Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  I was allowed to bring whatever I wished, as if it were a normal job. I brought the little I possessed: tunics and leggings, a few old postcards I’d been given on my government-sponsored journey a few years earlier, and the clockwork crab. In Taipei, they gave me a duffel bag and several modern dresses, as well as a kimono and a makeup kit with items like an ebony hair comb, white powder and red lipstick, which I had never owned. I did not question the lack of a nursing uniform like the one I had seen on the recruiting poster—I was too pleasantly surprised by all the gifts. Those dresses and that kimono, which had seemed luxurious at first, would have to last seven years. As one of the daytime laundrywomen and seamstresses—most of us did camp chores part of each day—it was my job to make clothing last.

  I would be confined in Taipei from late 1938 to 1942. I would not learn how to bandage a single arm, or even how to take a temperature. On my arrival, I would be housed with a strange assortment of women, from Taiwan and other lands: aboriginal farmers, educated town ladies from the lowlands, and a few urban prostitutes.

  Because I spoke Japanese with a good accent and told the recruiters I had Japanese blood, they kept me in a different category, at least in the beginning. I served officers, and one older captain in particular—silver-haired and with a limp and twisted back from a war injury some years earlier in Manchuria. He was in terrible pain and he drank too much. The girls called him “Goblin Fox” when he wasn’t within earshot, and claimed that on the night he was due in camp, the weather always turned foul. He beat me at times when he was frustrated, but he also left me alone more than the younger, able men would have, and posted a guard at the door of our quarters, to keep the other men from using me while he was gone. It worked, most of the time.

  The captain visited once per month, and his visits were not pleasant, but at least they were infrequent, leaving me to other assigned tasks during the day. Occasionally, another man would break the rule—even the doctors examining us for venereal disease felt they could take advantage—but even so, I was on call less than many of the other women, which in turn made some of them turn their backs on me.

  But this special treatment—if you care to call it special to be a concubine who gets beatings at every full moon—did not last when I was transferred to Indonesia, where I quickly became just another piece of meat, sore from morning until night.

  I learned more than one would ever wish to know about men: some come quickly, some slowly, some shout, some cry, some are afraid to touch you, some keep grabbing as if you’re slipping away. Some refuse to look in your eyes; some look too hard and too long. Even while they’re hurting you, you know they are hurting as well, but there is nothing you can do about it. One in ten wants to save you, for all of three minutes until he achieves his pleasure, and then he shuffles out the door and lets the next one in.

  In Indonesia, also, I tried to tell one of the higher-ranked officers that I was half-Japanese.

  So what?

  In other camps, they had full-blooded Japanese girls. And elsewhere they had captured Dutch women, Australian women, even. They weren’t only abusing aborigines, that was for sure. I knew women who lasted only three years in the camps. I knew women who lasted only three months. And yet, other women like me lived on, year after year. It was not the kind of hardiness that made us feel pride.

  We drank when we could. Not often. Mostly they drank and we pretended. On a bender, one Japanese soldier who had a reputation for beating women, bruising their necks and legs, and busting their jaws, finally broke into the liquor cabinet and was beaten nearly to death by his own officers, and then left tied just outside the door of the company brothel. Not because of what he’d done to the women, but because he’d drained the supply of good booze. That’s how they treated their own. Imagine how they treated us! We were worth less than a serving of whiskey. We were “comfort women,” but only a little comfort, and hardly worth protecting.

  Once, a big-shot officer came and arranged to have me for a whole day and night. He tied me up by my wrists to the bed, did what he wanted, fell asleep, and left me pinned there, wrists aching, bruises forming, unable to sleep in that position as the cord cut deeper, until I felt like a wild animal, desperate to gnaw off my own arm to make the discomfort cease. In my panic I kicked him awake, but he only had his way again and then nodded off a second time.

  I told myself I’d never let anyone chain my wrist again. I would die before I let them tie me to something. Even now, when I’ve been hooked up to IVs and all those other infernal medical machines, I’ve felt myself slipping back to that night, smelling the smells of his drinking, his semen and my own sour sweat as I tried and failed to work the cord free. How does one explain to a doctor or some lowly assistant that the hospital bed with its cords and tubes delivering innocent oxygen or saline is a reminder of the old camps, of that long-ago war—in any case, a reminder of the past? We can’t talk of these things.

  A Taiwanese woman wrote a memoir, it must have been twenty or thirty years ago now, and she was briefly notorious. It wasn’t the death threats that puzzled me—of course, modern Japanese don’t want to believe any of this happened—but how the woman herself managed to fill an entire memoir with the comings and goings of men, often five in a day, sometimes far more. I didn’t understand how she could bring herself to fill those hundreds of pages, to let those memories all loose at once. I don’t know how other women could read it. As for myself, I leafed through the book in a shop and then put it back, feeling like even that had been a mistake, and that the ghosts would surely follow me home.

  In the camps, we lived with aches, rashes, bruises, and smells that couldn’t be washed away. We were given no opportunity to leave, even though we were told we had volunteered. We hurt and hurt and after a while, came to despise the feeling of any human touch, the pressure of a finger against skin that felt like fire. Everything felt like fire. I dreamed of floating on air with nothing touching me, until I stopped dreaming.

  Occasionally, girls got pregnant. Fewer than you would think. Yet, thanks to medical assistance, no babies were born, not in the camps or stations where I was.

  I was supposed to be a nurse, helping people. They said I would be a nurse.

  What do I want now? What do I crave?

  Sometimes, to be alone. Unbothered. Unwatched. Untethered to any machine, whether or not it blinks or shrieks or simply stares at me, trying to see inside of me when my insides are no one’s business but my own.

  There was not enough hot water at the camp, just as there was not enough good food or booze. The smell of sex and sourness and illness and funk stayed in my nose so long I was smelling it even later, even in late 1940s Tokyo, before I met my husband, when things were grim.

  Yes. I missed hot water: a scalding hot, proper bath.

  Sometimes, I want to be touched. Sometimes, I want to be heard and finally understood.

  But most of all, I want to be clean.

  PART III

  19 Angelica

  They stayed up into the night, refilling the sake bottle twice. Without calling attention to it, Angelica drank less than Sayoko, at times barely wetting her lips, mindful of the fetus developing invisibly within her.

  Sayoko sipped her sake, her eyes closed halfway, savoring the taste and feeling the warmth, a balm for the difficulty of speaking about such an ugly past. Watching her, Angelica imagined the times Sayoko had lived through, times without comfort or privilege: the first fifty years or so, yes, but Sayoko had lived twice as long. No: twice as long plus ten years. It was true.

  With Hiro’s prompting, Sayoko told Angelica other stories, stories that came easier now that the hardest had been told. Now Angelica knew what Sayoko’s own son didn’t: about her childhood as Laqi, about her affair with Daisuke, about the clockwork crab and avoiding a marriage of convenience to Lee Kuan Chien, about what had happened to the first Ryo, and about the long road that followed, her secrets
safe in a world slowly emerging from the rubble of wartime, when most people longed to forget and move on.

  Everything Angelica had ever lived through—losing family, struggling for independence, trying to fit into a new culture—Sayoko had experienced many times over. Bustling Tokyo had once been as frightening to Sayoko as it had been to Angelica, and probably even more so, since she had come on a US warship, surrounded by sailors who thought they were repatriating her to her original homeland, set ashore with no family, no way to make a living.

  Sayoko told no one that she was from Taiwan. Not far from an army barrack, Sayoko managed to find a job sewing. Perversely, she had gotten so used to living in a military compound that the groups of young American men were less frightening to her than the regular local neighborhoods: mothers and children, large extended families, traditional shrines, unfamiliar customs, people who would ask too many questions and see past her charade.

  The sewing work kept her minimally fed and sheltered for fifteen years. It allowed her interaction with the locals, but only for limited encounters made all the more brief by her feigned shyness. With every kimono she stitched, with every Japanese lady of high and low station that she served, Sayoko became more Japanese herself, studying their accents, their demeanors, their slowly modernizing ways, until she could pass as one of them: her eyes a little larger, her black hair threaded with chestnut that glinted in the summer sun.

  “When I was young, my hair was closer to yours,” Sayoko said, reaching out to touch a strand tucked behind Angelica’s ear. It was almost two in the morning now. They were all exhausted with emotion, at moments pensive, at moments unexpectedly giddy. “I was relieved when it turned gray.”

  “But your husband knew.”

  “He did.”

  “And he was in favor of concealment.”

  “He demanded it.”

  When their heads were swimming, Angelica filled a bowl with rice crackers. Later she went to her closet digging for snacks and found a forgotten bag of coconut cookies: the very last. Caught up in the middle of Sayoko’s late-night story, she lost track of when the last bottle emptied, when the last crumbs were swept up. Angelica had started the evening with puffy eyes and full sinuses, and hours into the stories, she could’ve almost forgotten what had preceded Sayoko’s disclosure, not only the fall in the tub, but before that, the messages from Datu, his attempts to distance himself from her, which had reduced Angelica to sobs. No wonder her head felt so heavy now, dripping with the tiredness of a night of emotional purging.

  After helping Sayoko to bed, Angelica returned to her room, eyes burning and back sore from hours sitting at the edge of Sayoko’s bed. Glancing in the bathroom mirror at her ravaged face, Angelica spotted the cross at her neck, which she always left on, even in her sleep. There was so little in this world that connected a person to anything else: a memory, a story, a thin chain, a groundless hope. What good had faith done her? What good had it done any of them? Yanna. Datu. Sayoko. Yet still, she could not take the necklace off.

  “Hiro?” Angelica had come out of her room a half hour later, unable to sleep, and poked her head into Sayoko’s room, where Hiro was standing in a corner, powered down but instantly awakened at the sound of his name. Sayoko had dropped off into deep slumber, but Angelica’s problems were far from resolved. “Meet me in the kitchen?”

  She knew he could probably access nearly anything: obscure documents about her past, perhaps even more clues to her present visa troubles and whatever situation was pending. But if she could ask for only one favor now, quickly, as the sky began to lighten beyond the window over the sink, it was this: “Can you find out more about Datu, so I can understand how he’s doing? Pay stubs? Health records?”

  She pulled out a kitchen chair, quietly, so the legs would not scrape against the floor, and took a seat. He imitated her and drew his chair close, head tilted toward hers, voice low. “You want me to find and inform you of all I find.”

  “Will that take long?”

  “No, I had it as soon as you asked. I was only making sure you really want to see it. The problem is quantity. What is your priority?”

  Words came to mind: last time able to work, bank account balance, diagnostic details, treatment plans, life-span predictions. Hiro could show her everything, but what she wanted most was simple connection.

  “Meaning?”

  “The details can come later, when I’ve had some sleep. I just want to see him.”

  “Permission to breach BZ security?”

  Angelica attempted a half-smile. “You don’t need to wait for my permission.”

  There was no smile in Hiro’s reply. “But you need to know you have given it. Because the footage may not be comfortable to watch.”

  Angelica took a breath. “Okay.”

  “I have security video. I will use facial recognition to sort and organize, I will select and compress, if you’ll wait . . .”

  “I don’t mind—” she started to say.

  “—finished. Eleven minutes of selected images available. Review?”

  She told herself she would watch for five minutes. Instead she watched it all. Flickering shots of Datu in his dorm room, then being wheeled into a private hospital room, and then into a different one, a crowded space with three bunks, curtained walls. Isolated snapshots, inactive sequences deleted, active sequences preserved, of Datu being tended to. A sheet was snapped back by two orderlies, and she saw his thin frame, the black spots on his body, the withered state of his legs.

  “That isn’t my brother.”

  Hiro said, “Continue?”

  “Yes.”

  Even without sound, she could imagine his cry of pain as they rolled him over, emaciated body pulling into a ball, toes curling, sheets soiled.

  The kitchen window flashed white with the rising sun.

  Angelica heard the sound of Itou’s alarm clock.

  “I’m out of time. Hiro—” she paused. “Thank you.” But she wasn’t merely out of time. She was also stretched beyond her capacity to assimilate. Her brother was not simply very ill. Her brother was nearing the end.

  In her mind, she tried to sort through her naïve plans. She had hoped to get him home to the Philippines. Despite all he’d said to her, despite how he’d tried to cut the last cord between them, she could not understand why a person would want to die in a strange compound in a cold, contaminated, foreign land.

  She heard the sounds of Itou’s feet padding to the kitchen. Breakfast preparations. She had maybe ten more minutes until she should make herself present, offer assistance, and then wake Sayoko.

  In Alaska it was midday.

  Hiro said, “Anji-sensei, I have located something new. Active footage.”

  Ignoring him for the moment she tapped the last word of a text to her brother: I have to do something. I will find some way.

  “Anji-sensei,” Hiro said again. “I offer you my deepest condolences. I am concerned for your mental health. What are you feeling?”

  “I’m feeling very sad,” she said. But that was only half of it. She felt powerless to save him, powerless even to assure Datu comfort. Her mind was summoning the urge to run off in all the old directions: she must find more money. She must find people who could grease the way somehow. “You don’t need to worry, Hiro.”

  “You’re certain.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “I have to be.”

  She could not deny the facts anymore. In a way, she had known even before seeing the footage. She both was and wasn’t in the dark. At the very least, she could see far enough to take a few steps: but where?

  Datu wasn’t being logical. He couldn’t be left to die alone.

  “If you’re coping adequately then you may wish to see this,” he insisted. “It’s snapvideo on a vanishing loop. It’s being deleted at five minute intervals. The hospital does not preserve i
t when there are no security issues or patient emergencies.”

  “Can you tell me quickly what it shows?”

  “Your brother is in bed, appearance the same, being tended by a woman—a nurse perhaps.”

  Angelica heard Itou calling for her.

  “I could monitor and record any salient moments for later review . . .”

  “That would be best.”

  Angelica was still rubbing sleep from her eyes when the first visitor came to the door. The birthday party wasn’t scheduled until one in the afternoon. She knew the reporters and photographers were determined to come early, but this early? Before breakfast?

  She opened the door, bowing, relieved it was only mail delivery. A special birthday message for Sayoko, most likely.

  Instead, it was addressed directly to her. A large envelope. She shook it, fearing its official heft, hoping it was only her latest language exams with her passport inside, duly returned.

  It was not. Angelica noted the Health Department stationery heading. She noted her name, birthdate, landing date, basic vitals. She noted the urgent instructions for making a follow-up visit—blood draw, DNA test—not only with the Health Department, but with the Immigration Office, which had been automatically notified in order to share responsibility for this unusual case, for which there were relatively few precedents. She noted the diagnosis. Yes, well, she already knew, thank you very much, but now everyone would know. Her news was on its way to being public knowledge.

  “Anji-sensei,” Hiro said, standing behind her. “Would you like me to prepare Sayoko-san’s breakfast?”

  “Yes,” Angelica said, numbed by the notification. “Please.”

  Hiro remained standing, reading her body language.

  “Hiro,” Angelica began. “Never mind. We have a big day ahead of us. We’ll all think more clearly when it’s over.”

  “It was the letter,” Hiro said. “You can tell me, if it will help.”

  She was tired of secrets and even more tired of lies. So she did.