“THEY SHOT HER SEVEN TIMES. I HEARD HER DYING. I LEANED against the wall and sang to her, until her wind stopped. That was my second death. Then one day they took me from that place, trucking me and many girls to military ships. We were sent with ammunition and supplies, deep into the Pacific. To a place called . . . Rabaul.”
SHE STUMBLED BADLY ON THE WORD.
Maybe it was Sunny’s soft articulations, or maybe it was the discomfort of her hard-backed chair, for Malia slowly turned in sleep, shifting on her haunches. Hearing low murmuring, she woke, seeing the back of a head, an aged body, no one she recognized. But something familiar in the voice. Malia leaned forward, listening.
“. . . HOW DID I ARRIVE HERE AFTER ALL THESE YEARS? ONE day I turned, and I was facing home. Something beckoned. Beckons, still. Now I follow Keo, looking after him. Though he will never know. As you, Leilani, would not have known until one night I heard your wheezing. I felt your heart choke up with grief. How did I know? These things come to me. How did I know they brought you here? I only know I started walking. The way was clear.”
SUNNY TOUCHED LEILANI’S CHEEK, HELD THE TINY CRYSTAL IN her hand.
“SOMETIMES ONLY AMAZEMENT KEEPS US ALIVE. NOW, I WILL tell you the rest. Knowing it, you might forgive me. . . .”
OLA HOU
Resurrection
“WHO WILL EVER KNOW WHAT ALL THAT HORROR REALLY WAS? It was so long ago. And it was yesterday. Now there is only remembering. You see, after surviving, that’s all there is. Remembering. Tidying up the details. Waiting to forget . . .
“When Allied soldiers brought us from the caves, they said the war was over. I didn’t understand. If everything was over, why was I still alive? Rabaul had been mostly leveled by bombs. In hastily built clinics, medics deloused us, cut off our hair, and bathed us. We were quarantined. Officials came and looked at us through glass, and I remember thinking of a zoo—the tale told from the ape’s point of view.
“After we were somewhat recovered, no longer in danger of infecting them with typhus, officers sat down with us. They spoke softly, trying to be kind. We didn’t respond. You see, we couldn’t. We thought they were telling us we were going to be shot for collaborating with the Japs. Some girls went blind. Doctors said there was nothing wrong with them. They simply stopped seeing. They had seen too much. A few white women, Dutch and Australians, broke down. I watched them cry. It came to me as wounded music. I wondered what was left in them that cared that much. . . .
“As we recuperated, we saw Jap prisoners in scorching sun scrubbing airfield runways with wire brushes. Some so thirsty they fainted. To get water they had to run, drink fast, run back. They were not allowed to walk. Many died of sunstroke, skin blistered like giant soap bubbles.
“Hundreds of Allied POWs had been taken underground to the tunnels, kept as hostages until the Japs saw all was lost. Now Japs were imprisoned in those same hostage cells, conditions filthy and bestial. They were made to lie down on the same diseased cots where POWs had perished. And they were stripped naked but for loincloths, paraded like that day and night. We watched them scrub latrines. We saw them kicked and beaten by Allied soldiers.
“Americans and Australians were now ensconced in the few officers’ quarters left standing. The officers chewed gum and stared at us. Some of them looked bored. They had seen so much, what did a handful of sick whores matter? You see, they didn’t yet understand we had been kept against our will, that some girls had been children, eleven and twelve when they were kidnapped, before they had even begun to menstruate. These men thought we had volunteered, that we were prostitutes. . . .
“A few officers even flirted with girls who had begun to gain weight and look human. Some girls, fearing rape again, went mad. Others of us hung our heads. This confused the Allies. They thought we were ashamed because Japan had lost the war. It was only when the white women spoke up, when they told what had been done to us, that officers began to look uncomfortable. They interrogated each of us alone.
“When it was my turn, my lips parted, yet I couldn’t say the words. Visions weighted my tongue like stones: Rooms with hooks attached to walls, girls hanging by their necks like butchered game. Boatloads of girls blown up, so there would be no witness for the Allies.
“I remembered buckets in sunlight, from which water was scooped and poured over the blade of a fine heirloom sword. The sword raised in a sweeping arc, the bright hairy planet of a young girl’s head. Trying to describe it, to articulate, I drooled. Someone gently wiped my mouth. Someone handed me a mirror, saying, ‘Look what they did.’ I was twenty-six, I looked seventy. I tried again, telling everything. Because nothing mattered now. . . .
“In time, the Allies understood what we had been. We were so used, and broken. One day, when some of us were strong enough, we were taken to a dining room set up especially for us. We sat at tables with tablecloths. There was fish and meat. Vegetables and bread. There was wine. Forks and knives. And napkins. They served us food like we were human. Some women laughed stupidly, already planning their suicides. . . .”
_______
SUNNY SHOOK HER HEAD, STARING BLINDLY ACROSS LEILANI’S room, amazed that she could remember. That she was still here to remember.
“. . . HOSPITAL SHIPS ARRIVED AT RABAUL, FULL OF RED CROSS medics tending Allied POWs. There were thousands of them, many taken aboard on stretchers. They were so lost, they cried out loud. Some men were suffering from wet beriberi, their limbs blown up like balloons. Some were blind, some hobbled on one leg. We had never seen these prisoners; they had never seen us, the P-girls. Two horrors kept apart. But they said sometimes they heard us screaming. And we had heard their torture. Ships departed. Others came, taking on more POWs.
“Red Cross nurses bathed us frequently. We were sprayed over and over with DDT. Then we were given proper clothes and proper haircuts, issued ID cards. We were questioned again and again. One day I sat in a room with a naval officer, his secretary recording what I said. I talked for hours. When I stopped, the man wiped his eyes. He took my hand as if he were my father. ‘The war is over,’ he said. ‘You survived. Now you can forget, go home to your real life.’ I laughed. Life seemed unbearable because suddenly the only thing real was Rabaul.
“I remembered little Kim, how we had held each other in the dark, living in our imaginings. Honolulu! Paris! Sometimes, from beyond our compound, we heard haunting, plaintive songs—a harmonica—that floated us a moment’s peace. Why, even now, I sometimes hear an infinitely fragile tune skimming over the jungle, over barbed wire. And wind rattling through palms. I hear young Kamikaze pilots on their last nights, weeping, asking only to be held. They wrote us poems and died. You see, I am forever linked to that place. I am engraved.
“IN OUR COMPOUND AT NIGHT I WOULD HEAR TRAIN WHISTLES. The sound made me sob, reminding me of whistles of sugarcane trains rumbling into Honolulu during harvesting. I asked the American officer how it could be. Where would there be trains in the jungle? He said maybe it was passing ships. Maybe I imagined it. He told of a girl, imprisoned for two years in the Philippines, how she had dreamed of her mother’s baking. Nurses said she always smelled like flan. Another girl, chained inside a bamboo cage, dreamed of her bayoneted infant son. When Allies liberated her, she weighed eighty pounds. Her kneecaps and elbows had burst through her skin. Her eyes were gone. Yet even when they buried her, soldiers said she smelled of baby powder. . . .”
SUNNY SLOWED DOWN, RUBBING LEILANI’S HANDS, THE MOTION helping her to remember. Leilani’s eyes were open, the whites immaculate as if they had been polished from the inside. What she felt now was harrowing grief bleeding into mother love. In her life, she had been made to run, sixteen babies’ worth. At least they had left her feet for running. But all, all had been taken from this girl, who had not even been left the urge to live. Now she fell back into Sunny’s telling.
“. . . ONE DAY MPS HERDED US ON A SHIP TO SOMEPLACE CALLED Okinawa. We lay across the decks like sticks, stopping at Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima, picking up
hundreds of other stick-girls. Women had been kidnapped and enslaved all over Asia and the Pacific, wherever Japan invaded. I began to see the magnitude. I wondered what would happen to us. What more could happen. In Okinawa, we were asked to look at groups of Jap officers behind barbed wire. To identify them. They said I fainted, yet I heard everything. Only vision left me. I was ashamed to name my executioners, ashamed to recognize a face. That’s what shame does, that was the brilliance of it. . . .
“Hospitals were huge in Okinawa. Surgeons were experienced at purging, carving out diseased and damaged things. My womb, for instance. Afterward, I felt lighter, full of air. My roommate was a Chinese girl from Honolulu, who had been at university in Peking when the Japs came. We talked about our wombs as if they were old handbags absentmindedly mislaid. There were other women there from Honolulu—a missionary, a doctor’s wife—who had been enslaved in camps in China. I did not try to find them. What was there to say?
“They tested us again, like laboratory mice. X rays, heart, lungs, blood. We were put back in quarantine. Doctors were kind, but we were wary, still waiting for them to tell us we were going to be shot.
“This place, Okinawa, was where I overheard a doctor say most of us would not survive. Even the healthy ones. He was already burying us. ‘Most of these women,’ he said, ‘can’t return to their villages. Their families would stone them. Especially those kidnapped from Korea, a culture that demands virginity in women. The will has its limits,’ he said. ‘Many of them will find that what they have survived for won’t be worth it. Hiding in new towns, new countries. Nothing left, no family or dignity. Only continuing disease, deterioration, physical and mental. And devastating memories. Many will find they’ve lived enough. They’ll have no taste for more.’
“It began for me in Okinawa. Because, you see, daylight was repulsive. I wasn’t used to all that light. In Rabaul, it was dim in the Quonsets. Dim in latrines. Even on bright days, jungle foliage surrounded us. That hell-year in the tunnels, we lived by candle, and kerosene. Now I shunned daylight. Yet, night brought phantoms. They rose laughing in my throat. And I began to understand that truly nothing mattered. All was over. I had died so many times. . . .
“My body didn’t seem to understand. It continued fighting back. I would always limp with pain, but skin ulcers began to heal, scars faded. I gained a little weight. I decided if my body must live, I would reinvent myself. How could I return to Honolulu? I told the authorities in Okinawa that I was Korean, that I had lived in Shanghai, the old Chinese City. I spoke enough broken Korean and Chinese to convince them. I asked to be repatriated to Shanghai. Many women did the same. If they went home to Seoul or Panmunjom, they would be stoned as prostitutes. Some even chose repatriation to occupied Japan.
“While papers were processed, we were investigated, and hundreds of us were taken to the island of Tokashiki in the Okinawa chain. We were put in barracks next to camps with captured Jap soldiers. Though not called prisoners, we were guarded. Some women were interrogated repeatedly, suspected of having collaborated, turned spy, for the Japs.
“For almost a year we were detained on Tokashiki. They called it rehabilitation. Some women were trained as nurses’ aides, typists. Many were still being treated for syphilis, TB, for chemical and surgical experiments performed on them by Jap doctors and researchers. Six girls committed suicide. Since we were the only women there, young Allied officers chose those of us who were the least ugly and least scarred. They gave us nylons and cosmetics. They offered compassion, willing to hear our stories. They offered money in return for sex. Women who said no were forced. But how could a woman say no to her liberators?
“Since we were now housed and fed by the occupying forces, we were considered property of the U.S. Naval Operating Base on Okinawa. They were the victors, we were part of the spoils. Guards began to stroll our barracks at all hours. When women fought them, they were struck. Enlisted men began to come. They always asked first, they always paid. Some wanted sex, some just wanted talk. They were young boys, afraid to go home to the U.S. They had seen too much war and wouldn’t fit in. I closed my eyes and held them. Japanese, American. I no longer cared.”
SUNNY LOOKED UP, HER EYES LIKE DULL FIRES SEARCHING BEYOND the room, beyond the night, for that young woman long past judgment, a girl she must not lose sight of.
“ONE DAY I WAS SHIPPED TO OCCUPIED JAPAN, THEN ISSUED PAPERS allowing me to go ‘home to Shanghai.’ There, war crimes were being tried before Allied courts. Most crucial were the trials of Jap officers who had commanded internment camps and POW camps just outside the city. ‘Comfort women,’ P-girls, what Japs officially called jugun ianfu—the thousands of women imprisoned as sex slaves—were never called to testify. Crimes against us were erased.
“War trials were taking place in every country Japs had invaded. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Pacific Islands. But we, survivors of the hundreds of thousands of mutilated, murdered women, were never called upon to bear witness. We were the forgotten, the disposables of war. . . .
“Amazingly, Shanghai was its prewar self again. Foreigners strolled the Bund. There were nightclubs, cabarets. Gambling, opium. Back alleys were still sordid and seething. It would remain that way until 1949 when the Communists ended everything. I would then move to Hong Kong, live in a tiny room, sleeping all day, spending my nights teaching English, riding Star Ferry back and forth across Victoria Harbor. . . .
“Once I even followed Keo in Hong Kong. I sat near him on the ferry, and in a park in Kowloon where he talked to strangers. He was searching for the girl he knew as Sunny. The girl long buried . . .
“But I am ahead of myself. Now it was 1947, I had been ‘liberated’ from Okinawa to Japan, processed my papers, and gone to Shanghai. Deep in my heart was the wish to find my sister and my child. The hope that, against all odds, they had survived. I was twenty-seven. The world was new. I would begin my life again. Except, how does one start over?
“One day I had tea on a terrace in the sun. A teahouse near the Bridge of Nine Windings sitting in a little lake. Around me there were young women and military men. The scene was tender. Everyone seemed a little shy, amazed that the war was over and they had survived. They spoke different languages, there was laughter. Couples heading off in open cars. I drank my tea, while sunlight slaughtered me.
“In that moment, the certainty of living, of life, was so acute, so stunning, I understood I no longer possessed the strength for it. All I had the strength for was remembering. Rabaul. The nights, the years. I had watched girls die and envied them. Even the beheaded. I guess we thought we would all die. Otherwise, there would have been more suicides. In the end, we didn’t even have the strength for that. . . .
“In Shanghai I made no friends. I lived moment to moment, searching for phantoms. Existence had the strange, aloof acuity of dreams. I did not attach myself to things. I walked out of rooms leaving everything behind. I would walk through the years that way, attached to nothing. Until one day I turned, and I was facing home.
“And yet . . . after all, after all . . . there was a time of beauty that stays with me. A talisman I rub over and over.
“It was after the Allies, after the caves, when we began to recover on Rabaul. One day we took our first showers alone, without medics or nurses. Clean, spacious, disinfected showers. We undressed and entered slowly, like the blind. We touched white tiles, white faucets. Whole bars of soap. We became giddy, playful. We even sang, our voices pathetic and croaking. It was then, in those showers, that love, the capacity to love, was resurrected. You could see it in the eyes staring from our broken faces. Each woman there felt it for the other.
“We soaped, shampooed, rinsed each other tenderly like mothers. Some girls were still weak and had to sit down. We bathed them like children. We held them up to the showers, held their faces to the spray, their wrist-bones, little ribs and spines standing out like branches. For that while, we forgot the outside world. Just then—joined by our suffering, full of the fea
r of meeting ‘normal’ humans—we were lovers in the purest sense.
“We women fell upon each other, laughing, sobbing, embracing with no need for words, no need even for gestures, yet not wanting to let go. We held on and on in those showers, water softening the corpses inside us. No one would ever know us quite as well, no one would enter that place again—that quiet room inside us where each of us housed the great thing we were feeling. In many ways, none of us would love again. . . .
“Afterwards, we looked at ourselves in mirrors. Legs like matchsticks, arms with no musculature. Heads huge on bony stalks of necks. From the back we looked like boys without behinds. From the front we were old women, our hair thin as spiderwebs, and gray. Our skulls shone through like bulbs.
“After the showers, we lay down on clean sheets. Liberation left us exhausted. And somewhere deep inside me was a wish I could not say out loud, even to myself: that the break in our lives could be postponed a while. Could we not live a little longer in our own, our only, world? So much of our lives, all of our youth, was buried in Rabaul. The world had changed, gone on ahead without us. All we had was each other. All we knew was here. How could we leave it so suddenly?”
SHE LEANED HER HEAD AGAINST THE BED, AND WENT AWAY FOR a while. A hand reached out, discolored and trembling. Leilani rested it on Sunny’s head.
“. . . I DREAM OF RABAUL. I DEPEND ON IT. CAN YOU UNDERSTAND? Barbed wire in moonlight. Watchtowers. Creaking gates opening their jaws to swallow us. Latrines made of planks, under which rise piles of steaming excrement. I smell it in my sleep. I hear feet running. I see fireflies caught in the bushy hair of natives staring through the fence. They throw us food, hold their babies up for us to see. . . .
“Even lying awake at night, sometimes I hear thrashing and know a python has caught a cassowary, or a child. I hear someone flapping sheets and know it’s flying foxes coming home at dawn to roost. I smell mildew on my walls like condensation in the Quonsets. I remember how, in thirst, I licked those walls. . . .
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