by Kim Soom
“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.”
The yard in front of the comfort station was bare earth except for a few clumps of tangled grass. A stream went past the yard out back. A channel had been carved for the stream, and where the water pooled, an area for washing up had been curtained off with thick sheets the color of military fatigues. Fed by the stream water, half a dozen lengths of hose resembling fat worms stuck out of the ground, each one topped by a ladle-like showerhead.
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.
But she cannot forgive what happened to her.
Fifteen men a day was normal, but on Sundays fifty men or more might come and go from a girl.
Her father must have died, he was always having coughing fits, said Haegŭm, and then she broke into tears.
“They said I was seven months along.” Suok ŏnni heaved a sigh; her breath had the strong smell of steamed eggplant. “It was a boy, and one side was black and rotten from head to toe.”
The girls were never paid by the soldiers they took, but she heard other girls say they had been paid. Those girls said that the tickets were payment for sex, even though you couldn’t exchange them for rice grain, clothing, or rubber shoes.
Haha also handed out bean-sized pills. Supposedly they prevented disease. Once when she thought no one was looking she threw hers into the outhouse pit, but haha found out and she caught a beating. I had to go and tell her I threw them away—why didn’t I just say I took them? She didn’t know how to lie.
On the day of departure for Singapore she would gladly have given up one of her arms instead of Kŭmbok ŏnni. But when Kŭmbok ŏnni reiterated to her before leaving, “Just do what haha says,” it sounded servile and so she pretended not to hear.
And then she’d stripped off her undergarments and there it was, front and center on her belly, the scar that looked like a rusty zipper. “If they’d just removed my baby . . . then I could have had another one, I could have lived. But no, they cleaned me out, womb and all—how could they do that? And I never knew it—I tried to get pregnant, tried every fucking trick, I went to the temple, I prayed to the Buddha, I prayed to the three spirits, I tried, dammit, I even had a mudang do her song-and-dance!”
“My time came when I was eating barley rice wrapped in lettuce,” said Hanok ŏnni. “In comes Four-eyes with a stick up his ass and says we got to go now if we’re going to catch the train. I couldn’t even finish my meal. And here I am.”
That she still lives in fear.
The next morning she went to the canvas-covered laundry area in the backyard to find all the girls in tears as they washed their bloody underwear.
The days the girls didn’t have to go out to serve the soldiers were days of freedom.
The Soviets were camped here and there, guarding the crossing of this river that formed the border between Manchuria and Chosŏn.
Around that time she experienced swelling in her privates, which felt so heavy she thought they might separate from her. Such simple tasks as dishwashing became a chore, and she had to quit her job as a maid. When her nether regions were swollen, even bending or stretching her back was difficult. She tried all the “good-for-you” restoratives such as sweet pumpkin, carp, and Chinese herbal medicine, but to no avail. She massaged her lower abdomen with an ancient roof tile she’d heated, and that alone brought some relief. If a television show involved fighting or gunshots, she turned to a different channel. She didn’t like people singing, she didn’t like people who were loud, she didn’t like people having fun—she didn’t like anything.
She herself couldn’t endure, no way could she endure, and so she had herself injected too. Which got rid of the pain down below, no matter how she bled, and left her oblivious to the number of soldiers who came and went from her. The high left her feeling life was worth living, but when the drug wore off, she felt a crushing pain all over and couldn’t focus. At first one shot a day would tide her over, but then she’d have to add a second, and on Saturdays and Sundays when the soldiers swarmed in like fire ants, she would need five. She finally snapped out of it when she saw Hunam ŏnni dumped in the wilds, and she quit. From then on, if she found herself craving opium, she smoked or drank instead.
Back in her ancestral home of Miryang, Kisuk ŏnni had worked at a cotton-gin operation run by the Japanese. You put the cotton bolls from the field into the gin, and it separated the cotton from the seeds. Kisuk ŏnni said she had seen a man get dragged into the machine by his hair.
“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.”
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.
From the other girls at the station she learned that fretful parents were quick to try to marry off their daughters—whether to a widower with kids, a shriveled old man, or a man who was missing a leg—anything to prevent them from being taken away. But this was a mistaken assumption, as some girls were taken away in the presence of their husbands. The Japanese soldiers and military police had a sixth sense for ferreting out unmarried girls who tried to disguise themselves as married by wearing their hair in a bun covered by a towel.
When 16-year-old Kunja got pregnant and her belly began to swell, they said, “The bitch is young and pretty, low mileage on her, can’t afford to trade her in yet, so just take out her uterus.”
“Poor baby, where’s your mommy and daddy?”
The moth looks like a uterus. Her uterus, the army of ants sinking their tiny teeth into it and holding on for dear life reminding her of the line of Japanese soldiers jostling one another while awaiting their turn with her. She begins to gag.
A girl with a bulging belly was pulled under.
“I paid two hundred for one of them, a hundred for that one, and one-fifty for the third one.”
The compartment was flanked with pairs of seats that faced each other, each seat accommodating three girls. Pairs of Japanese soldiers paced the aisle. The train had originated in P’ohang, and four girls from there were on board.
And so the girls would cut themselves and bleed to death while hi
gh on opium. Knowing that if they cut a finger and sucked long enough to get the blood flowing, the opium would put them to sleep and they’d never wake up. Kisuk ŏnni had died like that, her blood-caked teeth looking like pomegranate kernels.
“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.
“And where are you going to find an unmarried guy, anyway? They’d all been taken away to be soldiers, miners, or factory workers. This friend of mine had a face that was full of life and a wrinkled old man for a husband . . . damn shame!” Tongsuk ŏnni smiled faintly as she said this.
Even during their periods the girls took the soldiers. Deep into their vagina went a cotton ball the size of a quail egg to block the flow of blood. The more soldiers they took, the deeper the cotton ball went. Whenever she spread her legs to put in the cotton, she felt downy like a duck.
She has no clue why she fixates on this nameless girl—after all she’s long since lost all sense of attachment or kinship to anyone. Her affection for her sisters is gone as well. Unable to breathe a word to them about her past made her ill at ease and distant from the nephews she saw a few times a year. She became an outlier and found it difficult even to make a friend.
I want to tell it, then die.
She wonders what expression God would wear if He were to look down on her just then. Would He frown? Glower? Shrug? Would He look on me with pity? Does God have a face anyway? And does it get old like ours?
More than sixty years ago she paid a visit to Kunja’s home village. The two girls were the same age and she missed her terribly.
She closes her eyes but sleep doesn’t come. No worries. She knows people can survive a lack of sleep.
Past the charred hills she saw a rocky peak the color of lead. She arrived there after a day and a half to see people slinking down the nearly vertical slope. They lived at the foot of the mountain and came down to feed themselves on hidden staples under cover of darkness before climbing back up at daybreak. They were taking shelter from strangers who murdered innocent villagers and raped young women.
She left around the time that the new growth of shepherd’s purse came poking out. One less mouth to feed was one less burden for her brother. Another cousin of hers, a live-in maid in Chinju, had visited just in time to recommend to her a banker’s family there.
Even so, in no time the soldiers were swarming her and the other girls like fire ants.
Seven in all. She bled more that day than she did later when her menstrual flow started.
There were in fact girls who had gone to factories to make money. Miok ŏnni had left school in the sixth grade at the urging of her principal and joined the Workers Service Corps. She took the streetcar to Kyŏngsŏng Station and with other girls boarded a train for Pusan. Young as she was, she thought only that she was off on a trip to some distant place. At Pusan she boarded a shuttle ferry named Kamome, which means “seagull,” to Shimonoseki, where she was loaded onto a truck and taken to a munitions factory in Toyama Prefecture that made cartridges for assault rifles. Her work table was so high she had to stand on a chest to do her work. One area of the factory was stacked with brassware confiscated from Korea to be melted down and made into weaponry. Not once was Miok ŏnni compensated during the time she worked at this factory.
When the girls didn’t pay attention, haha would tell on them to her truck driver husband, the man who had delivered them from the Harbin train station. He had been in the army, and the girls called him otosan—which, she had learned from Kŭmbok ŏnni, was Japanese for “father.” On the wall of the kitchen, where the girls took their meals, was a photo of otosan in a military uniform sporting two dots that you might almost take for stars. While the girls sat around the plywood dining table taking their meal, haha and her family ate among themselves. The girls took in the aromas of pike mackerel and beef soup. Those items didn’t appear on their table, which bore only watery gruel and pickled radish.
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.
Around the time the flock of soldiers was expected, Pokcha ŏnni would yell into the hallway, “Girls, an invasion from the south!”
She forever longs to return home. Even in this home she longs to return home. She panics at the prospect of never returning home.
“Sure. I used all my savings for some clothing and a new pair of shoes.”
Bringing up the rear as he herded the girls onto the train was a lanky, fiftyish man with a horse face. The one holding her by the legs when she’d been tossed into the back of the truck. Back then at least, a 50-year-old man was practically a grandpa. His salt-and-pepper hair was unkempt and he wore a scruffy, oversize pair of pants beneath a white chŏgori. He turned out to be the man who distributed hardtack to the girls during the train trip.
The water whirled round and round, reminding her of a rotating millstone. It was the Tuman River, people told her. After her five months’ wandering from the Chinese widower’s hut, the sight of the river turned her legs to jelly and she plopped down on the spot. The river was abysmally murky and turbid, and all she could think of was the river the girls had crossed on their way to the military outposts.
“Mom was about to marry me off,” said Kisuk ŏnni to the girls huddled in the yard. Another strategy she used to avoid the military police with their red armbands was to hide in the rice chest. Kisuk ŏnni also tried hiding in a crematory but was caught and then brought to the comfort station.
Haha gave the girls Japanese names and provided them with food and clothing. She also distributed jimigami—coarse, dark-colored toilet tissue—as well as olive green soap, toothbrushes, tooth powder, gauze menstrual pads, and towels. And a navy blue sleeveless dress that looked like a rice sack.
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.
The truck was rattling terribly, but her face and eyes showed that Haegŭm herself was rattled. We were too young, we didn’t know a thing; they never doubted how it came to be that they were all led to believe they were going to different factories. She herself didn’t care if it was a factory that made thread, silk, or needles; if it was a good or a bad place to work; she just wished they would get there.
The girls also hoped Japan would win the war. Because if it lost they were sure to die, all of them.
The crab lice lived in the pubic hair and came with the soldiers. Their bites left the privates an angry red, itchy and swollen. In their spare time the girls spread their legs and picked lice from each other.
“How would you lik
e to live with me?” she whispers.
For the better part of a day the truck bounced along a road across the wilderness plain before arriving at a building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence; the structure had plywood walls and a tile roof.
The crushed bellflowers remained stuck to the girl’s geta all the way to Harbin.
“My woman would fancy that!”
SHE STANDS OUTSIDE the gate, gaze fixed on the house. She feels she’s been gone since she was a baby and is allowed to return only now that she’s aged all she possibly can, almost a century later.
Brother must have known. Unlike her bothersome sisters, Brother never brought up the subject of marriage. Having spent fall and winter at home after her twelve-year absence, she had informed him she was leaving to become a live-in maid again. “I’m just thankful you made it back home,” he said.
The soldiers always showed up with a beige-colored ticket one fourth the size of a flower card.