Museum For Women Who Did Not Appear
“There is a difference between a choice and a wish. We were never asked what we wished for.”
These women were not forced into prostitution
Nor did they go willingly to support one side in a war
Nor did they stand in the spotlight and receive the applause of their audience
like the entertainment troupes that raised the morale of the soldiers.
They came and went silently.
Sudden death in shelling was an ever-present danger on the front.
No one knew them when they were alive and when they died.
They did not appear in military records.
They faced the same hardships, lived and died, like everyone else on Kinmen.—
*
us


Karissa Chen's fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Gulf Coast, PEN America, Guernica, and Longreads. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan in 2015-16 and received a 2019 Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and is a proud Fellow of both Kundiman and VONA/Voices. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief at Hyphen and a Contributing Fiction Editor at Catapult. She is working on a novel.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Karissa Chen
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Karissa Chen
More by this author
In Taiwan, Running Led Me to My Community—and to Myself
A place doesn’t begin to feel like a home until it contains people you care for.
Tea Eggs Have Always Tasted Like Home
In the first weeks after my arrival in Taipei, I ate more of these eggs than I’d like to admit.
When I Froze My Eggs, I Wasn’t Prepared for the Depression That Followed
I wish I had been warned—not because it would have changed my mind about the procedure, but because I might have been more prepared.
More in this series
The Agoraphobe’s House
She drank a bottle of poison. It must have been household cleaner. His poem doesn’t specify.
The Wedding After the Bomb
Somewhere far away, someone made a call, someone in power said yes to violence, and our friends would never get to see our friends say yes to love.
Model Home
Here’s the truth. We live in a model home in a prestigious village in a master-planned city. Beyond those borders, things aren’t so rosy.