Comfort Woman

by Nora Okja Keller

  “Red Death filled the room, thickening every breath I took, clouding my eyes so that I could barely see you—a motionless lump—on the bed. I called on the Birth Grandmother to help me beat a path through the honyaek to the windows. I tried to push some of the poison out, but the wind blew in even more honyaek.”

  My mother, who could not swim in water, would always pantomime the breast stroke when she told this part of the story. “I dove into red thick as blood pudding, fighting the tentacles of honyaek that tried to pull me under, and found you sweating and shivering under the blankets. I reached out to feel your forehead, but you burned so hot I could not touch you with my bare hands. I tucked the blankets underneath your body and carried you just like you were a baby again. But I could barely lift you; the Red Death sucked my energy, fed on my fear for you, so that I felt weak and unsure. I could barely force my legs forward as the fog of honyaek swirled around us, trying to trip my feet into missteps. I knew one wrong turn would lead us into the land of homeless hobo ghosts, yongson, where we could wander for ten thousand years without even one person knowing we were gone.

  “I closed my eyes and told the Birth Grandmother to guide my feet, and when I opened them, she had led us to the bathroom. I placed you in the bathtub and turned on the water. At first the water evaporated as soon as it left the faucet, turning into red steam when it hit your body. I turned the cold on full blast, and finally enough trickled out to dampen the blankets and cool you off.”

  When I was out of immediate danger of “burning to ash,” my mother said she needed to leave me in order to prepare her weapons. She opened the hallway closet, shook out our extra bedsheet, and, after studying it briefly, tore it into seven long strips. Then, with a felt marker, over and over again, she wrote my name, birth date, and genealogy—what she referred to as my “spiritual address.” When I first looked at my feet in the morning, I thought they were bound in black-and-white striped material, so densely written were my mother’s words.

  “You needed to be tied into your body,” she told me when I asked her about the linen around my feet. “And in case you slipped out, these words would have led you back.” She pointed to one of the lines. “Look here—this character means you. This is me, this is the Birth Grandmother, this is each of her sisters. I linked us all together, a chain to fight the Red Death.”

  My mother said she forced the Birth Grandmother to call upon her sisters, the Seven Stars—each of them named Soon-something, which my mother said meant “pure”—to come protect me. “I didn’t want to be rude,” she said, “but really, if your spirit guardian can’t protect you on her own, she should call for help, don’t you think? I mean, I’m your mother, but I still ask her to help me watch you.” My mother huffed as if disgusted and insulted by her spirit guardian’s overbearing pride and lack of common sense. “Finally, I had to get rough with her.

  “ ‘Induk,’ I said, using her personal name to show how upset I was, ‘this Red Death is too much for an old lady spirit like you!’

  “When the Birth Grandmother did not answer, I knew I had been too blunt, but I could not waste time massaging the ego of a fickle spirit. ‘Call on the Seven Stars, or I will find a new Birth Grandmother and you will be just another lost ghost,’ I told her. ‘My daughter is dying.’ ”

  When I choked, my mother interrupted her story to scold me. “Pay attention.” She scowled. “I told you this was serious.”

  The Birth Grandmother, responding to either her threats or her plea, must have listened to my mother, because a path of white light cracked the red cloud. My mother walked through—“Floated,” she said. “I didn’t even have to move my feet”—and found herself transported to my side in the bathtub.

  She peeled the blankets from my body, stripping me naked. When I shivered, she placed each of the seven strips of bedsheet—one for each of the Star Sisters—on my body. Starting from my head, she smoothed the linen against my contours, asking for blessings from the protective spirits. She ran her hands down my face, throat, arms, torso, legs, and when she touched my feet, her hands vibrated.

  “The Sisters were telling me where the honyaek entered your body. This,” my mother said as she tapped at my feet, which I could barely feel under their wrap, “is your weak point. Didn’t I always say you got them from your father?

  “They were balloons—so swollen, red, and tender,” she said, “they melted into pus when I touched them. I took a razor from the medicine cabinet and—zhaa! zhaa! just like gutting nsh—opened your feet to let the sickness out.” My mother brandished imaginary knives, slicing the air with sure, quick strokes, reliving her battle. “Red Death shot from your feet, fouling the air with its stench of rotting meat and rat feces. I cut deeper, catching and killing the poison with the bandages blessed by the spirits. At first, as soon as I placed the cloth by your feet, the whole thing turned red, becoming slick and saturated with Red Death. I was like a demon myself, possessed, pushing clean cloths against your feet with one hand, pulling away the ones drenched in Red Death with the other hand. And all the while, I could see the battle between the Sisters and the honyaek on the strips of cloth, as the good spirits fought to turn the bandages back to pure white.

  “Finally, toward the morning, when all the Red Death had been sucked from the room through the balls of your feet, when all the bandages were white again—even the one against your feet, which by then wept only clear water—the arrowhead, the sal triggered by the honyaek, popped out. Wait, I’ll show you.” My mother scuttled off the bed and rushed into the kitchen. I could hear her rummaging through the glass cupboard, and when she returned, she held above her head like a small trophy a Smucker’s jelly jar.

  She shook the jar in my face, and what looked like bits of bone jumped and rattled around the bottom. “Sal,” she announced. “This is the shattered arrowhead working its way out, making all kinds of trouble. We’ve got to watch for more of these.”

  I took the jar from her, interested in something I could touch from the spirit world, something tangible from the place where my mother lived half her life. I looked into the jar, then shook the contents onto my palm.

  “Don’t make that face,” my mother said as I stared at the sal. “Wrinkles will freeze in your forehead.” When I didn’t say anything, she knelt beside me and wailed, “It’s not my fault! In Korea, everything is safe for the mother and baby—you’re not even supposed to leave the bed for two weeks after you give birth! Here, anybody, any man, can come right into the delivery room and cut you, so how could I protect you when you first came into this world? At first I thought since you were half American you would be immune. But now I see that in your second life transition, the arrows are coming home.”

  I cupped my mother’s chin in my hand, forcing her to look at me, worried that she was losing the present and drifting away from me. “Mom? What are you talking about? Where are you?”

  She slapped my hand down. “Sometimes you ask stupid questions,” she said. “I am explaining to you how the sal got in your body and what we can do about it. This is the critical year, the year you become a woman and vulnerable—just like when a snake first sheds his skin—so we got to purge the clouds of Red Disaster from the home—done—and then this building and then the school. Then we got to purify your mind. You got to—”

  “Stop, Mommy, stop!” I held my palm toward her, displaying the white flecks. “This isn’t sal or an arrow or whatever; it’s coral.”

  “Coral?” My mother picked up a small piece and rolled it in her fingers.

  “Yeah,” I said, carefully dropping the rest of the rocks back into the jar so I wouldn’t have to look at her. “You know, like stones from the sea.”

  “Yes,” my mother said, her words measured, as if she were talking to someone mentally slow. “Sal is like stones from the sea.”

  “No, I mean coral is stones from the sea.” I took a deep breath and exhaled in a rush. “I rode a bus and went swimming on a field trip. I lied to you before. I’m sorr
y. No need to watch me anymore.”

  My mother lifted the jar from my hands and swirled it until the coral skimmed across the bottom in an even hum. “I know you went swimming,” she said. “The office called to tell me your bus would be getting back to school late.”

  “So you lied!” I yelled. “You know it’s not sal.”

  My mother slammed the glass down on the night table. Bits of coral flew across the bed and onto the floor at her feet. “It is sal,” she screamed back at me. “That’s what made you lie in the first place. It’s what made your feet swell up and stink. And I can see you still have more sal in your mouth, making it mean and stupid. Now—” Here my mother suddenly quieted and dropped down to kiss me on the forehead. “You are not well. Just rest. I’m going to keep you safe. I will watch for sal and pluck them out when you show the signs.”

  My mother pounced on the signs of sal with quick efficiency, spotting the evidence of my decay in every shortcoming. Whenever I snapped at her, or overslept, or forgot something as simple as leaving an offering for the Seven Stars on the seventh day of the seventh month, she’d wave a lit incense stick about my head and yell, “Sal!”

  Where earlier I had cherished the moments my mother paid attention to me, recognizing me as her flesh-and-blood daughter, I now began to cringe whenever she studied me, targeting a single part of my anatomy for any length of time. Because I knew that if I did not move out of her scope, she would hit me with another barb. Once, when I was about to kiss my mother goodbye before leaving for school, she grabbed my face, pressing my cheeks into my lips for a fish pucker. She held me that way for a blink or two, then announced, “Stink-breath. Sal from your father.”

  Sal seeped from the pores of my skin—proclaiming itself in feet that smelled like stale popcorn and armpits that smelled like fermenting potatoes—and pushed my body beyond its known topography. Knees and elbows erupted into sharp and dangerous angles. Zits bubbled onto my forehead and chin. Hair sprouted in damp, unexplored crevices. Knots of flesh fisted behind my nipples, punching up small hills.

  And my mother’s eyes and hands darted in to pinch and pull, poke and worry over each development.

  I learned to study my body carefully in order to find and eliminate the signs of sal before my mother saw them. I sucked on breath mints, rubbed deodorant under my arms and on my feet. When my hands started to sweat, I swiped a layer of Secret across them too. And each night in the bath, I’d lie back and wait for strands of downy hair to float away from my body in exploratory tendrils, then pluck them out with eyebrow tweezers. The removal of each hair brought a flash of tears to my eyes, the sting of a tiny arrow.

  I wore large, oversize T-shirts, which 1 pulled toward my knees to flatten my breasts. The kids called me a “mini-moke,” because I slunk around the playground rolling my hands into the front of my shirts and slouched over my desk like one of the big, tough boys who smoked dope at the bus stop before school started. All of my shirts looked misshapen and distorted that year, even after Miss Ching announced during health education that “Some girls, who shall remain nameless, are ruining their clothes when they really, in the name of decency, should just go out and buy a bra.” She looked right at me, and though I could feel my face burning red, I looked right back, sending a sal to strike her eyes. And her mouth.

  My mother prayed for me. Alternately wailing over my out-of-control body and cursing my father, who passed on his sal to me, she berated the spirits and begged them for advice on how to save me. “Beccah,” she told me after a long conference with Induk the Birth Grandmother. “No matter how much we cleanse the Red Disaster away from you, it comes back, because the sal keeps getting stronger.” She sniffed at my skin, and under the mint and the “rain-fresh” scent of Secret, she detected another genetically embedded arrow, more evidence of impurity left by my haole father: the odor of cheese and milk and meat—animal waste. “You have to stop feeding the sickness in your body, and starve the sal out of you.”

  To cleanse the impurities from my system, I ate food blessed by the spirits. For breakfast and dinner, my mother set blocks of white rice cake, bowls of water, oranges, and mixed vegetable namul onto our altar, offering the Birth Grandmother and her sisters first helpings. After rubbing her hands in prayerful supplication, she’d bow stiffly from the waist. “Please share with us our food and your blessings,” she’d say. “Please make this house peaceful. Please make the child turn out well.” Then we would both kneel, waiting for the spirits to finish their meal. When the rice no longer sent spirals of steam into the air, we knew that the spirits were finished and that it was our turn to eat.

  I tried cheating, eating the hot lunch at school. Pizza and Tater Tots, or loco-mocos—over-easy egg over gravy over beef patty over rice—cost twenty-five cents, so if I took only one money envelope from the Wishing Bowl, I could eat whatever I wanted for several weeks.

  But my body always betrayed me. My mother listened to my stomach’s noises, looked into my eyes, smelled my feet, and knew that I had eaten dirty food. “Rotten cow’s milk, pig guts, and red-hot fat,” she would comment, and that night I would have to drink endless bowls of blessed water while my mother chanted and sprinkled the ashes of burnt incense stick on my stinking parts. Sometimes this would go on through the night, so that when I woke in the early-morning hours to use the bathroom, I created landslides from ashes piled on the pillow near my mouth, on the sheets near my hands, on my stomach and crotch and feet.

  When I stopped fighting and ate only what was acceptable to my guardian spirits, I wondered why I had fought in the first place. Eating food that had been blessed, I began to feel the spirits fill my body, making me stronger, smarter, purer than my normal self. Each bite of the food tasted and tested by the Birth Grandmother and the Seven Stars seemed to ripen and bloom in my mouth, so that even one grain of rice, one section of orange, one strand of bean sprout, filled me to fullness.

  I became so full that I consumed only what the spirits themselves ate, feasting on the steam evaporating from freshly made rice, on the scent of oranges and pears. I saw food take flight from its physical manifestation, turning into light that shot through my body. And I saw the light flow through me, swirling like blood under skin turned translucent as the shade of a lamp, until it eddied in the tips of my fingers.

  My mother saw the light in my hands as well. “Your hands are so pale,” she murmured once, “I can see the blue hyolgwan burning under its skin.”

  And when I massaged her back, my fingers migrated toward the sal hidden in her muscles, alongside her bones. “Saa, saa, saaa,” my mother would groan with pain and pleasure. “Kill the sal.” And I would press my fingers into the knotted muscles until I felt them loosen and dissolve under my heat. With the light, I could dip into her body to pull out the walnuts of pain lodged in her back, sucking like leeches against her spine or between her shoulder blades. Sometimes when I massaged my mother, I felt my arms disappear up to the elbows, my body reabsorbed by hers. In those moments, I knew I was truly my mother’s daughter, that I nursed her with my light.

  I aimed the light into myself, feeling for the poisoned arrowheads implanted in my body in order to kill my own pain. I fed the light with more spirit food, until it grew larger than myself. The bigger the light within me became, the smaller my body got, until I seemed to shrink into myself, becoming as elemental as the food offered to and consumed by the gods.

  My body reabsorbed my hips, my breasts, the small belly that sloped between my pelvic bones. My hair fell out, leaving tufts of dry lifeless strands tangled in hairbrushes or in the shower drain. I knew that except for the down—like the woolly lanugo coating the fetus in the womb—developing on my arms and legs, I would soon become hairless as a newborn. I continued to devour the steam of rice, waiting until I would be tiny enough to slip completely into the world my mother lived in.

  But no matter how clean, how small I became, the sal—too deep within me to uproot—remained, a seed burrowed low in my belly, to k
ill the light.

  To ensure my safe passage through the critical year of the fire snake, my mother decided to meet me after school one day in order to purify the campus. Taking the same route as the morning bus, my mother walked and chanted her way from The Shacks to Ala Wai Elementary. Every few yards, she dipped into her shoulder bag and threw out handfuls of barley and rice—scrap offerings to lure the wandering dead and noxious influences away from the path I took to and from home every day. By the time she reached the campus, she had collected a gang of kids. “Eh, bag lady! Eh, crazy lady,” they called out as they circled her. “Watchu doing? Feeding the birds?”

  When my mother continued to chant and toss out grain, ignoring them, they must have grown bolder, pressing in on her with outstretched hands. “I like. I like,” some teased. “Gimme some.” And others, spurred by dares, came to slap at her bag or maybe her hands before scurrying back to the safety of the group.

  Seeing that these devil children refused to be tempted by the meager handfuls of rice, my mother probably stepped up the exorcism. She had come prepared with talismans that attracted luck, incense sticks that purified the air and flushed out hidden pockets of Red Disaster, and lumps of moxa and red pepper to scare away troublesome imps. After first trying to bribe the children to go away by offering them her prized good luck packets, my mother took out a handful of moxa and red pepper balls. One by one, she lit the pellets with her Bic and threw them at the children.

  “Shame on you! Your mothers must be so sad to have given birth to monsters,” she scolded, flinging the smoldering lumps into the growing crowd.

  “Hey, you crazy!” one or two of the kids yelled when a ball of moxa or pepper hit its mark, leaving a small ash-gray circle on a piece of clothing or a body part. The rest of the children edged in closer, howling with laughter at each word my mother spoke.