Comfort Woman

by Nora Okja Keller

  Roughly my age, the girls who were rescued were round-faced and pretty in their innocence, as I once had been. They braided their hair with bright-colored ribbons that flashed against their black hair and uniforms when they marched out of their common sleeping quarters and into the kitchen. Like children, they squirmed in their seats, stifling giggles and gossip when I swept past them.

  Later, when I could once again hear what others heard, I caught their whispers flying against me: Why does the minister always save the sweetest pastry for the devil girl? And see how he always touches her head, gives her the prettiest ribbons for her braid?

  Even the missionaries gossiped. I heard Sister Red Nose say, The wild child is possessed, a false light luring away the faithful. Sister Milk Breath, giving me the name that Manshin Ahjima predicted would be mine at the mission, muttered, Mary Magdalene, a curse, whenever I passed her way.

  Once, when questioned to his face about his treatment of me, the minister smiled, a fleeting quirk of the lips, and said, What man of you, having a hundred sheep, doth not leave the ninety and nine to go after that one which is lost, until he finds it?

  Putting his hand on my head, he looked at his sheep until they dropped their eyes. Rejoice, he said to them, for I have found a lamb that once was lost.

  Later the young girls fluttered around me. Will the handsome minister save you? they giggled.

  I wish he would save me, one said.

  As long as he saves me some ribbon, another grumbled. Akiko must get more than her fair share, don’t you, Akiko?

  Oh, it’s not fair, the girls cried. Akiko always gets more of everything because they say she’s touched. I think you are just acting. You wait till the war is over, Akiko. Our families will find us and we’ll marry rich men and have everything. What will you have, crazy Akiko, with no family and no mind?

  Because they were still young, they had faith that the war would end and the Japanese would be defeated. That their lives would resume their prewar scripts, as if the war and their abandonment caused only a brief stutter in the opera they envisioned for themselves.

  Because they were still babies, really, I did not tell them what I knew was true: The war would never end, because the Japanese, like all that was evil, would wait in the shadows, shape-shifting and patient, hoping for a chance to swallow you whole.

  I could not seem to differentiate among the missionaries, with their pink skin, mud-and-straw-colored hair, and large noses that blocked the space between their pale, watery eyes. If not for the clothes, I would have had trouble distinguishing the men from the women, for even the women were tall, with big hands and knuckles.

  Their actions, too, made it difficult to label them as men and women, for they did not behave as proper men and women. In the world before the camps, the unmarried women and men I knew lived separately. From the age of six, I was taken away from the babies of both sexes and taught the ways of women. Though we would play on the swing, standing tall as we were pushed high enough to see into the boys’ courtyard, girls were not supposed to talk or look at boys. In our family’s home, my sisters and I rarely saw my father. When he was home, we prepared his meals and served him first. After he finished eating and went into the back room to smoke or sleep, we would eat our meal. That was what was respectful.

  Even in the camps, where the soldiers banged in and out of the comfort cubicles, in and out of our women’s bodies, what was left of our minds we guarded, kept private and separate.

  At the mission house, I was embarrassed by the disrespect between the men and the women. Lives overlapping, men and women ate and worked together. They looked into each other’s faces as they spoke, laughing with mouths open. Even while worshiping, they sat side by side, unseparated by a curtain or sheet, on the same bench, thighs and shoulders almost touching.

  I began to recognize the minister because of the way the girls, forgetting or ignoring proper behavior, gathered around him. Like puppies, the girls would fall about his feet and legs, panting for a length of ribbon, a piece of candy, a box of chalk; for writing paper, toothpaste, a kind word. Thank you, Sonsaeng-nim, the girls would sing out, and as if they were pets, the minister would reach out, touching a nose, stroking the hair of those around him.

  Stop, he would say. I am not an honored teacher. I am just a child, like you all, in God’s eyes.

  But the girls would cry out: No, no, not true! Look at your body, thin and long—an aristocrat’s body! And your hands, so graceful—a scholar’s hands! And your voice, they said, like God‘s!

  The minister would laugh, saying, Stop! But his eyes would shine like blue glass.

  Because I had begun to recognize him as an individual, I watched him carefully, intensely, as if memorizing his features, his gestures, were one of my chores. Often, as he gave away his gifts, he closed his eyes and lifted his chin. Pushing his chest forward, he would open and shut his mouth quickly, pursing his lips, blowing quick puffs of air. After a few days, I realized he was singing.

  Now, years later, I recognize those same body movements and hear the words to the songs he sings to our baby. When she is fretful, crying so loud that the only thing she hears is the pain within her, only he can quiet her. He holds her tight against his chest, pinning her arms within her blanket, and sings. Soon she stops struggling, and as her screams fade into hiccups, she lifts her head toward the sound of his voice singing about whales of Jo-jo-jonah. Noah’s art-y art-y made out of go-phers barking barking. Jesus loving children.

  They are silly songs that my husband sings to comfort our child, but I hate them and I hate him.

  I hate that he can quiet her with his voice, the same voice that lulled and lured the girls from the Pyongyang mission. The same voice, sounding so honest and joyful that you want to believe, even when you know the truth. The same voice that fools everyone but me. I hate that voice because my daughter loves it.

  I cannot sing to my daughter like that, in a voice full of laughter, for I never learned funny songs, songs that make you laugh and laugh. I remember only bits and pieces from those my mother sang when she was working. And they were songs that filled you with sadness, that made you want to cry until your throat swelled with salt.

  After one of the missionaries’ communal dinners, the person who came to take the chopsticks from my hand was the minister the girls always followed. By then most of the people there had stopped speaking to or looking at me, unnerved by the silence by which I was surrounded. But when this man took the chotkarak away from me, he held my chin and looked into my eyes. He looked until I was forced to stop listening to the women crying in the comfort camps, until I looked back and saw him. And then he smiled, rubbed a napkin over my lips, and helped me stand. He took my hand and led me down the basement stairs, where the world turned on its side once again.

  In the basement meeting room, he placed me on a bench between two other missionaries. I concentrated on watching him walk down the aisle to the pulpit, but my vision narrowed and buckled under the increasing intensity of camp sounds. During his speech, each time I saw him slap the pulpit for emphasis, I heard the sounds of women’s naked buttocks being slapped as they were paraded in front of a new arrival of troops.

  When the congregation stood, opening and riffling through their black books, I heard the shrieking of bullets ricocheting at the feet of women the soldiers were momentarily bored with.

  And when the people around me all at once opened their mouths wide, I heard every sound from every day I spent in the camp all at once, so loud I felt I was drowning under a raging river, until, in a rush, my ears shattered.

  After a moment of utter silence I heard singing, but singing like I’ve never heard before. The only songs I had heard before that day were sung by one person at a time, or by a group of people who all sang the same part in the same way.

  What I heard after my ears cracked open was a single song, with notes so rich and varied that it sounded like many songs blended into one.

  And in that song I
heard things that I had almost forgotten: the enduring whisper of women who continued to pass messages under the ears of the soldiers; a defiant Induk bellowing the Korean national anthem even after the soldiers had knocked her teeth out; the symphony of ten thousand frogs; the lullabies my mother hummed as she put her daughters to sleep; the song the river sings when she finds her freedom in the ocean.

  My daughter’s cries filter into my dreams. Just before I wake, her crying turns into my mother’s singing. My mother is crying and dancing and singing a song that I heard her sing repeatedly in my childhood, but in my dream I cannot quite make out the words. I try to embrace my mother, but she dances away from me again and again. Just as I finally reach her, her song erupts into the screams of an infant.

  I look toward my husband’s bed, see his unmoving form huddled beneath the blankets. Dazed with sleep, still seeing my dream, I go to my daughter. As I pick her up, her body stiffens with her screams, and out of my mouth comes my mother’s voice, singing the song I forgot I knew:Nodle Kang-byon pururun mul

  Kang muldo mot miduriroda

  Su manun saramdul-i jugugat-na

  It’s a song full of tears, but one my mother sang for her country and for herself. A song she gave to me and one that I will give to my daughter. I want to shake my baby into listening, force her to hear, but I only sing louder and louder: E he yo! Pururun mul, kang muldo

  Na rul mit-go nado kang mul-ul miduriroda

  Over my daughter’s cries, I continue to sing and sing, until she begins to quiet. Her body falls into mine and the air in her room becomes sweet and heavy with the breath of her sleep, and still I sing. I sing until I reach the end of the song, until I can remember no more.Moot saram-ui seulpumdo diwana bol-ga

  Moot saram-ui seulpumdo hulro hulro sa ganora.

  8

  BECCAH

  When I entered the world, bottom first, arrows impacted my body with such force that it took twelve years for them to work their way back to the surface of my skin. My mother said she tried to protect me from the barbs the doctors who delivered me let loose into the air with their male eyes and breath, but they tied her hands and put her to sleep. By the time my mother saw me, two days later, she said she knew the sal had embedded themselves deep into my body by the way my yellow eyes turned away from her breast. My mother spent two weeks in the hospital waiting, she said, to see how the arrows would harm me: so swift and deadly that she would never have time to fight their power, or slow detonating, festering for years, until I formed either an immunity or an addiction to its poison.

  Years later, when the evil-energy arrows began to work their way from my body, I often wished the sal had killed me outright so that I would not have had to endure my mother’s protection.

  At the start of each Korean New Year, my mother would throw grains of rice and handfuls of brass coins onto a meal tray to see my luck for the coming year. In the year of the fire snake, I turned twelve, and my mother missed the divination tray completely.

  “Mistake! Mistake!” my mother yelled toward our ceiling as she scooted on her hands and knees to pluck coins and rice from the carpet. As soon as she collected enough to fill both fists, she held her hands above the tray, closed her eyes, and chanted, calling down the Birth Grandmother to reveal my yearly fortune. When my mother cast for the second time, she poured the riches from her hands rather than threw them, hoping to fill the tray with a better reading.

  When she opened her eyes and saw that she had again missed the tray, she cried. She wrapped her arms around her body and rocked. “Aigu, aigu,” she moaned. My mother chanted and swayed until she fell into a trance. Then she got up and, eyes sealed, danced through the apartment: on the sofa bed, around the black-lacquered coffee table, over dining room chairs, around me. And as she danced, my mother touched our possessions, reeling—she later explained—for the red. My mother held her hands in front of her, and like divining rods, they swung toward the color of blood. She ripped red-bordered good luck talismans from our walls and furniture, where they fluttered like price tags. She knocked over our altars, sending the towers of fruit and sticky rice crashing to the floor, and rummaged for the apples and plums. Clawing through the bedroom closets and drawers, she collected everything red, from T-shirts and running shorts to a library copy of The Catcher in the Rye to the bag of Red Hots I bought with my own money and stashed in my sock drawer.

  When she was through piling the red things into a mountain in our living room, my mother said, “We need to burn the red from your life. Everything.”

  At first, I didn’t understand what she meant to do; sometimes she said such things to her clients, then just waved a lit incense stick or a moxa ball over their heads. But when my mother took an arm-load of clothes to the kitchen sink and lit a match, I scrambled to the floor and rooted through my possessions, trying to save something.

  When the material in the sink caught fire, my mother came and took the one thing of mine I had managed to find: the tie-dye T-shirt I had made with rubber bands, melted crayon, and Rit dye in Arts and Crafts the year before. “Beccah,” she told me, “honyaek, the cloud of Red Disaster, is all around you. I am trying to weaken it so it won’t trigger your sal and make you sick.”

  Red Disaster, the way my mother explained it, was like the bacteria we had learned about in health class: invisible and everywhere in the air around us, honyaek was contagious and sometimes deadly. Burning the red from our apartment was my mother’s version of washing my hands.

  The fire in the sink kept sputtering out, held in check by flame-resistant clothing, until my mother added her talismans and money envelopes and a dash of lighter fluid. When she held a match to this kindling, the fire licked, hesitant at first, and then devoured what was offered. Flames shot up amidst coils of thick smoke that blackened our kitchen walls and ceiling. When this first batch had almost burned down, the smoke alarm sputtered to life with grunts and whines and a final full-strength shriek before my mother whacked it with a broom. After she cracked open a window, my mother continued to burn our possessions, even the Red Hots, which melted like drops of blood-red wax, filling the apartment with the stench of burning cinnamon.

  Since I was particularly susceptible to Red Disaster that year, my mother did not want me wandering about in unknown places, picking up foreign honyaek germs. I was not allowed to ride the bus without her or to swim at all. Consequently I was not supposed to attend school field trips. When my classmates went to Bishop Museum and to Foster Botanical Gardens and to Dole pineapple cannery, where they sampled fresh juice and fruit slices, I stayed behind in the school library, reading and helping Mrs. Okimoto shelve books according to the Dewey decimal system.

  But when my sixth-grade social science teacher arranged a snor keling expedition at Hanauma Bay, I signed my own permission slip after practicing my mother’s signature for so long that even now I cannot write her name without my letters cramping into her small, painfully precise script. I remember my hands shook when I turned in this first forgery on the day of the excursion, but Miss Ching just shuffled the form and the fare I had stolen from the Wishing Bowl into her carryall folder. Pushing me into line with the rest of the class, she counted our heads and led us like ducklings onto the bus.

  Since my mother had burned my red-heart bathing suit, I wore an olive-green leotard—not the sparkling Danskin kind with spaghetti straps, which might have passed, but one that was cap-sleeved and frayed in the butt. I knew I would catch stares and snickers from the Toots Entourage (led now by Tiffi Sugimoto, since Toots spent all field trips in detention hall for smuggling packs of cigarettes to school in her tall, frizzy rat-nest hair), but I also knew that this trip would be worth it. And even though I had to pair up with Miss Ching in the walk down the winding trail from parking lot to beach, and even though I sucked in water each time I tried to breathe through the snorkel, and my mask fogged no matter how many times I washed it with spit, the trip was worth the teasing and the lies. Because when I trudged across the networ
k of coral reef to dive into pockets of water as deep and clear as God’s blue eyeball, I felt perfect, seamless, and as whole as the water that closed over me.

  Only afterward, on the hike back to the parking lot, did I begin to feel the sting of Red Disaster. With each step, I felt a prick against my heel. By the time we reached the top, what had started out as an irritation had turned into bolts of fire shooting jagged through my leg.

  In the middle of that night, my mother said she woke up on the couch in a suffocating heat, the sheets clinging to her body, a damp second skin. She fought to take each breath, her throat and lungs burning, and worked her way toward the bedroom, where the waves of heat originated.

  “I thought there was a fire in there, that you were burning to death,” my mother told me when I woke the next morning, my feet bandaged in strips of bedsheet.

  “I swam through heat so heavy the room rippled before my eyes, and when I touched the bedroom door—aigu! Red hot!” My mother flung her hands into the air, showing off the raised welts on the palms. “I had to take my pajama, hold like this, then open.”

  The night of the terrible heat, sure that I was surrounded by a ring of fire, my mother wrapped the bottom of her nightgown around the doorknob and, waist bared, burst into the bedroom to rescue me. She was knocked immediately to the ground from the heat and enveloped in smoke that was not black but red. She pulled the collar of her nightgown over her nose and mouth to filter out the worst of the heat and the red smoke. “Just like a dust storm,” she said. “Or like that plague curse in The Ten Commandments that killed off all the children—only red, not black.