanese press. From the names written on napkin, Hsiung found her mother’s parents, dug through the years past and uncovered what happened in between decades.
“There’s this power in figuring out the truth, and finding the truth, and finding the story, and I’ve always been very passionate about that.” Hsiung continues, “People often ask, ‘How can you do what you’re doing? How horrible it is to hear all these old people talk about what happened to them and getting raped and all this stuff. How could you do that?’ How could you not? How could you not help them in any way you can…letting them know that they’re not alone?”
[The Within Every Woman film project is still on-going. To fund the project (any amount is encouraged), please visit their Kickstarter campaign page and pledge by Thursday, 6/30, 11.59 EST.]
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When I was 14 years old, I made an overseas call to my grandmother for an assignment. My mother did her round of the call, listening to stories about her siblings and giving her own updates about our life in California. After a long while, I was handed the telephone, and with an unanticipated lump in my throat, I asked,
Lola, what can you tell me about the Second World War?
The old tradition that I grew up with, wherein children are seen and not heard, advises against this very moment. This attempt to access my grandmother’s privacy – in which I included stories of fear – was, understatedly, alien territory.
There was the initial silence I expected. Then came that which I didn’t expect: she told me. She spoke about hiding through the forest with my lolo and their extended family, among them my eldest aunt, a newborn. She recalled sleeping in deep ditches underneath leaves and branches thatched to camouflage and my grandfather’s capture by the enemy as he fought for the province guerilla. In those few hours, she alluded, never really admitting, to the hardship of the time, the terror she felt, and the courage she had to assume.
I can say without hesitation that evening, speaking over the phone 8,000 miles away, was the closest I ever felt to my lola. After her passing years later, I thought about how easily our relationship could have skipped those few hours, how I could have never asked, and she would have never answered.
This is in honor of my grandparents, and of tremendous hearts and bright stories that could ethereally slip us by, yet, given a few moments, could stay with us always.
