Snippets of jazz music floated out the door of Murdock 218 in the afternoon of September 13th as black and white images of terrified young women played across the screen. Inside stood Stephanie Chou, a composer, saxophonist, and singer based in New York City, preparing a talk for MCLA students, staff, and faculty about her song cycle, Comfort Girl. A song cycle is a group of songs that are individually complete but designed to be performed in sequence and linked by a theme, story, or even a repeated musical motif. As the expressions on the faces of the women in the photos suggest, the story behind Comfort Girl is not a pleasant one.
Chou’s work tells the taboo story of Chinese “comfort women” during World War II, though the term itself isn’t particularly accurate. The so-called “comfort women” were Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian teenagers and young adults forced into sexual slavery camps by the Japanese military, who were occupying their homelands.
These camps, or ‘”Comfort Stations,” as they were called, were frequented by male members of the Japanese military on a nightly basis, and the living conditions for the girls were atrocious. In one of Chou’s numbers, the main character reflects on the words of another girl at her camp: “This is your new life now, it’s not comfort at all.” They were given no shoes, only one set of clothing, no access to any form of healthcare, and barely any supplies. Chou’s collection of photos projected on a screen behind her illustrated the appalling truth: these girls were prisoners of war in their own homeland.
For such a heavy topic, Chou’s idea to address it via music might strike some as odd. Comfort Girl is a 90-minute work that blends jazz, contemporary classical, pop, and traditional Chinese music to tell a fictionalized account of the main character’s experience in one of these comfort stations.
For Chou, however, the aim was always to tell this story in a creative way. She wanted to present “art, not just a history lesson.” Rather than a lecture, Comfort Girl begins as a tragic love story. The main character, Lian, is engaged to be married but is kidnapped on the day of her wedding to her lover, Ming. Like every other girl in her shoes, Lian is taken to a comfort station and forced to work under cruel and inhumane treatment.
When Lian arrives, the other women and girls at the camp share with her what life will entail for her there, and after experiencing it, Lian considers suicide. (This, says Chou, was incredibly common for the girls in these camps). Out of the 200,000 women and girls who were forced into comfort stations, around 90% died or committed suicide while imprisoned there.
Yet, as the story goes, Lian finds it within herself to survive. With such a dark subject matter, Chou’s choice to turn it into art helps her audience absorb the story more fully.
Though these events took place during World War II, Chou believes they are still relevant today, and crucial to talk about openly. The few survivors who did make it home to their families were shamed and isolated; they had been branded as traitors to their countries, and their stories turned into a hidden history. Chou did not even hear about it until her early 20s. Her goal in creating Comfort Girl was to bring these survivor’s stories into the future.
All the women whose testimony Chou cited in her work said the same thing: “We were never ‘comfort women’. We want our story told so that it is never repeated.”
As for herself, Chou aims to raise awareness about the horrors of warfare that aren’t always taught. When asked about why she was interested in sharing the story with college students, Chou says she wants young people to “know it has happened. Rape is a weapon of war. Don’t let it happen again”.
Stephanie Chou’s song cycle Comfort Girl was last performed live at the Adams Theater in Adams, MA on September 14th. Full performance videos can be found online on Chou’s website (stephaniechoumusic.com).
