Comfort Woman

  God’s call? said another missionary. Are you sure it is His voice you hear? Remember what He has said: Whosoever looketh on a woman with lust hath already committed sin in his heart. Cast her out, brother, for if the right eye offends, pluck it out so that the whole body can live.

  The missionary’s nails bit into my palm as he cleared his throat to hide his growl. I believe, he said, God also said: Why be holdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own? What is it, brother, that you see?

  My hand clenched and sweating in his, I stood on display with my head bowed, unable to look into the faces of the missionaries and the Korean girls still remaining at the mission. But I felt their whispers and thoughts striking me in the chest.

  After a week of frenzied prayer and fervent packing, the Pyongyang mission was dismantled. We packed what we could as fast as we could and loaded up the carts. On the last day, we gathered on the front steps for a final prayer, and one of the missionaries pushed us shoulder-to-shoulder for a picture. Cheese, he said. I did not know what he meant, but all the missionaries smiled. The camera clicked twice, and then, as if on signal, the neighbors and their families swarmed into the building. They marched past us to look through the house, sorting through whatever was left behind. Jira-handa, those hama, those dungbo! I could hear them call to each other, loud enough for us to hear their insults. See how stingy those fat hippos are: hardly anything good left! Rags! Empty matchboxes! Dishes I wouldn’t feed a dog off of!

  Years later, after the minister drove me through America, we received a copy of that picture in the mail. In it the minister and I are standing in the center of the stairs, surrounded by missionaries. One of his arms wraps loosely around my neck. He is smiling; I am not. Our heads have been circled in red, like ink halos. This is our wedding picture.

  Leaving Pyongyang, we hiked to the Taedong River, which was full and rushing because of the early fall rains. I wore a thin white gown that one of the missionary ladies had given me, because, she said, I was going to be reborn in the Spirit and because I was to be married. Two of the greatest events in a Christian woman’s life.

  I tried to push the dress away, but she said, Don’t bother to thank me; it must be a dream come true.

  She wrapped me in the dress, which kept slipping off my shoulders and dragged through the dust as we walked. Hold it up, the missionary lady kept whispering to me as she eyed the hem of what I think were her cast-off underclothes. You’re getting it dirty.

  I did not look up at her, even once. I kept my eyes on the trail and watched how the white cloth, the color of purity and death, soaked up the earth.

  When we reached the river’s edge, the congregation stopped, but I kept walking. I stepped onto the rocks at the shore and waded toward the center. Stop, I heard the minister yell. That’s far enough.

  The dress billowed around me, a bell on the water, and then, caught by the current, entangled me. I fell to my knees.

  See how earnest she is, the minister shouted to the witnesses as he yanked on my elbow. What’s the matter with you? he whispered. Get up!

  Instead I threw myself facedown into the river. Stolen by the cold, my breath rushed out, bubbling in the river’s froth. I held my body stiff, felt the waters turn me, testing my sturdiness against its rocks, and then I let go. I felt the pull of the river in my legs and my lungs, felt the need to dissolve into her body. I opened my eyes and my mouth to taste her—and then I was yanked by the hair and jerked upward.

  I gagged on air. Nose streaming, eyes burning unprotected in the wind, I turned to look at the minister. Wet up to the chest, one hand clutching my hair, he delivered me unto the Lord. I baptize thee, he said, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

  He pulled me from the river by the hand and the hair, and as I stumbled away from the river and into the arms waiting along the bank, I felt empty, desolate, abandoned.

  Drenched and dripping, I heard someone ask me if I took the minister as husband. I nodded, unable to speak, and then I was led to the cart and given my own clothes.

  You are born again, said the woman who had given me my wedding gown. As a Christian, as a wife, and as an American. Congratulations.

  Before we left the river’s edge, I reached down to touch the earth. I felt the mud under my hands, then quickly took a pinch into my mouth. I rubbed it across my tongue, the roof of my mouth, and I ground it between my teeth. I wanted to taste the earth, metallic as blood, take it into my body so that my country would always be a part of me.

  As thousands of exiled patriots from Manchuria returned to Korea to cheer the enemy’s descent into their own lands, the Christian missionaries and those who followed them were in turn pushed south. We moved toward Seoul, hundreds of us, through a nation we thought free. And just as many people from the south moved north. In the months when all directions were open for travel, people roamed the country, searching for family members and homes, pieces of their lives and themselves that were severed and scattered during the war. Or they moved to escape memories, to search for new lives and new homes.

  Now, because I have my daughter to protect from restless spirits, I wonder about those dead. Did they follow their sons and daughters across the country? Or did they remain at home, abandoned and uncared for? I think of Induk, who somehow followed me not only across the country but across the world, to become my guardian. I think of my own mother and father, who stayed behind, or got lost, following another daughter or another family. I wonder if their spirits are fed and clothed, content, or if they have turned outlaw and beggar, without kin, without home.

  Near Kaesong and Panmunjom, we passed roadblocks set up by the military. I thought of the soldiers at the Yalu River and tried to run away, but the minister husband pulled me alongside him. As we moved toward them, I could feel their eyes studying me—my face, breasts, hips, and poji—judging my worth as a niku-ichi P, and I knew they would pull me aside, question me, ask me how I had escaped, and then send me south to hell, to Japan. But when we moved past them, I saw that they were not even Japanese. Bored, the guards did not look at me at all, or at any of the faces moving past them, but stared instead at a point above the human river, toward the mountains in the north.

  And then the soldiers, rifles crossed against their chests, waved us through the barricade, and we were on the other side. It still seems strange to me to think of Korea in terms of north and south, to realize that a line we couldn’t see or feel, a line we crossed with two steps, cut the body of my country in two. In dreams I will always see the thousands of people, the living and the dead, forming long queues that spiral out from the head and feet of Korea, not knowing that when they reach the navel they will have to turn back. Not knowing that they will never be able to return home. Not knowing they are forever lost.

  When we arrived in Seoul, we found a room in the Severance Hospital Mission. Since we had left all the belongings from the Pyongyang mission on the cart, we entered the room with nothing but ourselves and the clothes we were wearing. The minister husband pulled me toward the bed, saying, Tell me how to be with you. As man and wife, we will be one flesh.

  He held my face in his hands. You do not have to tell me of your past, for whatever you have done, you are now cleansed by the washing of water with the word.

  His hands drifted down my neck and settled on my shoulders. He pressed his thumbs into my shoulder blades. I want to drink the water from your cistern and love your body as my own. But I do not know what you know of consummation, he whispered. Do you know what it feels like to take a man, how you will have to stretch and how it will pain you the first time? I will try to go slow.

  He pressed me to his chest, tilted his hips toward mine. There will be blood the first time, he said. Do you know?

  I knew what it felt like to stretch open for many men, and I knew about blood with the first and with the hundredth, and about pain sharp enough to cut your body from your mind. I could not form the words
, but I must have cried out, for the minister husband pushed his lips against my head and said, Don’t worry, sweetie, my little lamb. I will be gentle, he said, and then he bit my neck.

  It is better to marry than to burn, he whispered, and I am burning for you. There is something about you—the way you look so innocent, yet act so experienced—that makes me on fire for you. You are not a virgin, are you? he asked.

  He cooed to me and petted me, then grabbed and swore at me, as he stripped the clothes from our bodies. When he pushed me into the bed, positioned himself above me, fitting himself between my thighs, I let my mind fly away. For I knew then that my body was, and always would be, locked in a cubicle at the camps, trapped under the bodies of innumerable men.

  Without the mission and the sermons that had structured his days, my husband became like a man without a head. We traveled from church to church, drifting toward the tip of the peninsula until we reached the port of Pusan. From there we crossed the ocean, pulled by the missionary’s need to teach the word of his God, continuing his odyssey across the United States, from the Larchmont Presbyterian Church in New York to the Florida Chain of Missionary Assemblies, wherever we could obtain an invitation to teach or study or speak. I would stand by my husband’s side in my Korean dress as he lectured on Spreading the Light: My Experiences in the Obscure Orient.

  When we were not in a lecture, the minister husband dressed me in a white blouse pinched in at the waist and a dark-blue skirt that clung to my hips and barely covered my knees. I felt naked in the way the clothes touched my body, but this was the uniform I was to wear as the minister’s wife. During the day, I pulled my hair back into a knot that reminded me that I was married. If I forgot and wore my hair in a long braid slung over my shoulder, the husband would scold me: You look like a little kid. And yet at night that is how he wanted me: hair down in braids to my waist; eyes wide and blank; lips dropped into a pout and ready to cry. At night, when he climbed on top of me, he’d take the ends of my hair, put them into his mouth, and suck. Afterward he’d pull the blankets over me, tucking them around my chin, and ask me to recite my prayers. Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, I would say, while thinking of Induk, her body bathed in a river of light.

  For years, we traveled from the east coast to the west coast, from north to south, to every state of the Union. Rich enough to own a private car called a wagon, we drove through stretches of farmland so flat and yellow with grain that there was no way to judge time or distance. The land, smooth and bland as the dish called pudding, hypnotized me. Every once in a while, I would blink and rub my eyes, as if waking from a daze, and realize I was still caught in the dream: the same field, the same barns, the same cattle grazing along the same wire fence, endless. I felt that we were traveling in circles.

  Trying to break the monotony, my husband pressed the car horn whenever we passed cows along the roadside. When we first entered the farm country, the beeps, sparse and irregular, jolted me. As we drove on, they became like the land, regular and lulling as a heartbeat.

  I think it was the car horn that made me understand just how rich America was: in just a few hours, we beeped enough times for every family in Korea to have a cow, yet my husband said that only a handful of ranchers owned the cattle we saw. A country of excess and extravagance, America was so rich that one man could own a hundred cows.

  We packed and unpacked, living out of two bags and a box, sleeping sometimes in college guest rooms or motels, but mostly in the car at roadside rest stops. At these stops, I took a wad of Kleenex and ran behind the building to do my business, and I cleaned myself with napkins dampened at the drinking faucet. Though my husband complained, lecturing on how cleanliness was next to godliness, I could not bring myself to stand in line to use the toilets and showers. I felt cleaner skipping showers than remembering the way the Japanese referred to the recreation camps as public rest rooms.

  Some of the rest stops and gas stations along the road had what were called vending machines, where anyone with a coin could pull a knob and receive candy—something that I thought only America must have. If the husband had money left over from filling the tank, he would give me the change so that I could practice using the vending machine. I memorized which coins to put in the money slot, learned to match the knob to the candy that I wanted, and watched as the belt rolled forward to push my selection off the shelf. At first I found it comforting that there was always another candy bar behind it, waiting to take its place. But the more of it I ate, the more it began to bother me: it was so easy, so cheap, so easily replenished.

  During the first few months of traveling, I ate only candy bars and salad with Tabasco sauce. Nothing else appealed to me; American food did not have any taste. I could not eat the food the husband ordered for me to put meat on my bones: potatoes fried or smashed and covered with gravy, bread so white and fluffy I couldn’t remember swallowing it, meat I could not recognize. I did see meat that I could tell was meat, but it was something we never ordered. Once, at the counter of a diner that didn’t turn us away because I looked Japanese, the woman sitting next to me ordered a plate of something that looked like kalbi. I watched out of the corner of my eye, and was surprised that she refused the best part: the chewy, tastiest meat—closest to the bone. When she pushed her plate away and touched the napkin to her lips, I picked up one of her bones and bit into it.

  Excuse me, the woman said as she jumped up.

  The husband grabbed the bone from my hand and put it back on her plate. No, Akiko! he said to me, and then to the woman: Excuse us. She is not from our country; her people tend to share plates.

  She’s a scrawny little thing; maybe you should feed her. The woman’s eyes flicked at my stomach and breasts, and then lingered on my husband’s face. She smiled. Where’s she from? Where’re you from?

  Sorry I am, I said, my tongue stumbling in English in front of this woman who would not look at me. I not knowing you still wanting meat.

  The lady did not look away from my husband. How quaint, she said, a poor little orphan Jap.

  To learn to be an American was to learn to waste. Food, paper, clothes—everything was thrown away when we got tired of it, because there was so much. The cities, especially, were places of waste; it seemed like everything everyone had ever thrown away collected in the cities. Looking up, you saw buildings so high they could catch the clouds, but then you stepped into side streets littered with rotting paper and old food and throwaway people wearing throwaway clothes. Rivers of cars snaked between buildings and blared at people as if they were cows. And the rivers of water were thick as sludge, slick enough with oil to catch fire. The cities all looked like shit alley to me.

  In one of the cities, my husband took me to the highest building in the world. We rode to the top in a box that made me so dizzy I clutched at my husband’s arm to keep from falling. See the numbers, he said. I looked up at the numbers lighting faster than I could count and dropped to my knees. At the top of the sky, everything glittered, the sun glinting off metal and concrete. From so far away, the city seemed beautiful, because you could forget about the waste and the dirt when you didn’t have to step in it. Maybe that’s what the earth looks like to people in heaven, to ghosts and to God.

  That’s what all of America was like to me. When you see it for the first time, it glitters, beautiful, like a dream. But then, the longer you walk through it, the more you realize that the dream is empty, false, sterile. You realize that you have no face and no place in this country.

  My husband never talked about a home, about family, and I never asked. In fact, it did not occur to me that he might have a family, parents who loved him, until two letters from the place where he was born caught up with us at the First Friendship Bible Church in Illinois. The first letter we opened, from the manager of Cuyahoga Falls Sunnyside Retirement Community, told my husband that his mother had died. The second one told him she was ill.

  We followed the letters back to their origin and found the
last place where my husband’s mother lived. After several false turns along roads that spiraled into dead ends, we entered the building’s soot-stained parking structure. Someone had planted a handful of mugunghwa, the everlasting flowers, along the walkway that led into the three-story building. I took seeing them as a good sign, even though their stems seemed withered from the smell of burning tires and bent under the heavy eyes that looked down on them from the building’s windows.

  The lobby smelled of mildew and of old people without families to care for them, ancestors without descendants. It smelled like abandonment and loneliness and ghosts. It smelled like home.

  As we waited for the elevator, old people flocked to us, eager to touch our young people’s skin and smell our young people’s breath as we received their questions.

  You related to Mrs. Bradley? Never knew she had a son. Never knew he was married to a Chinee. All them people are so small, see? How adorable! You speakee English?

  They crowded against us, eager to escort us to my husband’s mother’s door, eager to tell us of her death and her funeral, which was beautiful, just beautiful, even though none of her family saw fit to come.

  When we entered the mother’s apartment, her ghost rushed out at us. She enveloped us with a heavy stickiness that sucked us into the room. A fat spirit, she demanded in death the space she had never had in her life as a thin, sickly woman. She pushed us up against each other, the furniture, the knickknacks and mementos that filled shelves and counters and floor spaces.

  Jesus Above, Good Lord in Heaven, my husband said, trying to maneuver his way between a Dalmatian-dog lamp and thigh-high stacks of National Geographics to get into the kitchen. What’ll we do with all this junk?