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Comfort Woman

Page 4

by Nora Okja Keller


  By this time Toots was so close I could smell a mixture of seeds and the kakimochi she always ate in class on her breath. I gave her stink-eye, but she kept pushing me.

  “You talk like you better than everybody else, but you not. We all know you live in The Shacks, and you prob‘ly sleep with dirty feet in the same bed as your crazy old lady.”

  “Not!” At the one thing I could call a lie—that I went to bed with dirty feet—I called Toots a liar and punched her in her soft, newly forming chest. When she fell back into her friends, I ran away and didn’t look back, not even to see if they were chasing me.

  I don’t think I ran home and asked my mother to verify her singing story right away. I probably went to my secret place, a spot under the Ala Wai Bridge, where runoff from the rains and the city drained into the canal. Underneath, I had flattened out a nest among the tall grass that stretched along the bank. Sheltered by the underbelly of that small pedestrian bridge, I would practice my singing. I liked to hear my voice bounce off the concrete that surrounded me.

  I probably went there right after Toots and her Entourage told me I sucked. I know I would have wanted to hear the truth for myself.

  Eventually, though it might not have been that night, I must have asked my mother to repeat the story of how she met my father. Because I have the distinct memory of another story.

  We were at the kitchen table, sorting coins from the Wishing Bowl and packing them into paper sleeves, when, trying to sound casual, I asked her for the story of my parents’ first meeting. “Mom,” I told her, “tell me again that story, you know, that one about you and Dad meeting.”

  Without looking up from counting out a pile of dimes, she sighed. “Once was a hard time,” she said, “but a happy time. I was helping to take care of all the orphans during the war—you know, so many children lost their mommies, lost their daddies at that time. Your father was one of the missionaries that gave us food and clothing. When he saw how good I was with the children, he fell in love with me, because he knew I would make a good mother.”

  She slipped the dimes into a roll, then began on the quarters. “When the war moved into my village, he helped us all, everyone, even the old mamasans, escape. We walked and walked, trying to escape from the communists. We hid in cemeteries and walked over the mountains of Korea until we were free to build a new home. In America.”

  My mother finished one stack of quarters, then looked up at me. She touched my cheek. “You remember anything about your father?” When I shook my head, she said, “Everything was nice and happy.”

  I don’t recall if I challenged this new story or her old one. Sometimes I think I must have said, “Wait! That’s not what you told me before! What’s the truth?” because even then I must have recognized her story as an adaptation of The Sound of Music. Every year we’d watch that movie, after preparing a big bowl of boiled peanuts and a plate of dried squid as snacks. My mother liked the songs and would always cry at the ending.

  Other times I think I must have said nothing, swallowing her new story without accusation or confrontation, even if I didn’t believe her. When she spoke to me, calling me by name, I never wanted to do anything to spoil the moment. I feared my own words might break the spell of normalcy.

  I grew cautious of my mother’s stories, never knowing what to count on or what to discount. They sounded good—most of the stories she told me included the phrase: “It was a hard time but a happy time.” In fact, I repeated several of her stories, telling teachers and other students versions of them that I supplemented with my own favorite movies: West Side Story, where Maria, my mother, was left pregnant with her love child, who was, of course, myself; The Little Princess and The Poor Little Rich Girl, where I, the brave and suffering orphan, am reclaimed in the end by a rich and loving father, who was alive.

  But I knew they were just stories told to people who didn’t really matter, those who couldn’t see into our Goodwill-furnished apartment in the row of dilapidated tri-story housing units nicknamed The Shacks. Those who couldn’t see into the past when my father was alive and drunk and yelling about God. Those who couldn’t see into my dreams of drowning and sinking and struggling for breath while unseen hands wrapped around my legs and pulled.

  Not long after I started working for the Bulletin, I saw Tiffi Sugimoto. She wandered into the news building, looking for the marketing department, and even after all the years that had passed, I recognized her right away. With her spindly arms and her head that seemed overly large for her thin neck and scrawny body, she looked more like a ten-year-old as an adult than she had when she was really ten. When we were both ten, she seemed so big, her power as Toots’s “right-hand man” larger than life.

  I meant to look away when she walked near me, but I was caught staring. She smiled at me and sailed over to my cubicle. “Rebeccah!” she said as she bent over to hug me. She smacked the air near my ear. “You look exactly the same!”

  I must have appeared dubious, because she leaned back and said, “Don’t you remember me? Tiffany Sugimoto. Remember, me and Janice were always following you around, trying to be your friend?”

  “Uh, yes, Tiffi,” I mumbled.

  Tiffi giggled, high-pitched and girlish, and as the men in the newsroom—including Sanford, who back then always seemed to be nearby and ready with encouragement and advice—looked up, she batted her lashes. “What a wonderful place to work,” she cooed. “How stimulating! How exciting to be the first to know the news!”

  I grunted. “What I do is not glamorous,” I said. Then, throwing a glance, a challenge, toward Sanford, I added, “At least not yet it’s not.”

  “No, really, Rebeccah,” Tiffi said, frowning her sincerity. “Wait till I tell Janice and the others what you are doing now. Now that Janice is back from California, learning how to be an EST instructor, I know she‘d, like, love to see you! We always wondered what happened when you moved away—you went to the Mainland to live with your dad, right?”

  She patted my head. “We really missed you. You always had such presence, an individualistic sense of style and color, and what a wit! Remember when Vice Principal Pili ordered you to sing ”Hawai‘i Pono’i“ and you made up your own words? I thought he would, like, flip!”

  Tiffi laughed and added how great it was to see me, that we should keep in touch, and maybe the “old Ala Wai gang” could get together for a mini-reunion. Hey—would I be willing to, like, put together a newsletter?

  As I smiled and nodded whenever she took a breath, all I could think was: Is this the way she really remembers it? Her sincerity made me doubt my own version of events. Perhaps what I thought was true had been colored by the insecurities of a ten-year-old girl. At any rate, at that moment, looking at Tiffi chatting at me like we were the best of friends, I realized that not only could I not trust my mother’s stories; I could not trust my own.

  4

  AKIKO

  I was strapped down when my daughter was born too. My hands cuffed to the bed, flat on my back with my knees up, I heard the low keening of a wounded animal in the etherized darkness. Surrounded by doctors, unable to move, I felt my mind slip back into the camps. You’re a doctor, I screamed, help me, help me get home. But he only laughed and pushed himself on top of me, using my body as the other soldiers had done. Afterward, as he wiped himself on my shift, he opened the screen partition and let others watch him examine me. This one is still good, he called over his shoulder. He pried the lips of my vagina open with his fingers. See? he said. Still firm and moist.

  I tried to protect my daughter from the doctors, from their dirty hands and eyes. I scissored my legs closed, wanting to keep my child cradled within me, safe. But they roped my legs, stretching them open into the Japanese character for “man.” One doctor pushed on my stomach, another widened me with a double-pronged stick, and this time my baby came into the world fully formed and alive.

  We caught her, someone said—and when I heard that woman’s voice in the roomful of men, I kne
w Induk was there. Slipping into the body of a doctor, she stood beside me, shadowed by mask, gown, and a halo of light. And though I could not see her face, though it had been some time since she last came to me, I knew it was her, just as I’ve always known. Even the first time.

  She comes in singing, entering with full voice, filling me so that there is no me except for her, Induk.

  That first time, she found me sprawled next to an unnamed stream above the Yalu, the place where I had discarded my empty body, and invited herself in.

  I saw her with my eyes closed, though how I knew she was Induk I do not know, for she looked like my mother, standing there next to the river with her arms outstretched, long strips of hair coming undone from the married woman’s bun at the back of her neck. It was as if without their earthly bodies, the boundaries between them melted, blending their features, merging their spirits. Now I cannot remember what either my mother or Induk looked like when she was alive and a separate person.

  Here, baby, here, Induk said, her voice creaking like a hundred thousand frogs. She shuffled closer, hands cupping her breasts, which turned into an offering of freshly unearthed ginseng.

  It is not myokkuk, Induk said as I gnawed on a raw root. She stroked my head, combing out the tangles with her fingers just as I did for her when she was alive, then she said: But the seaweed soup is mostly good for making milk anyway. You don’t need that now.

  My stomach cramped, and I threw up what I had eaten. I rinsed my mouth with water from the stream, and my stomach rebelled at even the taste of water. Yet I could not stop my mouth from sucking at the root.

  Secretly, I think that is why I could not have a baby for so long after the Japanese recreation camp. Though the camp doctors said my insides were ruined from so many men, so many times, I think that the real reason I could not conceive for almost twenty years is because I ate so much ginseng. I became unbalanced with male energy. Finally the effects wore off enough to give me a baby girl.

  I make seaweed soup for myself now, for milk for my living daughter. Induk says my body is weakest after birth, but also at its most flexible. Our bones are as soft and changeable as those of the fetus we carried for nine months. This is the time we are most female, she says. Myokkuk is for women, for life.

  My breasts tingle at my daughter’s cry. I pick her up before she fully wakes, so that even before she reaches consciousness, she knows that her mother is here for her.

  Her father says, Leave her to cry for a while. You’re spoiling her. She needs to learn independence. ‘

  He tells me, parroting the doctor, Give her the bottle, better than breast.

  But I cannot. I have heard what the doctor says, but I also remember my own mother shaking her small, limp breasts at each of her daughters, laughing as we bathed together. Look, girls! See what you did to me? she teased. See what will happen to you, too, one day when you give all of yourself to your own children?

  All I know is that I do not want my baby to experience even a moment of insecurity, of want. I cannot take the time to prepare and heat a bottle while she screams with hunger. And if she drinks from the bottle, how will she know her mother’s heart?

  Beccah-chan latches onto me, her lips and tongue pulling my nipple, one hand kneading my breast as if to make the milk flow faster. The milk comes in too fast; she chokes. My baby breaks away from me, squalling. Her arms stiffen, and little fists strike out at me. She is noisy like her father, not afraid to yell and keep yelling. This must be a lingering effect of the ginseng. I do not know if it is a good thing.

  There was no need for me to get up. I lay by the river, already feeling the running water erode the layers of my skin, washing me away, but Induk filled my belly and forced me to my hands and knees. She led me to the double rainbow where virgins climb to heaven and told me to climb. Below me, a river of human-faced flowers stretched so wide and bright I could not keep my eyes open.

  She spoke for me: No one performed the proper rites of the dead. For me. For you. Who was there to cry for us in kok, announcing our death? Or to fulfill the duties of yom: bathing and dressing our bodies, combing our hair, trimming our nails, laying us out? Who was there to write our names, to even know our names and to remember us?

  And now, said Induk, there is only the dead to guide us. Here, she said, giving me the image of a woman. I saw a fox spirit who haunted the cemeteries of deserted villages, sucking at the mouths of the newly dead in order to taste their otherworld knowledge.

  This is Manshin Ahjima, Induk said. Old lady of ten thousand spirits. Go to her, and she will prepare you.

  I wanted to say I didn’t know where she lived, but then I saw the exact spot where Manshin Ahjima lived and how to get there. I’d have to cross over the Yalu, scale seven mountain peaks in the deep country, then follow the road to the outskirts of Sinuiju. Through a scattering of gray adobe houses, all identical, I would go to the house fronted with mulberry trees. There I would find the old lady and her ten thousand spirits.

  I do not know how long I left my body by the river, stirring periodically with cramps and the need to vomit. It lay in its own filth, moving only to fill its mouth with ginseng and water, the instinct for survival in the blood and bones.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I saw not heaven but partially chewed and digested bits of ginseng root in the dirt next to my face. I felt clear and empty, as translucent as the river beside me. Noticing the bleeding between my legs had stopped, I peeled the rags, stiff as scabs, away from my body and, carefully folding them, placed them on some rocks away from the running water. After taking off the rest of my clothes, I waded into the stream and rubbed at the dried blood caked on my legs from groin to calves. The mud-colored flecks turned liquid red in my hands, then dissolved under the patient licking of the river’s tongue.

  Rubbing handfuls of small pebbles against my head and skin, I washed my hair and body until I felt raw. I let the cooling air dry me. By the length of the day, I knew that soon it would be the season to replant the stalks of rice in the paddies. When my parents were still alive and I was still a child, everyone in our family worked to grow the rice. Where we lived, there was time only for one planting, one harvest, so everything had to be done quickly and well. As the youngest, I was responsible for feeding the workers their meals of rice and soup, carried to them on trays balanced on my head. When I delivered the food without spilling, I was allowed to play—a function also rooted in practicality; as I jumped through the rows of fragile plants, waving sticks into the air, I kept scavenging birds away from our future meals.

  But as I grew and second and third sister were hired on neighboring farms, I took over more of the work. Mother, oldest sister, and I would spend hours bent over the knee-deep silt, our fingers cradling the baby rice, laying them into the oozing earth.

  During one season of planting, my mother gave birth to a dead baby. Smaller than one of my mother’s outstretched hands, the infant slipped between her fingers in a gush of blood and sour-smelling fluid. My mother wrapped it in a bundle, packing it neat as a field lunch, before I could see it, but oldest sister saw. It was deformed, Soon Ja whispered. Tail like a tadpole. Or maybe, she added as an afterthought, it was a boy.

  We walked with our mother to the river, taking the clothes that needed to be washed. My mother divided up the clothes between my sister and me, and humming under her breath, she walked downriver. We listened to her voice, rising in waves above the rushing of the water, sing the song of the river: Pururun mul, su manun saramdul-i, jugugat-na? Blue waters, how many lives have you carried away? Moot saram-ui seulpumdo hulro hulro sa ganora. You should carry the sorrow of people far, far away.

  And as we beat our clothes clean, we watched out of the corners of our eyes as she tightened the knot on her baby’s shroud and set it into the water where the current pulled it down. Into Saja’s mouth, oldest sister told me later in an attempt to torment me. An offering for the gatekeeper of hell.

  When I was dry from my bath, I took the ra
gs that had held back my blood and all that was left of my first baby, and instead of throwing them into the water, I planted them in a clean patch of earth next to the stream.

  I like to imagine the face of my first child, what she would have looked like had the features evolved from fetus to infant. I imagine her as perfectly formed as my living daughter: her head, her hands, her toes, everything perfect and human-looking, except in miniature. No bigger than my fist, her tiny body crosses in on itself, arms and legs folded over her chest and belly. Her eyes flutter against closed lids, and her mouth opens and closes as she dreams of suckling. I like to imagine my first baby in this way: nestled in the crook of the river’s elbow, nursing at its breast.

  5

  BECCAH

  Like the rats and cockroaches that ruled The Shacks, Saja the Death Messenger, Guardian of Hell, lived in the spaces between our walls. Each morning before dressing, I inspected the clothes hanging in the closet for the light dusting of gray fur or pawprints, and for the poppy-seed shit or fragile rice-paper skin of molting roaches. In the same way, I looked for indications of the Death Messenger: As I brushed and beat the dresses hanging in the closet, or shook and sifted through the underwear drawer, I unearthed the jade talismans my mother pinned to the insides of my clothes, the packets of salt or ashes she sewed into my panties.

  I imagined the Death Messenger as an ugly old man with horns and ulcerous skin, burning yellow eyes and a gaping, toothless mouth that waited to feed ravenously on the souls that lined up in front of our apartment. Our open door was Saja’s gaping mouth, my mother his tongue, sampling each person for the taste of death. The demon waiting to snatch me off to hell if I did not carry a red packeted charm, Saja was the devil my father had preached about and, through my mother’s chants and offerings, became more real to me than my father ever was.

 

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