Sad Peninsula

by Mark Sampson

  She began to tremble.

  “I thought you might have,” he went on, “seeing how she was your unni.”

  Meiko’s eyes flashed at him with surprise.

  “It’s okay,” Yoshimi said. “I speak a little Korean. I lived in your country briefly, ten years ago, working as a school doctor at an academy for girls. So I know what unni means. I’d say it’s important to have one in a place like this. Wouldn’t you?”

  She jolted into tears, as if the doctor had struck her. She turned to stare at the tent’s canvas wall. “I’m sorry,” Yoshimi floundered after seeing what his words had done. “I’m sorry they killed your friend. I’m sorry they forced you all to watch. I’d like to say that it’s the worst thing you’ll ever witness here, but I doubt that’s true.”

  Meiko just let her tears scald her temples.

  “I’ve been meaning to come and see you,” he said, and stepped toward her. “I’ve wanted to tell you how sorry I am. And maybe try to explain some things. Explain why our men do what they do. Not that it will help. But I still think you deserve to know.” And with that, he put a hand on her bare knee.

  As soon as he did, Meiko leaped off his bench and shoved him as hard as she could. Her face was a furnace. “ Fuck you,” she said in Korean. Then pushed past him and went out the tent door. Still crusty with blood, she headed back to the main building, back to her cubicle and the rapes that awaited her there.

  He had to pay if he wanted to see her. He needed a ticket from the camp manager.

  When he stepped through her curtain, she looked up dimly from where she lay freshly raped on her mat, her shoulders crushed against the wooden wall, her face shining with sweat and a new bruise. She saw that it was him. Saw the ticket he held in his fingers. Yoshimi tossed it in her box as if it were an extinguished cigarette, an indifference that mocked the ceremony of this transaction. She ignored his nonchalance. Assumed her rote position, moving down on the mat, spreading her legs and looking off to her usual spot on the wall.

  “Put on a saku,” she told him.

  Yoshimi didn’t move. His eyes fell first to the dull scars on Meiko’s legs and then the brighter, newer one jagging across her mouth.

  “This wasn’t supposed to be a place of violence,” he began, almost to himself. “That’s what I wanted to tell you when you were on my bench. These camps were set up as an answer to bad behaviour. The army believed that pacifying the men’s urges would promote military discipline. But the opposite has proven true. We’re losing this war. We will lose it.”

  Meiko said nothing. Yoshimi was about to go on but was interrupted by the sudden scream of a soldier in the stall next to Meiko’s and the guttural cough-and-weep of the girl with him. Out in the hallway came hollers of Hurry up! Finish already! It’s my turn, it’s my turn! Yoshimi cringed at the sound.

  “Do you know why they yell like that? It’s because they know they’ve survived another day and they want to celebrate. They’ve learned that their lives could end at any time, so they take whatever hasty pleasure they can from this world because they don’t know what awaits them in the next. And that’s your role in all of this. You are that little treat for them. They consider it your duty, as a servant of the Emperor.”

  Meiko’s face was a flood. She scrunched down further on her mat and spread her legs even wider. Violate me here, her gesture said. Don’t violate me in places you can’t see.

  Yoshimi would not let his eyes fall to the mangled genitals laid out in front of him. “Did you ever hear about the massacre at Nanking?” he asked. “No, I suspect you wouldn’t have. Nanking was a Chinese city we invaded early in the war. Our men raped their way through it. Old women, girls, little babies. It was disgraceful. We brought an entire city to its knees by raping its women. The army denied it, but we all knew. The comfort stations were set up so that it wouldn’t happen again. No more raping, no more diseases.” He swallowed. “This was the Emperor’s thinking.”

  So what do you call what happens in here? Meiko thought. Am I not raped? Am I not diseased ?

  “I enlisted as a medic after that,” he went on. “I knew I’d probably never see my wife or daughter again, but thought: I can do good work. Help keep our men clean, keep them healthy. Keep them — moral. But we’ve lost sight of why we’re here and what we’re fighting for.”

  Meiko sat up then, stared at him. What did you ever think you were fighting for? To keep the Orient Oriental, like they taught us in school? Is that what you thought when they tied my friend to a tree and carved her up like a pumpkin?

  “I’m not interested in saving our men anymore,” Yoshimi said. “Maybe I want to save somebody else, Meiko. Maybe you. When this war is over, and if we’re both still alive, maybe I could take you home. Deliver you there myself, back to Korea. And then I could learn your real name.”

  Yoshimi waited for her to reply. But she didn’t. She just stared at him. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll check in on you when I can.” Then he stepped through her curtain and returned to the hall. There he found one last non-commissioned officer waiting before his rank’s allotted time was up. The soldier’s pants were already undone, his thick member extended out from his loin cloth. As soon as Yoshimi cleared the room, the man jumped at Meiko’s curtain and cackled with a laugh of relief.

  She would not let Yoshimi take her back to Korea. There was only one escape from the camp that she would accept, and that was death. Death would come for her. Death would rescue her like a chivalrous older brother. She refused to allow her body, this sack of meat with its scars, with its diseases and its shame, to return to her father’s house. She would die first. She would let her spirit float away like chaff on the wind.

  But Yoshimi was right: Japan was losing the war, and losing badly. Meiko knew something horrible was happening when the girls had to move three times over a two-month period. Each trip took them farther south, and each new rape station was more run down than the one before. Every time they moved, Meiko hoped that Yoshimi would not be moved with them. But he always was. She came to hate his kindness, the way he paid to see her under the pretense of sex only to check in on her, bring her extra bits of food he hid in his pockets, and tend to her injuries outside of her monthly examination time.

  Autumn turned to winter, winter to spring, and the war went from worse to disastrous. Meiko longed for that final explosion to come, the unexpected blast that would blow apart the wooden walls of the comfort station and rip everyone inside to shreds. The warm rains of May brought discouraging news to the soldiers: the war in Europe was over. It was only a matter of time before the Emperor would concede defeat on the Asian front. Maybe by the end of the summer. Maybe sooner.

  Yoshimi increased his number of visits to her stall. What he had talked about strictly in the hypothetical before — taking her back to Korea — became more possible with each passing day. “We’ll need safe passage to the coast,” he said one evening. “We’ll find a ship to cross the Yellow Sea to a port in western Korea, and then maybe find a train to take us to Seoul.” Yoshimi’s words came very close to igniting a small spark of anticipation in Meiko. But she would not allow it. She couldn’t let herself imagine going anywhere except to the otherworld.

  Yet how would death come now, if Japan surrendered tomorrow? Or the day after that? Was time not running out for death to slip into her stall and carry her away?

  She got hold of a piece of twine. It came off a box of medical supplies that she had been ordered to unload from the back of a truck one morning. A sergeant cut the bundled rope with a pair of scissors after Meiko had set the box down, but he carelessly allowed the twine to fall to the ground and didn’t collect it. As soon as the sergeant was gone, Meiko bent to scoop the twine up, bunched it into a ball in her hand, waited, looked around and then slipped it up under her skirt, all the way until she could clamp it in her armpit. Back in her stall, minutes before her first soldier of the day would arrive, she took the twine out and unfurled it. It was as thin as a
vein, but strong. She snapped it a few times in her fists — yes, it would do. She went over to her tip box, grabbed handfuls of gyumpo bills and set them on the floor, then rested the twine near the bottom of the box, curled it up like a snake. She piled the gyumpo back on top of the rope until it was completely hidden.

  She did not say anything to Yoshimi that night when he came to see her. He brought her a handful of walnuts he managed to sneak into the hallway; he asked how the Secret Star Cream was working. After he left, Meiko was visited by a large, foul-smelling officer whom she had serviced many times before. He arrived in the late evening and raped her quickly, silently, then fell into a light sleep on her mat, crushing his hot, doughy chest into her back. Meiko waited until deep into the night, when the officer had shifted enough in his sleep so that no part of his body was touching hers. Then she got up slowly, quietly from the mat. She moved to the tip box, submerged her hand into the Gyumpo bills until she felt the twine touch her fingers, and eased it out. Bundled it up again, hiding it in her fist. Moved to her curtain, slipped through it and out into the hall, which was dark and mostly silent. She walked slowly at first, out past the manager’s podium and into the main room. But her gait increased as she approached the station’s main door. Felt her stomach list with a kind of nauseous excitement. Out onto the building’s main stoop. Hurrying now that she had caught sight of the trees with their long, sturdy branches out in the copse. Down the steps now, racing, racing.

  She stumbled over a metal box set near the steps, spilling a highway of shell casings noisily onto the ground. A rustling back in the building, the sound of people waking. Voices. Ignoring the mess she had made and the clatter coming from behind her, Meiko fluttered like a bird across the field, her legs scurrying through the dark until she had crossed into the copse and found herself at the base of a large gingko tree. It arched upward, spreading its knuckled branches into the sky. More voices behind her now, thickening in the house like batter. Meiko tucked the twine between her teeth before grabbing hold of the gingko’s trunk with both arms. It seemed to take forever to scale up to the lowest branch, even though it was less than a dozen feet from the ground. She was finally able to hoist her thin backside onto its rough, sturdy bark. When she did, Meiko took the twine from her mouth and tied one end into a stiff knot around the branch’s bulk. The other end she looped onto itself, narrowing it into a circle and securing it with a knot. Voices now outside the building, crossing the field towards the copse. No time now. Too late now. How long would it take? She snap-snap-snapped the twine to make sure it held to the branch before dropping the other end over her head and patting it around her throat like a necklace. Pulled it tight against the flesh under her chin. The beam of a flashlight ripped across her torso; she looked down and saw pale grey faces approaching the base of her tree. Too late now. Too late now. But let’s see if this works.

  She slid off the branch without a second thought. The ground raced towards her and for a moment she believed she’d fumble back onto it, the twine’s long slack unable to give way to tightness. But then it did — a horrendous wrench at her throat that seized her in the air and swung her like a pendulum. And suddenly Meiko was flying, lingering in space with tiny desperate kicks of her feet. The ground was still two or three feet off. She could not draw a breath through her cleft mouth — could not imagine ever drawing breath again. The pain ballooned in her head as she hanged in suspended animation. Meiko fought off the reflex to grab hold of the twine with both hands and plant her feet into the trunk. She waited for an ocean of silence, the noise of death, to flood her ears. But it didn’t. Another sound came, one that made her want to weep.

  Laughter.

  “Ahh, Chosunjin, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Cut her down!” From the back of the small crowd that had gathered. Yoshimi’s voice. “Dammit, men, somebody cut her down right now.”

  The shake of the twine as a fist took hold of it, and the touch of a blade that instantly released the tension. Meiko dropped into a heap at the gingko’s base, down on all fours as if grovelling, choking on oxygen she didn’t want. Someone loosened and then ripped the twine from her throat, grabbed her by the armpit, and yanked her to her feet. She was shoved through the small crowd like a naughty toddler, the soldiers’ chuckles ringing in her ears. Meiko opened her eyes and saw Yoshimi at the edge of the crowd, trailing behind it. His face had sunken with a look of betrayal. Meiko turned her eyes away from him and waited for the men to throw her back toward the building. They were in the centre of the field and she wanted to collapse down into it, feel the soft grass on her thighs.

  And then came the rattle of sniper fire, snapping open the night like kindling.

  Meiko was shoved to the ground. Everyone was turning, diving, aiming their weapons at the far edge of the copse where starbursts danced across the darkness. Meiko hugged the grass, kept her body perfectly flat as soldiers fired and yelled all around her. She squeezed her eyes shut. It occurred to her only later that she should have stood up, tall and proud, an easy target for a sniper’s bullet to chop her down, to finish this evening’s botched task.

  Silence fell then. The gunfire ended as quickly as it had begun.

  Meiko opened her eyes and found Yoshimi’s face at eye level with hers a few feet off, half his head hidden in the long grass. He lay prostrate in the field with the same sad, dismal stare he’d had at the base of the tree. He blinked once. Concentrated on Meiko so hard — so hard in fact that he was ignoring the black, syrupy hole that had taken ownership of his throat. He gulped and strong little waves of red spurted over the grass. His expression held a thousand regrets. I ran to you, Meiko, it said. As soon as the firing started, I ran to you instead of diving to the ground like I should have. What is this thing I’ve done?

  She closed her eyes, unable to watch the rest. Held an image in her mind of the sky opening up with a bright blare of sun shining down upon them. The sky was wide and filling with cranes, hundreds of wise cranes taking flight toward a world beyond this one.

  Chapter 8

  Little Chin-ho, ten-year-old boy in the second row, has mastered the comparative tense, and the results are hilarious. It’s a Thursday evening in my Junior 4 class and we’ve just finished a grammar module on irregular adjectives. Riveting stuff, really — good, better, and the best; bad, worse, and the worst. The other kids get it more or less, but Chin-ho — whose English name was “Harold” until two nights ago, when he decided he didn’t want an English name — has latched on to the term worse and made it his own. Now, whenever something even remotely negative happens in class, he punctuates the air with a lispy, drawn-out “Worrrrrrrse!” It sends everybody — including me — into gales of laughter. When someone gives a wrong answer, or I drop a marker on the floor, or separate two girls for whispering, or even assign grammar exercises for homework, he’s right there to chastise us all with his new favourite word. I know I should punish him for this ongoing disruption, but it’s just too damn funny; a moment of levity in an otherwise frustrating class. These kids are supposedly at a Junior 4 level, but really they’re only about a Basic 5. This, sadly, isn’t an uncommon occurrence at ABC English Planet. Ms. Kim, in her pedagogical wisdom, will often race batches of students through several levels before they’re ready. It astounds me that there are children here who can recite rules to fairly complex English grammar, things some native speakers wouldn’t even know — how the subjunctive tense works, where to place the comma in a prepositional phrase — and yet cannot tell me what they did on the weekend. “I is goes over our grandmothers to visit Pusan …” or some other syntactical abomination. This school treats the kids like patrons at a fast-food joint, and my language is the burgers I sling at them just as fast as humanly possible. It’s awful.

  Except it isn’t. Surprise surprise — I find this job rewarding at the oddest moments, times when I can cut through Ms. Kim’s lunatic curriculum, this hagwon’s assembly-line treatment of children, and get the kids to really g
rasp something. Tonight, we move on from comparatives to something I hope they’ll enjoy a bit more: adverbs of frequency. I write the five most prominent ones — NEVER … RARELY … SOMETIMES … USUALLY … ALWAYS — across the length of my white board, explain what they mean, and then ask the kids to name habits or actions for each. Hands fly to the ceiling; everyone’s eager to participate. The first few answers are predictably banal — I always breathe; I sometimes cry. Then things take a turn for the scatological: “I never eat d-d-o-n-g,” says Devon, cheekily.

  “Worrrrrrrse!” Chin-ho exclaims.

  Now the kids are getting into it, the personalization behind each answer.

  “I usually call grandmother on Sundays,” Suzy says.

  “I rarely play with my brother,” quips Karen.

  “I always do my homework,” says Eddie.

  “MichaelTeacher, Eddie never do his homework,” Erin grumbles. The kids all laugh. And me, I get it, finally — what all of this is supposed to be about. It’s not just making them understand the concept. It’s about watching those little lights turn on, about getting them to bend their brains creatively.

  I have forgotten what it feels like to fall in love with someone slowly. I don’t remember it being so imperialistic, your emotions stalking the other person’s attributes, claiming each of them in turn, the word love sneaking into your lexicon. “You know, I love this about you …” you find yourself saying; or she, apropos of nothing: “You know, I really love that about you …” And on it goes until there are no aspects left to claim, and you end up loving it all — the good, the ridiculous, and especially the parts you don’t quite understand, the mysteries. You love it all. “I love you” becomes the natural next step.

  For three more weeks, Jin and I make these concentric circles around each other, snatching up more and more characteristics as we go. I love the way she sticks out her bottom lip when she’s thinking hard. She loves the way my brow furrows when I’m reading something good. I love the flutter of her eyes whenever I say something foolish. She loves my beard, its scruffy coarseness framing my jaw. I even love aspects of Jin that I would normally find untenable in a girl, like her total inability to accept a compliment at face value. She treats blandishments from me not so much with suspicion as with supreme exhaustion, like she’s heard it all before. Is it weird that this causes a strange flush of yearning in me, a bubble of desire?