Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  “You haven’t been up the lane since you came back. Let’s go ‘talk story’ with Papa, old time sake. Maybe you’ll catch Malia there.”

  Krash swaggered up the lane between them. Since the l‘au, he had been distracted, the shock of being home. Now he wanted to see Malia, spend quiet time with her. He knew Leilani had a hnai baby girl, almost four years old now. Nearing the house, he heard the child’s laughter. They were all sitting outside in the garage.

  Baby Jonah threw herself at Keo. “Uncle Papa!”

  Leilani stood, a little frightened, giving Krash a hug.

  “ ’Ey, Krash, how you doing? Look! Here our little hnai girl. Pretty, yeah? Name after Jonah.”

  Malia sat on a folding chair, avoiding his eyes while her mother nervously kept up her chatter.

  “Rosie Perez already tired wit’ four kids, hubby fighting overseas. One night she say me, ‘Leilani, you like hnai dis numbah five? I say, too good! Why not? All my kids gone far and wide. Except for Malia, who t’ank God take care of us while everybody gone. Yeah. T’ank God fo’ Malia.”

  Keo looked from Krash to his sister, to the child. A perfect composite of both of them. It was so obvious, only a blind man could have missed it. In that moment, even Timoteo understood. He gazed at the child, at Krash, at Malia, and tears ran down his cheeks. Same high forehead as her father. Identical wide-set eyes. Same dimpled chin, and something dear in the shape of her earlobes, like little pointed hearts exactly like her father’s.

  From Malia, high cheeks, the small, slightly flat nose, full, beautifully shaped lips. The proud way she carried herself. An endearing huskiness—like her mother she would be voluptuous. Yet again from Krash, the long legs, large feet a little pigeon-toed. And, too, there was her age. Born exactly nine months from the night before Pearl Harbor.

  Seeing the mirror image of himself, he stood dumb. His mouth worked silently. Malia rose, and stared at him. Defying him. Refusing him knowledge of his child. Let him go out into the world. Let him be a sensation.

  With no sense of it, Krash held his arms out to Baby Jonah. The beautiful, round child hid behind Leilani’s skirts, peeping out flirtatiously.

  He stood there for what seemed ages, then slowly turned, reeling down the lane. Seven years later when he came home to set up practise, he came back married to a haole.

  HILI P

  To Wander in the Dark

  HONOLULU, LATE 1940S

  EACH DAY HAD ITS ERRAND, HIS TRUMPET GAVE EACH DAY A point. Sometimes his horn was a soaring hawk, his body’s winds and currents holding it in equilibrium. The hawk’s tension held his world together. He stalked it, ruffled its feathers, until his arms felt heavy as mercury, his throat all dust and broken glass.

  Mornings when he woke, his lip was a scabby crater. Yet the next night and the next, and each night of every week, he blew his horn, dragging his lungs home like old balloons. Some nights he found himself in aimless exhalations of a predawn trance, staring down at Baby Jonah, wanting her to be his child. Some nights the dressmaker’s dummy called to him.

  He stood in the dark, face-to-face with the headless, armless woman. “Sunny.”

  He placed his hands on her shoulders, wanting to tear off his skin for having come home without her. He wanted to tear a hole in the world and find her. What was the point of living? How could life have meaning? He thought of the war-torn cities of Asia, survivors still crawling from debris. She was there, somewhere, she and their child. He knew she was there because Oogh said life would find her. He didn’t want to wait for life. He wanted to outrun it, outsmart it, find her and get on with living. Six years. She could be dead. He refused to believe it, unappalled and unimpressed by the odds.

  One day, Leilani pulled the bedsheet over her head, howling. Timoteo tried to comfort her, saying no one could hurt Keo now, the war was pau. Saying Keo had to do this—search for Sunny Sung.

  “Why?” Leilani cried. “He almost die in camp because of her. Now he going back dere.”

  He stood on the deck of an ocean liner, feeling the engines’ vibrations, the trembling of a thousand lives on the brink of other lives. Through cataracts of paper streamers Malia looked up at him. That he was going back there again seemed madness. She waved goodbye, as if scribbling curses on the air.

  He watched the ocean rise and grope, falling heavily on its face. At night, playing with the cruise band, he blew with everything he had, screamed it out of him like a man pleading for redemption. When he wasn’t playing, he dragged the decks, feeling time like whips across his back. The day they reached Shanghai, his face looked like someone else’s.

  Sailing up the Whangpoo River, approaching the harbor, Keo felt terror blow through him, as if there were only seconds to survive in. On the tender to the docks, memories of feudal madness sucked him in. Coolies dying in gutters. Infant-girl corpses stacked in alleys. Concentration camps. Still, he had been too tough to kill. After all, he had survived.

  He stood dockside, and nothing happened. He saw the sad humanness of Shanghai, the sooty traffic of postwar crowds. There was nothing in it now of mystery. Except for bombed-out buildings, it thrived again, noisy, almost amiable. American sailors swarmed the streets, pimps following like wolves trailing herds. Europeans barked at liveried chauffeurs, gambling houses thrived. In mild shock, he saw Japanese soldiers directing traffic, the victors now the vanquished.

  He checked into a modest hotel and took a cab as close as he could get to the old Chinese City. Much of it had been bombed. Where there had been hutments were now only filthy sewers, mounds of dust. . . . Her face at tea. He crossed the Bridge of Nine Windings, the old teahouse still intact. Now there were different waiters, the crowd mostly European.

  He went back to the silk mills. One day at Dez Hen Number Two Mill, a woman stopped and spoke in halting English.

  “I remember you. Always ask for two sisters.”

  He smiled, in shock. “Sun-ja Sung. Her sister, Lili . . .”

  “Ever find?”

  He shook his head.

  “Plenty girls lost. Maybe they come sing-song girls. Maybe kidnapped. Jap soldiers come in trucks, take girls to pompon houses.”

  “Pompon houses?”

  “For sex! Soldiers use girls plenty.”

  “I—I don’t understand.”

  “Sure, sure you understand! Pompon girls like prostitutes. But forced. Pompon houses like prisons.”

  “Why didn’t they use real prostitutes? There were thousands in the city.”

  “Disease,” she whispered. “Soldiers want clean, young virgins. One day Japs take me in truck, then find out I diseased, throw me back. War end, doctors fix me up. Syphilis save my life.”

  Keo hesitated. “What happened to girls kept in those places?”

  She shook her head. “Many died, exhaustion. Soldiers climbing on top them all day. Many suicide. Some just children, ten-eleven years old when kidnapped.”

  He quietly thanked her, gave her dollar bills, and walked away.

  He went to Club Argentina. Different owner, mediocre band, but the manager remembered him. Keo sat in with the band for several weeks, asking regularly about pompon houses during the war. No one could help him. One night a U.S. Army colonel sat down at his table.

  “I heard you play once. Honolulu. You want information on a comfort girl.”

  Keo looked at him, puzzled.

  “Pompon house, comfort station, same thing.”

  His hand shot forward. He gripped the colonel’s sleeve.

  “There isn’t much. Girls used for sex in war, what else is new? We’ve got war trials still going on. POW stuff. Real atrocities. What Japs did to our boys would make you puke. So no one’s paying much attention to these kidnapped girls.”

  The man leaned closer, attempting to explain. “Japs officially called them ianfu, comfort women. They were shipped to frontline bases with foodstuffs, ammunition—comfort supplies. Unofficially, they called them P-girls, short for p’i, Chinese slang for vagina. So,
coupled with their nationality they were known as Chom-P, Korean vagina, or Chan-P, Chinese vagina. Their huts and barracks were called P-houses, or simply ‘toilet.’ ”

  Keo closed his eyes, trying to absorb it. “My fiancée might have been one of those women. Kidnapped off the streets of Shanghai.”

  “Was she Chinese?”

  “Hawaiian-Korean American.”

  “How in the world did she—”

  “She was trying to get her sister out of Shanghai. Right around Pearl Harbor. I was here. . . . I lost her. Japs might have picked them up.”

  The man whistled, shook his head. “American women were held in some of those places. Dutch, Australians, captured missionaries, nurses. Information’s still coming in. But most comfort girls were Asian.”

  “I need records,” Keo said. “They must have kept files on them.”

  “No files. You see, it was covert. Wasn’t supposed to be happening. Those girls were kidnapped, virtually enslaved. Many were kids taken right out of grade schools. Especially Koreans. It was condoned all the way up to the emperor.”

  Keo looked at him, appalled. “Why haven’t the leaders been dragged into court and sentenced?”

  The colonel frowned. “Well . . . now we got Russian Communism. Japan could be an asset in a confrontation. Look, I know there were half a dozen comfort stations here in Shanghai. Mostly for the Japanese navy, who were a helluva lot more civilized than the army. Three or four hundred women in all . . .”

  He drew lines on a slip of paper. “Most of the really young ones, the prettiest, were taken here.” One line moved along the Whangpoo River, south of the city past Longhua Airfield.

  “You should know—a lot of those girls were later put on troopships, sent as sex slaves wherever there were Jap bases. Java, Borneo, Pacific Islands. That’s where the real hell was. They were right there at the battlefronts. Tens of thousands of girls massacred. Some even forced to carry arms, fighting and dying beside the soldiers who had raped them.”

  Keo looked down, wanting to be ill.

  The colonel tapped his arm. “I can get a military jeep and driver for you, run you out there. You won’t see much. It was very primitive.” He hesitated. “Tell you something else. The girls who managed to survive . . . most are disfigured. Aged beyond belief. Some were in those camps three-four years. Tortured. Diseased. Raped thirty-forty times a day. If you find your sweetheart, you might not even recognize her.”

  That night Keo walked in the rubble of what had been Hotel Jo-Jo. He picked at bits of mortar, an inch of filthy rag, ghost moltings of their night together. Sunny near reduced to bone, yet her beauty somehow radianced, skin and limb and milk of her now mothering. Breasts nourishing his child. His child. He staggered with the weight of it.

  Days later he passed beside the Whangpoo River, his driver dodging potholes, an MP in the backseat of the jeep. They sped through the city’s outskirts past miles of cardboard hovels, beside each one a small campfire. As if refugees were marking the place where suffering had become unendurable.

  A compound now deserted—eight long barracks surrounded by barbed-wire fences, empty guard towers. Inside, tiny rooms, single cots, each “room” separated by plywood walls. Not knowing Keo’s purpose here, the driver repeated what he had heard.

  “Some of them girls was kept here two years. You believe it? Forced to do fifty-sixty guys a day. When fleets were in, they didn’t even feed them. Just shoved rice balls in their mouth while men climbed on and off them.”

  The MP added what he knew. “Hell, I heard they weren’t even whores—just kids, tied up like dogs.”

  Keo held on to a flaking door, his bowels jerking, a visceral urge to defecate.

  He haunted nightclubs, cabarets, still searching. One night he woke, knowing she was not in Shanghai, she had not been there for a long time. He felt suddenly compelled to get out of there, it was still a place of nightmares.

  He lit a cigarette in the dark, smoke conjuring parables of what he had done in order to live. To live with his conscience. Killing someone because he was a traitor. Killing someone else for raping hungry women. Making love to a woman he didn’t love because she was dying.

  Maybe that was the lesson of war, of life: that knowing too much, and seeing too much, could damage us. Experiences too profound could break us in pieces. He left Shanghai, too late to save a part of himself, hoping another part was salvaged.

  AT HOME IN HONOLULU HE PLAYED A FEW CLUBS, MADE A RECORDING, then after six months, a year, felt the whirl of chaos pulling him again. He drifted, aimless with a diligence. Hong Kong, Bangkok, Manila—wherever there were cafés, nightclubs, that booked him for a week, a month. Any city touched by war, where people remembered. Where he might find her.

  He would arrive in a city, find work playing horn or piano, usually in small watering holes for expat jazz lovers left over from the war. He would enter each place with hope, even blow his trumpet full of expectation, as if he were entering new time. There would be timidity, mystification, which after he got his bearings would evaporate. In time he would come to believe that this feeling of remoteness and mystery lay closest to the truth. The truth of anything.

  At first, he would feel the way he felt when he first sat down at a piano, or picked up a horn. Alone and ignorant. Knowing humility was the only way to ever understand anything at all. If Sunny was in the town where he was playing, he had to wait for her to come to him. But first she had to know he was there. He took small salaries, asking instead that clubs advertise his engagements: KEO MEAHUNA, INTERNATIONAL JAZZMAN, APPEARING NIGHTLY. . . .

  Wherever he appeared, whatever he played—trumpet or piano—he spent every hour watching the door. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself: he went where damaged women went. Brothels. Opium dens. Clinics he heard of where disfigured women were still being rehabilitated. Hospitals where comfort women who were “healed” worked as nurse’s aides. He talked to doctors, asked to see records. Afterwards he shook their hands.

  In each city he sat on park benches, waiting. Because maybe she was searching, too. Sometimes he sat all night under the ghostly yellow clarity of streetlights. Maybe she was damaged, and only tested the airs of night. Another year passed. Keo went home, then left again, melting in and out of cities, up and down the Asian coast.

  On an island in the South China Sea, he traveled to a Buddhist monastery called Po Lin—Precious Lotus. He heard there were female monks and acolytes, some who had been Japanese sex slaves in the war. He sat in their temple while they chanted. He studied each face. He peeled a mandarin in winter.

  Once in northern Thailand, in the city of Chiang Mai, he watched a woman enter water. Her shoulders were Sunny’s and her hair spreading round her, floating like black algae on a river of time. Afterwards she stood in sunlight throwing back her hair. One hand on her hip, she smiled at him. Through the triangle formed by her slender arm he saw the next town, and the next, pulling him on. Women approached him. He backed away, desiring no one he could see or touch.

  In different cities, in whiskey-ridden conversations, people relived the war. Listening, he learned what had been done to hundreds of thousands of women. Kidnapped, tortured, sacrificed. Whites, Asians, nuns, missionaries, nurses. Children, and wives. Wherever they invaded, Japs had rounded up sex slaves, jugun ianfu. Or what Koreans called chongshindae, conscripted worker, a euphemism for P-girls. Most had been kidnapped from Korea. But one night in Jakarta, Keo learned that many girls, maybe thousands, had been kidnapped from the silk and cotton mills of Shanghai.

  He reeled into the streets, wandering aimlessly. He stood in a garbage-strewn alley, helplessly sobbing. He slid down to his haunches, rocking. After a while he opened his trumpet case and removed the horn, placing his palm against cool brass. This thing that had become his voice, his conscience. He tapped the trumpet’s golden bell, thinking how, through the years, he and his horn had become a separate creature apart from the world. Apart from her.

  He thought of her stand
ing alone in Paris nightclubs, watching while he gave everything—his heart, his soul, his juices—to this horn. This thing. He raised his arm and brought it down, slamming the trumpet against the street. He staggered to his feet and slammed the horn against a wall, then backed up and swung again. Reverberations made his arm feel shattered.

  He reeled back and forth across the alley, leaning against walls for leverage, viciously slamming the horn over and over until he lost count, until boundaries blurred and he was the thing being slammed. Fingers torn, wrists scraped raw, he felt etched in metal. Nothing left. He collapsed, unseeing and unhearing. Beside him, a freaky configuration of flattened brass.

  ANOTHER TOWN, KOWLOON, ACROSS VICTORIA HARBOR FROM Hong Kong. One day Sunny’s face darted out at him in traffic. He followed her to a dingy building on Nathan Road, a place called Chungking Mansion. He haunted Chungking, riding elevators, tripping over cats vomiting in stairwells. One day from an adjacent alley he saw her on a tiny balcony hanging laundry. Insane, Keo shouted out her name.

  Eight floors up, her features were slightly blurred, yet when she looked down, something in him buckled. It wasn’t Sunny. But it could have been her, older, ravaged. It could have been her at sixty or seventy. . . . After years in those camps, many are not recognizable. Day after day he stood outside the building, asking merchants in the alley about the woman on the eighth floor. Thinking him mad, they shooed him away.

  He was playing piano at Pimm’s then, a small, dark club on Victoria Street whose customers wanted to be lulled. He gave them Gershwin, Cole Porter, Broadway show tunes. It didn’t matter what he played, he wasn’t in that town to play. One day he entered a jade shop. After an hour he purchased a small netsuke, then invited the owner to tea.

  The man was Chinese, middle-aged and gracious. “It is not necessary. Although . . . I feel there is something on your mind.”

  They stepped outside and Keo pointed to Chungking Mansion, a huge building shaped like an H.