by Kim Soom
Grudgingly the girls rose and dispersed. What a shame to have to dispense with the warming spring sunshine they’d awaited the whole winter long. They let the sun hit their faces one last time before returning to their rooms.
In no time a flock of soldiers arrived, turning the yard into a sea of yellow. Already they were undoing their gaiters while waiting their turn.
Fifteen men a day was normal, but on Sundays fifty men or more might come and go from a girl.
To save time, instead of taking off their pants, the enlisted men merely unzipped and undid their loincloth. She often felt the dagger sheath on their belts poking her belly.
If the soldiers had trouble penetrating, they applied ointment to the sakku.
When a soldier came and went from her, she felt as if a thin strip of flesh had been carved from her privates. After ten men had come and gone from her, she felt there was no flesh left to be carved.
At any given time her vagina would prolapse and not even a needle could penetrate it.
Lacking a calendar, the girls never knew the day of the week or the date and could only assume Sunday had arrived by the number of soldiers who came and went. The days were anonymous, and as they streamed by, the girls broke down.
“Is there ever going to be an end to these fucking guys?” Ch’unhŭi ŏnni would grumble whenever the soldiers surged into the yard.
Wanting to leave the soldiers disgusted with her, she didn’t wash her face and didn’t comb her hair.
Even so, in no time the soldiers were swarming her and the other girls like fire ants.
If only there was a battle every day. When there was a battle the soldiers didn’t come. And if only the soldiers never returned from battle. The soldiers who did return seemed to be in a frenzy, they were so giddy and violent. They were covered with dust from head to toe, they hadn’t washed, and they stank. Their arrival transformed the comfort station into a madhouse—in one room a fight between a soldier and a girl, in another room a girl beaten by a soldier she was trying to get away from, a drunk soldier running amok in the next room, a girl sobbing in grief in the next room, a girl haranguing a soldier who didn’t want to use a sakku . . .
Often soldiers flat-out refused to use a sakku. No matter how a girl might plead, saying she’d come down with a terrible disease and didn’t want him to catch it, the soldier wasn’t about to listen. So what, the soldiers retorted, they might die in battle today, or tomorrow, so why worry about a stupid disease—and then they would pounce. What if I come down with gonorrhea or syphilis? Such worries drove her up a wall.
There were soldiers who cried knowing they were going off to battle. One of them, a slightly built youth in a man-sized uniform, clutched her arm as he might have that of a big sister, and sniffled. The mere sight of the Japanese military uniform made her want to throw up, but she soothed him nonetheless: Come on now, don’t cry and just make sure you come back alive. . . . Even though she wished that none of the Japanese soldiers would come back alive, this soldier, crying like a child, captured her sympathies. She never saw him again and never did learn if he had survived.
During the lull between battles the soldiers were comparatively docile.
The girls also hoped Japan would win the war. Because if it lost they were sure to die, all of them.
Haha’s mantra was, “If Japan wins the war, then you girls can go home.” And they’d be set for life, she added. “Japan wins and I’ll send you girls home with enough money to sock away a good-sized patch of paddy land.”
It didn’t have to be paddy, she would tell herself; a good amount of cotton fabric to take home would do—or enough soybeans to fill the soy-sauce crocks. Yes, better that way than dying there in Manchuria. But the next moment she would wonder what use it would be to go home; considering what she’d done in the comfort station, she’d be better off dead. What would she say to her family? That she’d been working at a thread factory? A silk factory? Maybe she should just tell them she was working at a nice factory? Such thoughts filled her with gloom.
Haha sometimes handpicked half a dozen girls to send to a backcountry outpost. Military transport would be sent for them.
In a makeshift comfort station put together with canvas and plywood partitions, the girls were put to work taking the soldiers. In their bent-leg frog-flipped-over-on-its-back position, the girls took the soldiers all day long. By evening, when the officers summoned the girls to their tents—you wouldn’t find them going to the comfort station— they were unable to straighten their legs. Their meals were brought from the canteen and consisted of a couple of spoonfuls of flattened barley with pickled radish on the side. Very rarely they were given thin spinach soup and canned fish. After a week of taking soldiers they returned to the comfort station.
On one such trip to an outpost the truck passed through a Chinese village littered with corpses. The girls saw women and children making their way among the bodies and heard them wailing. The truck drove straight through, crushing arms, legs, and heads. When the wheels ran over a pudgy man’s belly and his innards burst out, it was like a full-body shock to the girls.
While she was gazing at a man slumped against the earthen wall of a home, wondering if he was dead or alive, Punsŏn tapped her on the shoulder. “Look, that dog’s dragging off a dead boy! Why would it do that?” Punsŏn cocked her head skeptically.
“For food . . . it’s probably hungry,” Ch’unhui ŏnni said with a pout.
Pongae awoke from a nap with an embarrassed grin. Above a collapsed house fluttered a Hinomaru flag the size of a blanket. A barefoot woman standing with a devastated expression before the charred remnants of a home looked with hollow eyes at the girls in the truck.
The truck left the village and in time a river appeared. It was twice as wide as the river in her home village. The near bank was heaped with the branches and trunks of chopped-down trees. Armed soldiers guarded the dock.
A mass of corpses floated down the river, reddening the water, before coming apart at the bow of the ferry taking the girls upstream.
The potato on the round plate is the size of a baby’s fist. She looks at the potato, a thread of steam rising from it, as if it’s the last meal she’ll ever have.
When finally she takes it in her hand, her eyes lose focus and flicker.
She holds out the hand with the potato.
“Take it!”
She realizes no one is there but can’t take the potato back.
She could have sworn Yŏnsun was across from her.
Yŏnsun, scrawny and malnourished though she was, socked away the hardtack, taffy, and canned goods she got from the soldiers, instead of consuming them herself. She couldn’t get over thoughts of her younger siblings, whom she imagined nibbling on cuckoo lilies or wild rose petals when they had nothing to eat. The cuckoo lilies blossomed in early summer around the time the cuckoos could be heard calling, and her siblings ate the tender shoots fresh off the stalk, though they left a bitter taste. Yŏnsun said she would ask the lieutenant who was one of her regulars to have her stash sent home. He had a daughter the same age as Yŏnsun. One day he went off to battle and didn’t return. Not long after, Yŏnsun was sent elsewhere. Cheekbones jutting from hollowed cheeks, Yŏnsun hugged her bundle tightly as she climbed into the truck.
The other girls had gathered in the yard to see her off. “She was so pretty when she got here and now look at her, the poor thing!”
“Did they really cut her open to get rid of her baby?”
When the soldiers they’d gotten used to seeing didn’t show up over a period of time, the girls assumed they’d been killed in battle.
She pinches off a tiny chunk of the potato and brings it to her mouth.
The girls knew what it meant to be hungry.
They knew from the time they were in their mother’s womb.
They knew even before their mouths were formed.
There was hunger at the Manchurian comfort station too. Haha served tin bowls of gruel to the
girls for breakfast. The gruel was clear as water, so clear the girls could see their entire face reflected in it, and the only side dish was pasty-looking kimchi that was going bad. More often than not it was weevils or maggots floating to the surface of the gruel instead of bits of meat. When the gruel was gone the girls scooped at their face reflected in the bottom of the bowl. But all the scooping in the world could never fill them.
The rice balls were generally spoiled in summer and frozen in winter. But regardless of condition they weren’t served to the girls who couldn’t take soldiers because they’d caught a venereal disease. Those girls instead would eat the hardtack given them by the soldiers, soaking it first in water to make it last longer. Soaking made the hardtack swell up until it resembled a hunk of steamed pork.
Dinner was almost always wheat gruel made by boiling salted clumps of dough. Eating a bowl of it left the girls with the smell of wallpaper paste coming from their mouth. With dinner constantly interrupted by the arrival of soldiers, even this meager fare was eaten only a few spoonfuls at a time. She often cooks noodles for herself but never soup with wheat dumplings, which reminds her of the wheat gruel.
On the twice-monthly volunteer days the girls were graced with miso soup, however watery it might be, and only had to take soldiers in the evening. On these days otosan mustered the girls and loaded them into the cargo truck. A half-hour ride brought them to a lone, dreary canvas structure that resembled a neglected workshop storage shed. Inside, the girls sat across from each other on planks and repaired soldiers’ uniforms—mending caps and pants and darning socks. She wished she were mending her father’s chŏgori instead. Or her brother’s chŏgori. Or her mother’s quilted socks. . . . She never understood why the girls had to mend the uniforms on top of everything else they did for the soldiers. Why didn’t the soldiers’ mothers or sisters do the mending? But as vexed as she felt with this chore, she didn’t want to take shortcuts what with the deep freeze winter brought to Manchuria. It was so cold that even the cabbage for making kimchi turned into icy blocks.
Later she heard that the girls who were taken to Singapore ate rice steamed in bloody water. At the height of the Pacific War with explosions all around, the girls were transported by scooter-trailer to take the soldiers. Late one night six girls huddled in a blacked-out tent were feeding a few handfuls of rice into a canteen when a bomb exploded outside. The freaked-out girls escaped with the canteen, instinctively groping in the dark for water to add to the rice, and were still on the move when day broke. Finally they could cook, but when they saw that the mixture in the canteen was red as the blood of a slaughtered pig they realized that what they had scooped in the dark was blood instead of water. How could they eat that? But after talking it over they decided to go ahead rather than risk starving to death, and so they closed their eyes and ate. Six girls avoided starving by eating rice cooked with the blood of a dead person, but only one of those six ended up surviving the war.
Sitting in front of the TV and staring at the paper mask, she cocks her head. Is that supposed to look like my face? She wonders if her face came to mind when the girl was making the eyes and nose.
She wants to cry but can’t. She lowers her head and opens her mouth as wide as a hungry goblin, but not a tear falls. Nor did the passing of her sisters and her older brother bring tears. She was met instead with backbiting from her relatives: her obstinacy had turned her into a spinster for life and left her heartless. For her, though, it was her relentless life that had left her dry-eyed; no amount of pulling on her eyelids would bring tears. She must have cried herself dry back then when she was young, she would tell herself, rather than rationing them throughout her life.
How savage she was; even animals can cry, she reproached herself when her brother’s death failed to bring her to tears.
What’s the use of living if you can’t even measure up to an animal?
What if I saw Kunja—would that bring me to tears? Or Kŭmbok ŏnni? Or T’anshil? Or Sundŏk? . . .
Sundŏk from Hapch’ŏn in South Kyŏngsang Province said she thought she was heading to Inch’ŏn to work as a live-in maid but ended up at the comfort station.
“I left home at age 12 and worked as a maid for a Japanese officer’s family. I had no choice because at home we never knew where our next meal was coming from. I cleaned house for them, I did the laundry, I ran errands, I even went to the market. . . . The officer’s name was Takeshi. I was there three years and then Takeshi says to me how would I like to go to Inch’ŏn, I could get eight wŏn a month as a maid there, you know? Sure, I said, and the next thing I know he sticks twenty-four wŏn in my hand, a three-month advance, see? I gave twenty to my mom and kept the rest, bought myself a dress and a pair of white rubber shoes with it—I was soooo happy. . . . Mommy came out to the station with me and bought me some crabapples for the trip. If I’d known I was ending up here, I’d have given Mom the other four wŏn too. Yeah, I definitely should have given her the whole amount.”
From haha’s radio came the chirping of a cuckoo.
“Why does that damn cuckoo keep calling?” So saying, Sundŏk pulled her close and began whimpering. She herself felt the same way. Listening to the cuckoo on the radio left her missing Mom and home dearly. Cuckoo, cuckoo—the chirping had her weeping in no time.
Tears dribbled down tall Tongsuk ŏnni’s broad face too.
“What if I die and never get to see my little brother again?” lamented Hanok ŏnni, sitting out in the hallway with her legs stretched out. He was her only sibling and she’d promised him that when she came back from the needle factory she would buy him a couple of calves.
It was more than ten years ago that Sundŏk visited her in a dream— though in the dream she couldn’t immediately recall her name. She was in the kitchen rinsing rice and in popped Sundŏk. She herself had grown old, but Sundŏk was as youthful as she remembered her. And she was wearing the same drab sack dress. Sundŏk disappeared momentarily and she found her sitting demurely next to the window in her bedroom.
“What was your name?” It still hadn’t come to mind.
“Yeah, good question, what is it? . . . Maybe a person who doesn’t even measure up to a dog or a cat doesn’t rate a name, and anyway I can’t even remember it. And sometimes my mom’s name and my dad’s name escape me too.”
“Well I don’t remember how old I am.”
“Same with me. But I was 13 when they took me away—I remember that as clear as day.”
“You haven’t aged a bit—how can that be?” But far from envying Sundŏk, she felt pity for her. As Sundŏk was getting up to leave, she detained her, saying she should at least have a bite to eat.
“What do you miss the most?”
“Fresh sweet peppers dipped in toenjang paste, that’s all.”
“Not meat?”
“I can’t. Remember? Not after I saw them burning all those bodies.”
She left to put together a meal, but when she returned with the meal tray Sundŏk had disappeared.
Awakening from her dream, she sobbed for a good long time, thinking Sundŏk had come to say goodbye forever.
Among the women she saw on television was one who couldn’t find her way back to Korea after its liberation from Japan. She was in a comfort station in the Heilongjiang area and barely remembered her own name.
Is she still alive? And if so, how old would she be? She has to be the one who was sitting next to me on the train, asking which factory I was going to—just like Haegŭm used to do.
5
WHO COULD HAVE TAKEN MY SHOES? Her face scrunches up as if she’s about to cry. Her eyes scan the yard then return to the trash can. That’s right, I hid them behind the trash last night before I went to bed. She retrieves the shoes and sets them neatly below the edge of the veranda. But she can’t put them on, they just don’t look like hers, and all she can do is gape at them.
Hmm, maybe the last one left them here? After the next-to-last one passed away and now she’s all alone? She
must have come by last night and left her shoes.
She wonders if the last one might be T’anshil. Or maybe it’s Aesun, who drank the arsenic solution that left her sounding like a parrot when she talked. Or Changshil ŏnni, a helpful shadow for her sister T’anshil, whose sight was dimmed by syphilis—except when Changshil had to take soldiers, and then she felt compelled to get her little sister as far away from herself as she could. For T’anshil it was like having a prosthetic removed.
During all these years she hasn’t encountered any of the girls from the Manchuria comfort station. Needless to say, she doesn’t know if they’re dead or alive, not to mention where they might be or any other particulars.
In the post-Liberation period the girls scattered every which way. Some followed the Japanese soldiers, some remained in China, some died crossing from China back to Korea. In any event the majority ended up dead before their time.
Even while speculating about who might have returned safely, even while visiting the home village of Kunja, whom she missed so terribly, she remained anxious at the possibility of encountering any of the girls by chance. And she’s forever on pins and needles thinking, What if someone finds out I used to be a comfort woman? And when she’s out and about, if she feels someone is giving her a suspicious look she’ll disappear into the nearest alley.
So there were other comfort stations—she learned this from the girls who had arrived from stations elsewhere. Until then she’d assumed there couldn’t possibly be another place like the Manchuria comfort station.
Three years had passed and the number of girls had grown from twenty-five to thirty-two—and this despite the fact that quite a few girls had left. Not that any of them had walked out on her own. Safer to say they had all come down sick and were told to leave. Haha made the girls with serious diseases, such as syphilis, use a separate outhouse until they got better, and then they had to take soldiers again. The girls had two chances at this salvage operation; if they were infected a third time, otosan would load them into the truck and take them away—or soldiers might show up for that purpose. None of the girls taken away had ever returned. Haha was tight-lipped about the fate of the girls, whether they’d gone home or to another comfort station.