Not enough tension to draw me into reading the rest of the story, so on the front, I must give it a bad rating. Overall, however, it is solid.

Changes is bold.

quote:

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I silently stepped into the dusty, old room. Surprisingly, nothing much had changed in contrast to the extrinsic,[big word=big distraction refurbished city around it. I couldn’t believe that it had not been destroyed after all these years, still appearing almost untouched, hidden away like a buried treasure, as if it was forgotten for centuries.
space added
I never dreamt that I would return here. This entire sentence seems to drag--perhaps because it is reapeating earlier theme?--Though I had long departed from this place, until now my mind had still lived inside it. Sighing, I gazed blankly at the battered walls, ;[the way it's written, this is two independent clausesa cascade of memories flooded back into my head. Here, I had encountered great melancholy, but also immense happiness. I embraced the memories freely, as my mind wondered back to the time, all those years ago...

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My personal feeling is that, unless you are planning on running a parallel storyline happening in your narrator's present, it's better not to frame the story as a flashback. If you do, then there needs to be some tension happening in her present that is causing her to revisit the past. Otherwise, as a reader I would rather just start the story at the moment in your narrator's past when things get interesting and move forward to the present. To start in the present diffuses the tension, for me, unless there's a reason to be concerned about your narrator in the present and the past. Not knowing the structure of your story, that might be what you're planning on doing, but I'm just responding to these thirteen lines so ignore me if I'm out of line.

That said, the writing in this is much crisper. Oddly, with all of these lovely descriptive phrases I have no idea where the dusty room is, or what sort of room it is.

Survivor- I'm sorry, I still don't really understnd what yo meant by casting it as an autobiographical account, could you perhaps give mean example?

First you'll tell the reader a bit about yourself and your reasons for telling the story. You might take a bit to get around to it, you might refer to yourself indirectly, but you would say, "this is a story about what happened to me, and I have a reason for telling it to you."

It might be a bit of an alarming sign that you don't know what I mean by an autobiographical account. I would suggest that you start by writing about some of your own actual experiences, to an audience that has no prior knowledge of you or your life (or has never had your own account of your life). To be fair, you should actually let some such audience read your account (it needn't be a large audience). That way you'll experience some of the...difficulties that affect a real person writing a deeply personal story.

Then you can start imagining how this woman, who is about to challenge as much of the accepted ideas of the "comfort women" as she will confirm, would feel about writing this. She needs powerful motivations to reveal something so deeply personal which exposes her as a flawed human being rather than an iconic symbol. And so she'll tell the story honestly, beginnning with why she's telling the story.

For instance:

quote:

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I am known to the whole world these days, or so it seems. Not by name, not personally. Only by type. But the world doesn't truly know me, know the story of my life. I was a victim, yes, and the crime committed against me was an atrocity in a war marked by terrible acts of inhumanity.

But I am also a woman, a living person that experienced that war as an individual. In the history books, the "comfort women" are reduced to an impossible stereotype, the 16 year old virgin that is dragged from her home by leering Japanese soldiers and then gang-raped for the next several years before returning home and suddenly vanishing entirely. Sometimes it happened that way. I knew girls that didn't survive the drunken party-rapes, or the beatings for having an "attitude problem", or the inevitable hardships of even a valuable slave during war. I know that some went home and committed suicide rather than face their families again.

But many of us survived, because we didn't let even our role as "comfort women" reduce our existence to that of disposable sex-slaves, because we continued to live. It all happened so long ago, in a world now swept away, but I lived through the rapes, and the slavery, and the war. And I want you to hear the story of that life, so long ago.

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