I was at the sink when Huay came in. I turned and looked at her fully for the first time since we arrived. She was trying to keep her dress closed around her torso but all of the buttons on it were missing, like mine, and her left sleeve was ripped wide open, the bottom cuff dangling loose like an open jaw. The gap revealed red and purple marks all the way up her arm. When she moved, I saw more bruises blooming on the inside of her thighs. When she noticed me staring, she touched the marks on her arm, shifted her dress to cover them. When that didn’t work, she let her arms fall and turned away. Someone had hung a mirror, a circle of warped plastic, above the sink and she looked into it as if she had just discovered a creature, newly born. She had never been taller than me but I saw now that she had grown smaller. Lost weight in little more than a week. How the blades of her shoulders poked through her dress like the wings of a bird.
I set about ignoring her the way I had for the past week until she turned towards me, her mouth half open to say something before dropping her eyes, no doubt discouraged by how I was standing – feet away from her, ready to leave. I was exhausted. Exhausted from the effort of keeping her away, from telling myself that I was going to be released (any day now, I just had to wait). This hope was nothing, I realized, but a vanity. Girls like Jeomsun had been enslaved for years. What made me think I might be singled out and released? Nothing. My fists were balled tight and I opened them now to splash water on my face. When I looked up again, I felt lighter, as if the effort of hoping had fallen away from my shoulders.
‘Are you okay?’ I whispered, keeping one eye on the door.
She shrugged and held her stomach, smoothing a hand over her pelvis. I thought, for a moment, that she was going to say what I felt as well: it hurts, here. But she didn’t. Instead she shrugged again and looked down at her feet.
‘Don’t fall ill. Remember what Jeomsun said the other day.’ I didn’t know what else to say, felt my mouth hanging open, useless. Then a voice floated into my head: Have you eaten? I could picture my mother’s face as she said it, and the way she said it, with a stiffness, a regret, because she couldn’t manage anything else – it was the closest she came to asking Are you well? Are you okay? I’m thinking of you. I swallowed before saying it now, to Huay, ‘Did you eat your breakfast?’ Cringing at first from the briny practicality of my words, then savouring them. My mother’s voice in my head echoed again, again, again.
She said yes but her eyes were distracted, flicking from my face, to the sink, to the window high up on the wall and she jumped then, at the sound of Mrs Sato’s voice, ordering us to hurry. I went into the cubicle, was still thinking about my mother when Huay said, ‘Do you think they’re looking for us? Our parents?’
I stared at her, thinking that she had read my thoughts before realizing that my question must have reminded her of her own parents. In the water, my reflection showed a smear of darkness on my cheekbone. It was days old, I barely felt it anymore; it only made me think of my father’s bleeding face. How my mother had held him as the soldier pulled me away. A bitterness gathered in my mouth and I had to spit. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I just hope my sister is safe. She’s eleven, almost twelve.’
I tried to recall if there’d been a child in the truck but couldn’t. ‘Did they – they didn’t take her, did they?’
‘Oh, no. Fortunately, no. I was watching from the truck to make sure. She’ll be home right now. My parents stopped her from going to school after the invasion. I’ll need to help with her schoolwork when I get back.’
I wanted to ask when she thought we would be let go but didn’t. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Rong. Xiao Rong. She’s the youngest.’ Over the next few months, I would find out that Huay used to carry her around when she was an infant and pretend that she was her own. That the two of them were inseparable even though they were four years apart in age. ‘If being here means that Xiao Rong is safe, I would do it. Gladly.’ I said nothing in reply because I couldn’t imagine it – that kind of love, not yet.
The caretaker started shouting, a wordless hacking, as if she were coughing up her lungs. She rapped her cane on the floor until Mrs Sato appeared.
‘Let’s go, girls. Time to work,’ Mrs Sato called out, long fingers reaching for us as if to stroke our arms, but just missing us. ‘Remember, it goes into your wages at the end, Fujiko.’ She tapped the wooden tag hung outside my door as I went into my room. In the black-and-white house, Huay was ‘Kiko’ and Jeomsun, ‘Hinata’. But Mrs Sato and her staff were the only ones who used these names. Few of the soldiers noticed these plaques and fewer still addressed me at all, but it helped. In the morning, Fujiko was the one who pressed her lips over rouge paper to put colour into them, and then put on the clothes that were a little too big for her. Fujiko received the tickets and tucked each one under her mat before she lay down on it. At the end of the evening, I would run my thumb along the edge of the stack, measuring the thickness of it against my hand. Mrs Sato would ask for them before locking us in every night, and I would hand mine over, telling myself that it was all adding up to something, at least – a few dollars that might make its way to my parents.
These were the lies that I told myself to get from day to day. I knew, even as I sat in my windowless room, that my parents would never receive anything from Mrs Sato, that she painted this story in order to get us to comply. The involvement of money, just the very thought of it, made her captives more compliant; it made us guilty, somehow, in all that we had endured. None of us mentioned the word rape. No one had to.
Every day passed in the same way. I woke at about six-thirty to the sound of the caretaker rising from her cot in the front room and bustling about the kitchen, clinking dishes before coming to us, opening my door just wide enough to shove a bowl through. With my rising came an ache in my chest, which would grow and grow as it got closer to opening time. But I ate through it, devouring my meagre portion of rice and making the lone slice of pickled radish, just a half moon, last three bites. At seven, we would be let into the bathroom. Huay, Jeomsun and I would wait for each other, then take turns at the sink with the one toothbrush. While we cleaned up, we chatted softly, hoping not to be caught. In the meantime, Mrs Sato would arrive, filling the house with her floral perfume, the sound of her voice rising over the dash of water, our whispers.
Once the front doors opened at nine, the soldiers would begin to arrive, laughing and chattering as if they were boys making a beeline for the sweet shop after school. I would hear the clink of coins as they jangled their change in their pockets before handing them over to Mrs Sato for a ticket. Once they were in my room, they would drop the tickets – pink squares of paper – leaving me to scoop them up after for Mrs Sato. One day during my first week, I had stood in the centre of my room and thought of the only ticker-tape parade I’d seen as a child, how the ground had looked afterwards, a mayhem of colour. Then I knelt and picked up each pink slip, counting forty-two, so I could hand them over to Mrs Sato before lights out. We would only be given another meal after the last man had left. Sometimes dinner would be withheld from me if the caretaker caught me talking to Jeomsun or Huay in the bathroom and I would have to go to sleep aching with hunger. At ten, Mrs Sato would go round to close up, locking each of us in before finally putting the bolt on the front door, leaving us with the caretaker who spoke no Chinese. Outside, she would say nothing to her driver as she climbed up into the back of the rickshaw and sat down with all her weary weight, and I would hear the wheels creaking as they went down the driveway.
I dreaded Mrs Sato’s departure though I hated even more her arrival in the morning, the way a caged animal could be uneasy and hopeful around its keeper. I watched her the way I used to watch my mother, when I was five, six, wanting desperately her attention. Wanting to learn what crossed her, what would put me in her good graces. How I would look out for any warm gesture. A smile, sometimes. The way she pressed a twist of radish omelette into my bowl. I thought she was the most be
autiful woman I had ever seen, the way all little girls do of their mothers no matter what they look like, until one day, they don’t. The realization making their stomachs drop with disappointment.
I almost wanted Mrs Sato’s favour in the same way. The way baby animals always find a parent in the unlikeliest of places, latching on out of helplessness, from having been left without a choice. Her beauty, though, was real. Even in her forties (or fifties, I couldn’t tell), her skin was buffed porcelain and her hair, richly black, wound up and away from her face with a silver hairpin. Some of the girls called her Mrs Sato. Some called her ‘Madam’, but all of us saw her as a mother of sorts, troubling as it was. Most of us were little more than children after all, aged fourteen to twenty. I had never been away from my family, not even for a night. Mrs Sato was the closest thing I had to a guardian, whether I liked it or not. Each evening, before she left, I would take care to arrange the tickets I’d collected that day and smile as I handed them over to her. She would always smile back and touch my arm to say good job, well done.
Her absence made me nervous, as if worse could happen while she was away. The first week I had followed the sound of her departure, all the while keenly aware of how near I was to freedom, I liked to think it was simply a matter of two locks and a gate, until I remembered the men, of course. The soldiers, that large compound housing them just a minute’s walk away. Their closeness as clear and present as a toothache. On each of those nights, I fell asleep hoping that I would be released the following day. I kept on hoping until it seemed like I was holding on to a shard of broken glass in my hand, and I was squeezing tight, tighter, in an effort not to let it slip away from me. After a month, I stopped. Stopped counting the days and weeks. There was a clock above the counter in the front room, which I could see if I went down the hall far enough. The clock served as my only accurate unit of time. The doctor’s visit, which happened every month, served to mark the passing of four to five weeks. Each of these were small lifetimes, periods during which some of the women I slept and suffered next to would disappear and never be seen again.
‘I’m never going home,’ Jeomsun said. There had been another visit from the doctor. At the end of the check-up, Mrs Sato had come in with two soldiers, pointed out Quek Joo – a girl who had been brought in the same day Huay and I had – and made the soldiers bind her wrists. Then they led her out, pulling on her bonds as if she were a dog. It happened so quickly that no one had time to react.
‘What do you mean you’re never going home?’ I said. ‘You never look as happy as when you talk about Busan. Or when you talk about mountains. There are no mountains here, you know?’
‘Go home to the people who sold me in the first place?’
Huay looked incredulous. ‘But surely they didn’t know. No one could sell their own daughter to let them be –’ She stopped, refusing to use the words she knew for what we were doing, what was being done to us.
‘They sold me. That’s all I know. They got money from selling me then said that I was to go and work in a factory. Liars. I’m never going back to them, even if I’m let go.’
‘Is that what happened? They let Quek Joo go?’ She had been ill, I recalled, bleeding on and off for three weeks and soaking through countless menstrual cloths, her dress, her mat. The doctor had found her unfit. ‘Contagious,’ Jeomsun had overheard. Of what, we weren’t sure. After she was gone, Mrs Sato had the caretaker take all her things out back to be burned.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps. Sometimes they move women around the different houses in one region. Sometimes they send them away to another country, like I was. Sometimes they take the sick ones to the hospital. That’s what I heard. Except I don’t think the Japanese are going to waste medicine on us. I’ve seen so many women get taken away when they were ill, both here and back in Formosa. Only a few returned.’
‘Then where do you think she was taken?’ Huay whispered, her voice sharp with desperation.
‘Maybe she was let go. Or maybe they left her in a clearing to die. I don’t know. I don’t know everything.’ Jeomsun got up and left.
It had been a month. One long month that felt like years. I caught my reflection in the mirror one morning and started. A stranger’s face, I thought, aged and bitter, warped by the house and all that went on it in. I imagined going home and knocking on the door only to have my parents draw away from me and say ‘this is not my daughter’. I could see my father shake his head, the violence in his movement making it look like shock, a spasm. They would look at me and see what had happened, what I had done. Then they would close the door in my face. I did not know anything – how we would get out of here or if we would at all – but I knew this.
Huay was still next to me and I grabbed her arm. ‘Promise me something. If we do get out, we’ll tell people we were working in a factory. We’ll tell them that we were ill-treated, that we were fed badly but that all we did was work and put things together.’ This, they might believe. Especially if it came from the two of us. Huay stared at me, and I knew I looked mad in my desperation to make her understand this. ‘Do you promise?’
She nodded. A hasty, single nod. ‘I promise.’
Over the course of the next few months, I learned what to do. What not to do. Mrs Sato frequently urged me to look more welcoming. ‘Always so glum, Fujiko. Smile a little, smile!’ And I did, especially if I was afraid. I would smile and then when the soldier was done with me, I would smile at the next one, and the one after. There was always the threat of a fist or a boot. A pistol, which I would see, tucked into his belt, out of my reach. The only thing I could do was not to resist even when the days seemed impossibly long, when it seemed that the stream of men coming through would never end. After the initial week, I served around thirty men a day. On weekends and festival days, the number went up. Forty, fifty. Both Mrs Sato and Jeomsun had told us that we were to make sure each one of them wore protection. I tried once, pushing the soldier away and pointing at the condom that he had left on the floor next to the mat. He responded by getting his knife out and pressing it against the base of my throat, leaving a shallow cut that refused to heal for weeks, then a white scar after it did. With time I found that it was easier to avoid looking at them completely. I could control nothing else but what I thought about. Not the pain, which started between my legs, fanned up to my stomach and wrapped around my lower spine. Its presence was solid, constant. The more men I’d had to work for that day, the more likely it was that I got no sleep – the ache, dull during the day, shot spikes through me when I was trying to rest. This pain, I couldn’t control. But to keep alive, I made no noise, did nothing, and tried not to exist. Those were the only things I could do.
After my morning ablutions and my breakfast, I would lie down on the mat and wait. I would remain lying down much of the day except for trips to the bathroom, and mealtimes. While I was lying on the mat, I would think about how I used to hide amidst the tall grass in the field on my way back home from the market. Especially when I was finished earlier than normal. I would sit on the ground and then fall back into the soft grass. There were lalang with their soft white tails, and weeds sprouting white balls of fur that the wind would take away, one by one. I would lie on the mat and pretend I was there again, in the late afternoon heat, warm against the ground, watching as the clouds rolled past. I did not close my eyes. If I did, all I would hear was what was going on around me, and in the room on the other side of the thin plywood wall. So I kept them open, focusing on a water spot in the ceiling and reading shapes into it – a frog, a paper plane, the floral pattern on a blouse that I wore during the last mid-autumn festival back home.
I tried never to look at the soldiers if I could help it. The fact that most of the men seemed not to care at all, not even if I were ill or bleeding, made it easier for me to pretend that this wasn’t happening. Most of them entered the room and climbed on top of me without even shedding their boots. Some came in with their trousers already balled up in their hands and le
ft as soon as they were done.
The ones who frightened me most were the men who pretended to treat me as if I were human, at least at first, on the surface. The first time it happened, I found myself looking at someone my age – he couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, with a face so nondescript, so familiar, he could have been a shopkeeper in our village or the son of a neighbour. I understood little Japanese but it was his voice, soft and reasonable, a sharp contrast to the barks and cries and spat commands, that drew me out of myself and made me look at him. He was clean-shaven and his eyes were warm, laughing. When he took his cap off, thick black hair fell forward, making him look even younger. He spoke again, and I listened this time.
‘Konbanwa.’ Good evening. He dipped his head and smiled, bringing pink into his cheeks. Then, fully clothed, he sat down on the floor, a foot away from my mat.
It felt strange to smile back. The muscles around my mouth were tight, as if withered from the lack of use. I said good evening to him and sat up.
He pointed his finger towards his chest and said, ‘Takeo desu.’
‘Fuji…’ I started, before changing my mind. ‘Wang Di.’
‘Wang Di,’ he said, trying the words out in his mouth. Then he drew something out of his pocket and put it on the mat, in front of me. A rice ball, wrapped in wax paper. I ate it in a few bites, almost choking. When I finished, I realized that he was talking. He talked for a long time, making shapes in the air with his hands and nodding at me, even though it was clear I understood none of what he said. That day, he did nothing. He was one of the few who visited and did little but try to talk to me; he didn’t even try to satisfy himself on his own, as a few of them did. When his twenty minutes was up, he bowed again before rising and leaving the room, murmuring something in Japanese as he backed out. That night, I tried to guess what he might have been saying, couldn’t help but hope that he would be back to visit and would take me away from this place.
How We Disappeared Page 16