“Uh,” I answered, trying to remember if I had forgotten to unplug the phone before I left for school.
Sweet Mary, the woman who lived next door, kicked the common wall between us so hard that the dishes in our sink rattled. “Shaddup!” she screeched through the walls. “I goin’ call dah police! Whatchu think this is, Grand Central Station?”
Mrs. DeSilva-Chung, my Auntie Reno, yelled back, “Eh, you shaddup!” but she stopped banging the door and made her voice real sweet: “If you don’t let me in, Rebeccah honey, I dah one goin’ call dah police.”
I unsnapped the locks and pulled the door open. “Won’t you please come in?” I told her. Behind me, I could hear my mother panting and wheezing.
“Ho,” Auntie Reno said as she pushed her way past me. The blue-and-silver scarf she had wrapped around her poodle-permed head snagged on the doorframe. “Goffunnit,” she grumbled, yanking the scarf away from the frame. She folded the scarf over her hair, tucking the tight curls under the cloth. “Where’s your maddah?” she growled, and when she looked up and saw my mother twirling in her see-through clothes, Auntie Reno breathed, “Ho-oly shit,” and let the scarf float to the floor.
I closed the door and watched Auntie Reno watch my mother. A spider’s line of spittle swung from my mother’s gasping mouth as she swayed from the top of the coffee table. When she finally dropped to the ground, her chest heaving as she gulped air, Auntie Reno said, “Wow. I never seen that before.”
“Shut up!” I marched over to where my mother lay and folded my arms across my chest. “She’s not crazy!”
Auntie Reno looked at me, then blinked her eyes slowly, so that I could see the wings of her sparkly-blue eye shadow. “Honey girl, no one evah told you nevah jump to conclusions?” She walked forward. Stopping in front of me, she bent down and touched my mother’s face.
My mother’s eyes opened. “Why have you come here? Dirty person from a house full of mourning, tend to your own mother: Teeth are biting at her head, and rats are nesting at her feet.”
Auntie Reno gasped. “What dah hell dat crazy woman saying?”
“Bad girl, bad daughter!” Rolling into a crouch, my mother yelled at Reno. “You pretended to take care of her, wiping her drool and her gundinghi, but you only wished for her to die! You only wish to save money for yourself. You wouldn’t buy your mother a decent bed in life, and look, now, you won’t buy her one in death—”
“No!” I rushed forward to put a hand over my mom’s mouth. “She doesn’t know what—”
Auntie Reno waddled quickly to the door. “I jus’ go now. Uh, I call her wen she feeling better.” She bent to pick up her scarf.
Before I could stop her, my mother rushed toward Reno and grabbed the scarf. She twined it around her own neck, closed her eyes, and started to rock back and forth on the cushions of her feet. “You, Baby Reno, you always wanted dis scarf. So did your sister, but I nevah wanted for you two for fight over um. ‘Bury it wit me,’ I told you. You made me one promise, you good-for-nuttin‘, and still you wen tell yoah sister I gave um to you.”
Reno dropped to her knees. “Oh my God,” she groaned. “Eh, Mama, wasn’t li’ dat, I swear on your memory.”
“Mommy, stop,” I said, jumping up to untangle the scarf from her neck. I pulled it from her, felt the sweat that had soaked into the material, and offered it to Reno. “I’m sorry,” I said. “My mother is sick, and sometimes she just starts talking about nothing, rambling on about anykine stuff.”
“Try wait, Mama—please no leave me again.” Auntie Reno crawled to my mother’s feet. “Mama? Akiko-san? Please,” she whispered, “you can tell me anyting else?”
My mother hummed, then went to lie down on the couch.
Reno wiped at her eyes, smudging her makeup, and listened for a while to my mother’s monotonous buzzing. “Your maddah might be one crazy lady,” she said, holding up her hand when she thought I would protest, “but she got dah gift. She was right, you know.” She glared at me, knotting the scarf in her fist and quickly adding, “Not about everyting: my maddah did say I could have dis as one—whatchucail—keepsake; my sistah only tink I was suppose to bury em wit dah body. But—and I stay shame for dis—I nevah put my maddah’s remains where she asked, and now the city moving all dah graves where my maddah stay. Tractahs digging em up now.
When I frowned, inching away from her, Reno scowled back. “You dense or what? Don’t you get it—dat’s dah teet’ stay biting at her head.” She crossed her legs, leaned forward to prop her chin in the cup of her hands, and studied my mother. When my mother’s eyes drifted shut and her breathing settled into a rumbling rhythm, Auntie Reno spoke: “All my life, I heard about people like dis. You know, my maddah said dis kinda thing supposed to run in our family, but I nevah seen anyone wit dah gift dis strong.” She touched the tip of her finger to my mother’s forehead. “Some people—not many, but some—get dah gift of talking to the dead, of walking true worlds and seeing things one regulah person like you or me don’t even know about. Dah spirits love these people, tellin’ em for ‘do this, do that.’ But they hate em, too, jealous of dah living.”
Auntie Reno likes to say she saved my mother and me from life in the streets, and I suppose she did. “Out of dah goodness of my heart, I’m telling you,” the story goes, “I became your maddah’s manager. I saw how she could help those in need, and I saw how those in need could help your maddah and you.” Which is true, I guess, but Auntie Reno also saw a way that she could help herself.
Whenever the spirits called my mother to them, Auntie Reno insisted I dial her beeper, punching in 911 to let her know my mother had entered a trance. After the lunch crowd and before the dinner rush, Auntie Reno would phone the people who waited sometimes for months for my mother to deliver messages to and from the city of the dead. Then Reno closed the store and rushed over to our place.
While my mother wandered through the rooms talking to ghosts, Auntie Reno would place the large ceramic Wishing Bowl and a stack of red money envelopes on the coffee table, and I would stack oranges and light incense sticks in the corners of the apartment. Auntie Reno, who asserted that atmosphere was just as important as ability, hung bells and chimes and long banners of kanji on our walls. When I asked her what the characters meant, she shrugged. “Good luck, double happiness, someting like that.”
Then we’d catch my mother, dress her in a long white or blue or yellow robe—whichever one we could throw over her body without protest from the spirits—and turn on the music that would start my mother dancing. She liked heavy drumbeats, and once she got going, my mother could tell all about a person and the wishes of the dead that circled around her.
It got to be that whenever my mother slipped into her spells, we’d have people camping in our kitchen and living room and out in the apartment hallway, all waiting for my mother to tell them about the death and unfulfilled desire in their lives. “Your father’s mother’s sister died in childbirth, crying out the name of the baby who died inside her,” she’d tell one elderly customer with a growth in her uterus, “and she hangs around you, causing sickness and trouble, because she is jealous of all your children and grandchildren.” Or she’d tell someone else that her husband was cheating on her because of her bad breath, caused by the vindictive first-wife ghost who died craving a final bite of mu kimchee.
For each of the seekers, my mother would pray and advise. And before they left, she would fold purified rock salt, ashes from the shrine, and the whispers of their deepest wish into a square of silk as a talisman against the evil or mischievous or unhappy spirits inhabiting their homes. In return, to ensure the fulfillment of their wishes, they folded money into a red envelope and dropped it into the Wishing Bowl.
And milling through all the mourners-in-waiting-the old ladies with their aching joints and deviant children, the fresh-off the-boat immigrants with cheating husbands and tax problems, and, later on, the rich middle-aged haoles looking for a new direction in life—was Reno, who served
tea or soda and collected the fee between her shifrs at the restaurant.
Everyone seemed so respectful of my mother, so in awe of her, and Auntie Reno played it up, telling people my mother was a renowned fortune-teller and spirit medium in Japan and Korea. “Akiko Sonsaeng-nim,” she’d say, attaching the Korean honorific to my mother’s name—something she would never do when my mother was conscious—“stay famous in dah old country.”
Auntie Reno’s words impressed so many people that customers would wait for hours in the dank hallways and decrepit stairwells. Finally the apartment manager, fearful of the potential liabilities and lawsuits related to substandard housing and building codes, evicted us. And Auntie Reno saved us from the streets once again, informing us that my mother’s share of the money enabled us to put a down payment on a small house in Waipahu, Kaimuki, Nu‘uanu, or—if we weren’t too choosy—Manoa Valley.
As long as my mother’s trance lasted, Auntie Reno would show up at our door every morning before I went to school, leading a new gathering of people. After she organized the customers, packing them tight against the railing and down the stairs so that the line coiled from our second-story apartment into the alley below, she’d pull me aside and hand me a pastry and a small bag of money collected from the Wishing Bowl.
Always, when I went to hide the money in my room, I’d slip out a dollar bill, roll it tight as an incense stick, and lay it in an ashtray on the dresser. Careful to hide from Reno’s eyes, I’d strike a match and burn the money for the spirits. Then, pulling out my father’s picture, I would begin to pray to my only connection in the spirit world. “Please please please, Daddy. I’ll give you everything if you give my mother back.” I begged, reasoning that as a dead preacher, my father would be able to get God to intercede on my mother’s behalf, or—as a spirit himself and in collusion with the other vengeful ghosts holding my mother captive—he might be persuaded by my own burnt offerings and bribes to free her.
When my mother began talking about how she killed my father, I thought that the spirits were coming to claim her again. “Stop, Mommy,” I said, rubbing the shrimp juice from her fingers. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” At ten, despite all the people coming to hear her talk this way, I was still afraid that someone would hear my mother’s craziness and lock her up. It wasn’t until I reached high school that I actually started hoping that that would happen. “You’re not yourself,” I said loudly.
“Quiet!” My mother smacked my hand, just as she did when I couldn’t memorize the times table. “Who else would I be? Pay attention!” She took the dishcloth, folded it into a rectangle, then a square, smoothing the wrinkles. “I wished him to death,” she said. “Every day I think, every day I pray, ‘Die, die,’ sending him death-wish arrows, until one day my prayers were answered.”
“Oh God,” I groaned, my eyes rolling toward the back of my head. “So you didn’t actually, physically kill him. Like with a knife or something.”
She whacked my hand again. “I’m teaching you something very important about life. Listen: Sickness, bad luck, death, these things are not accidents. This kind stuff, people wish on you. Believe me, I know! And if you cannot block these wishes, all the death thoughts people send you collect, become arrows in your back. This is what causes wrinkles and make your shoulders fold inward.”
She looked at me slouching into my chair, shoulders hunched into my body. I straightened up.
“Death thoughts turn your hair white, make you weak and break you, sucking out your life. I tell you these things,” she said, touching my hair with her blistering hands, “to protect you.”
She leaned toward me, and as she bent forward to kiss or hug me, I could see veins of white hair running through her black braid. Before she could touch me, I pushed away from the table, turning toward the sink to prepare the shrimp for the annual meal that made my mother’s hands crack open and bleed.
I look at myself in the mirror now and see the same strands of white streaking across my dark head. I squint, and the lines in the corners of my eyes deepen, etching my face in the pattern that was my mother’s. And I think: It has taken me nearly thirty years, almost all of my life, but finally the wishes I flung out in childhood have come true.
My mother is dead.
2
AKIKO
The baby I could keep came when I was already dead.
I was twelve when I was murdered, fourteen when I looked into the Yalu River and, finding no face looking back at me, knew that I was dead. I wanted to let the Yalu’s currents carry my body to where it might find my spirit again, but the Japanese soldiers hurried me across the bridge before I could jump.
I did not let them get too close. I knew they would see the name and number stenciled across my jacket and send me back to the camps, where they think nothing of using a dead girl’s body. When the guards started to step toward me, I knew enough to walk on, to wave them back to their post, where they would watch for other Koreans with that “special look” in their eyes. Before the Japanese government posted the soldiers—“for the good of the Koreans”—the bridge over the Yalu had been a popular suicide spot.
My body moved on.
That is why, twenty years after it left my spirit behind at the recreation camp, my body was able to have this baby. Even the doctors here say it is almost a miracle. The camp doctor said I would never have a living child after he took my first one out, my insides too bruised and battered, impossible to properly heal.
So this little one is a surprise. This half-white and half-Korean child. She would be called tweggi in the village where I was born, but here she will be American.
When the missionaries found me, they thought I was Japanese because of the name, Akiko, sewn onto the sack that was my dress. The number, 41, they weren’t sure about, and thought, Perhaps an orphanage? They asked me—in Korean, Japanese, Chinese—where I came from, who my family was, but by then I had no voice and could only stand dumbly in front of their moving mouths as they lifted my arms, poked at my teeth and into my ears, wiped the dirt from my face.
She is like the wild child raised by tigers, I heard them say to each other. Physically human but able to speak only in the language of animals. They were kind and praised me when I responded to the simple commands they issued in Japanese: sit, eat, sleep. Had they asked, I would also have responded to “close mouth” and “open legs.” At the camps where the Japanese called us Jungun Ianfu, military comfort women, we were taught only whatever was necessary to service the soldiers. Other than that, we were not expected to understand and were forbidden to speak, any language at all.
But we were fast learners and creative. Listening as we gathered the soldiers’ clothes for washing or cooked their meals, we were able to surmise when troops were coming in and how many we were expected to serve. We taught ourselves to communicate through eye movements, body posture, tilts of the head, or—when we could not see each other—through rhythmic rustlings between our stalls; in this way we could speak, in this way we kept our sanity.
The Japanese say Koreans have an inherent gift for languages, proving that we are a natural colony, meant to be dominated. They delighted in their own ignorance, feeling they had nothing to fear or learn. I suppose that was lucky for us, actually. They never knew what we were saying. Or maybe they just didn’t care.
I’m trying to remember exactly when I died. It must have been in stages, beginning with my birth as the fourth girl and last child in the Kim family, and ending in the recreation camps north of the Yalu. Perhaps if my parents had not died so early, I might have been able to live a full life. Perhaps not; we were a poor family. I might have been sold anyway.
My father was a cow trader. He traveled from village to village, herding the cows before him, from one farmer to the next, making a small profit as the middleman. When he was home, my older sisters’ job was to collect the dung and, after we parceled out a small portion for our own garden, sell the rest to our neighbors. Sometimes we dried the
dung for fuel, which burned longer and cleaner than wood. Most of the time, though, we used sticks that my sisters collected from the woods.
My job was to help my mother wash clothes. We each had a basket, according to our size, which we carried up the river we called Yalu Aniya, Older Sister to the Yalu. Going up was easy, the load light on our heads. Coming home was harder, since not only were the damp clothes heavier but we were tired from beating the clothes clean against the rocks. I remember that as we crouched over our wash, pounding out the dirt, I pretended that my mother and I sent secret signals to one another, the rocks singing out messages only we could understand.
My mother died shortly after my father. I didn’t see my father die; he was almost thirty miles away. As with his life, I know about his death primarily through what others have told me. The villagers who took him in say he had a lung disease, coughing up blood as he died. They also said he called for my mother.
She was always a good wife; she went to him quickly in death, just as she did in life. One night after we had carried home the wash, she kept saying how tired she was, how tired. Come, Mother, I told her, lie down. I kept asking her, what could I do? Do you want soup, do you want massage? Till finally she put her hand over my mouth and guided my fingers to her forehead. I stroked her softly, loosening her hair from the bun she tied it in, rubbing her temples where I could feel the heat and the throb of her beating heart. Even when the erratic tempo slowed, then finally stopped, I continued to pet her. I wanted her to know that I loved her.
I touch my child in the same way now; this is the language she understands: the cool caresses of my fingers across her tiny eyelids, her smooth tummy, her fat toes. This, not the senseless murmurings of useless words, is what quiets her, tells her she is precious. She is like my mother in this way.
Comfort Woman Page 2