Comfort Woman

  A tower of magazines toppled onto the floor, knocking over several figurines and picture frames from one of the end tables placed in the middle of the living room. I stooped to pick up a wooden owl, a porcelain clown holding a bunch of balloons, a tea-cup, and the pictures. As I unfolded the backs of the silver frames to make them stand upright, I studied the people my husband’s family once were: a gray-haired, thin-lipped man with heavy eyebrows, dressed in a military uniform; a bony woman with pointy glasses on a sharp nose, pressing a fat boy against her breast; the same fat boy, several years older and starting to stretch into the man who was my husband, with his hair curled about the high-necked collar of his private school uniform.

  For a long while after that first day, I could not live with the dead woman and her possessions. I could not touch her things, even the carpet that I walked on, without feeling her spirit trying to squeeze me out.

  Help me tag and box everything, my husband would say, as he sifted through mountains of his mother’s old magazines and letters, through her armies of tiny dolls and animals. And when I would not move, letting the dust fall and settle over everything like snow, he’d scold: Wife, be subject to your husband, as sayeth the Lord, for as Christ is head of the church, the husband is the head of the wife and savior of her body.

  A good wife will turn a house into a home, he’d say. It’s your duty as wife and helpmeet.

  Then, after lecturing on cleanliness and godliness, he’d beg: Please, please, at least help me tidy up.

  But I could not forge through the space filled by the mother. It was as if she sucked all the air from my body and pressed me down with the weight of her possessions. I spent most of my time hiding in the bed that had conformed to her body’s indentations, under her mustard-and-green knitted blanket that smelled like lavender and must, dreaming of Induk and people who looked like me peeking in through the windows.

  Finally, perhaps by way of my dreams, Induk slipped into the mother’s apartment. After she rolled me out of bed, she slid her hands over the mother’s desk, over the pictures, over the wooden animals and ceramic figurines, until her fingers were coated with dust. With the dust of all the mother’s possessions cupped in her hands, Induk lured the ghost mother into her palms, where she pressed and pushed until the fat spirit became as small as a speck of dust. Then, bringing her fingers to my mouth, Induk told me to suck, to taste, to make this—the apartment, the city, the state, and America—home my own.

  When I was pregnant with my daughter, I made tea with the black dirt from the garden outside our room at the Mission House for Boys. I drank the earth, nourishing her within the womb, so that she would never feel homeless, lost. After her birth, I rubbed that same earth across my nipples and touched it to my daughter’s lips, so that, with her first suck, with her first taste of the dirt and the salt and the milk that is me, she would know that I am, and will always be, her home.

  11

  AKIKO

  I dreamed.

  The sentries at the Yalu River checkpoint aimed their rifles at me instead of letting me hurry across.

  Shall we make her eat a few beans? one of them asked, laughing.

  I looked up at them just as the other mouthed, Pat-ta-ta-ta-tat. As his lips moved, I dreamed I could see the words leaping like the feet of a fire dragon from his gun.

  When I turned to run, I felt the bullet words enter my back, burning through skin and blood, muscle and bone, so hot that I could feel myself evaporating. My legs still pumped but became heavier, denser, as the water in my body boiled into the air. Finally there was nothing left of me except for salt and the fire inside of me.

  I heard more laughter. And felt pricks of brilliant heat from the dragon’s teeth before a blessed coolness blew my body apart. When the grains settled, all that was left was the dragon, blue-white with its heat, chasing its tail around and around, faster and faster until it spun like the sun.

  Because of that tae-mong, the first birth dream, I knew my baby was a boy. I was so sure of this, I told my husband. See, fire and dragon and sun, I said, all yang. And salt, really good luck because it’s so valuable. I am having a boy.

  He told me he had not heard such superstitious nonsense since leaving Korea. Didn’t he teach me to leave all that behind, to give it up for the Lord? Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

  But still, underneath the words of disapproval, I read the pleasure and the pride in his eyes.

  Consequently we were both surprised when we saw the baby’s genitals. I remember how hazy everything looked to me, how the faces of the doctor and the nurses blurred until they turned into those of Induk, my mother, my sisters. When they held my baby up to me, I remember first thinking: Oh no, something is wrong with his jajie—where is it? And then I realized I had a daughter and knew a fierce joy, more awesome because of its unexpectedness.

  This baby was for me, mine, not my husband’s son but my daughter.

  I still feel that joy as if it were brand-new, so hot that it hurts, burning blue-white and brilliant, sharp as a dragon’s teeth.

  Like my mother, my daughter was born in the month of the dog. Fierce, loyal, bold, and fearless. If we were in Korea, and if I had married a Korean, I am sure my husband’s father would have insisted on a name to counteract these traits, to inject meekness into the dominant natures of those animal signs.

  I asked my husband to pick an American name that is very strong, one that will protect her throughout her life.

  It does not matter that I cannot pronounce Roh-beccu.

  I will call her Bek-hap, the lily, purest white. Blooming in the boundary between Korea and America, between life and death, this child, with the tendril of her body, keeps me from crossing over and roots me to this earth.

  Watching my daughter sleep, arms and legs flung wide, her body like a star, I find myself fighting both overwhelming joy and overwhelming grief. I lightly touch each fold in her fat baby arms, stroke her wrists and fingers. I lift her hands to my face, inhaling her sweet, sweaty baby smell, and I know in that moment how much my own mother must have loved me—more than anything in this world or in heaven, including God.

  I wonder if my own mother ever dreamed dreams so filled with yang that they could only mean sons, and I wonder whether she was happy or disappointed when yet another daughter emerged from between her legs. Did she feel betrayed by her night visions, by the signs, by Samshin Halmoni, the grandmother spirit who takes care of babies and mothers? I know my mother and father would have made the appropriate offerings in hopes of a male infant.

  Maybe by the fourth daughter, she could not feel the love that I now feel, all maternal instincts diluted with the disappointing birth of each successive child, all girls. Maybe by the time I was born, my parents had no need to pretend unhappiness to placate jealous spirits. There would have been no need to think of protective, misleading nicknames like Dog’s Dung or Straw Bag or Rockhead, because the truth, announced by the kumjul of pine branches and charcoal hung across our gate, would have been demeaning enough: one more girl for the mountain Kims.

  I was born on the fourteenth day of the first month, the day before the first full moon of the year, and so it was doubly unfortunate that I was born a girl. Women in Korea take special care not to go visiting the day before the first full moon of the year, since bad luck will enter with them and stay for the year; because of me, a wrong-sexed baby arriving on an inauspicious day, bad luck moved in and became part of the family.

  Because of me, my oldest sister always reminded me, our family could not participate in what was to be the last full-moon celebration in our village; before the year was out, the Japanese soldiers arrived to enforce the Emperor’s edict banning Korean holidays.

  We all had to sit around and look at you, all crinkly red and ugly, she used to say, while outside we could hear nuts and fire-crackers exploding in the bonfire, scaring away demons, wild animals, and mosquitoes into the next year.

  Oldest sister was especially bitter, because that was the
first year she had helped to weave the rope to be used in the male-female tug-of-war contest. She had even planned to position herself near the front—if not at the very front—of the rope so all the boys could see her; in this way she’d planned to lure a future husband and pull him to her side. She mentioned this every year until the year our parents died and she betrayed me, paying me back.

  Because I was the youngest and she was the oldest, my sister loved to torment me. The other two, second and third sisters, teased me too, but their taunts held no malice. They were just like little birds chirping out whatever words oldest sister fed them. They had each other and were happy, not having to worry about the responsibilities of oldest sister while at the same time having someone to order to refill the rice or water bowls.

  Oldest sister, though, snapped at me out of anger. She was old enough to realize I should have been a boy. She was old enough to have traveled with my mother to Samshin Halmoni’s shrine and old enough to pray. She was old enough to understand what my parents wished for and what the villagers would have celebrated.

  If you were a boy, she used to tell me, we would have had a hundred-day party for you. We would have dressed you in a crown and a rainbow-sleeved hanbok as if it were New Year’s or Harvest Day. We would have made a feast, with special red-and-black bean cake sprinkled with honey to show how much we loved you, if you were a boy.

  I want my own child to know that I gave her a hundred-day celebration, that I love her and thank the spirits for her health, even though she is not a boy and not in Korea. Or perhaps I celebrate because she is a girl, an American girl.

  I sew her hanbok and crown out of the best satin on sale at Sears. I make special red bean cake topped with white sugar and place it at the four compass points in the house, to bar disaster and welcome happiness. And I prepare enough rice cake for one hundred people to ensure her a long life, even though I do not know one hundred people to invite to the party.

  My husband and the minister wives who come to the party do not care for the rice cake. My husband says, Tastes like Styrofoam. What blasphemous waste. The neighbor ladies say, No, no, it’s not so bad, but they wrap their pieces in a napkin and leave it on the table. Then they take pictures of my Beccah-chan, a tiny face lost in voluminous clouds of color, and leave.

  When my husband takes the newspaper into the bathroom, I carry the baby and the platters of rice cake to the porch. I settle my daughter into her basket, then crumble each cake, precious in its own way as salt, until she is surrounded by miniature mountains of crumbs.

  I place a bit of rice in my baby’s mouth and throw a handful high over the railing. When birds fly in for the feast, my daughter flaps her arms and crows as the bravest swoop over her basket and into the piles of rice cake surrounding her. Faster and faster, I scatter crumbs by the fistful, calling more and still more birds to come and join us, until there must be well over one hundred pecking in a frenzy at the ground and at their tails, flapping along the porch railing, hopping next to the basket where my baby girl laughs and I sing over and over, into the ball of flurry and heat made by their beating wings: Thank you, thank you for coming, thank you for coming to my party.

  12

  BECCAH

  Since my mother died, I dream the dream from my childhood.

  I am swimming in water so blue that even when you’re dreaming you think nothing this pure exists in real life, a blue so translucent you can almost breathe it. I hunt black-and-white fish as they dart through red coral reef, when suddenly I am wrenched from behind. I try to kick away but cannot move my feet. Something pulls me under. I begin to feel dizzy with the effort of not breathing, and when I know I will drown, I wake up, gasping for air.

  I found my mother after she had been dead a night and a day and another night. I usually stopped by to check on her before and after work and during the day on the weekends, to see if she was lucid, eating, sleeping, combing her hair. Since moving into my own apartment last year, I missed only one day, and on that one day she chose to die. I think she did it on purpose, to punish me. Or, maybe, to release me.

  I brought doughnuts that morning, my usual peace offering of maple bars, planning on having breakfast with her on the lanai. The lanai was the main reason my mother bought the house when we first saw it, almost two decades ago. When Auntie Reno badgered the realtor for a list of homes in our price range, this house was last on her list and so the first one we visited; Auntie Reno believed in saving the best for last.

  The ten-year-old, white-with-blue-trim two-bedroom home in Manoa was relatively inexpensive but did not convey the image of spirituality Reno felt a prominent fortune-teller’s home should. “You need a cottage in Kahala or, better yet, Nu‘uanu—you know how many ghosts stay in Nu’uanu?” Auntie Reno sniffed. “Manoa not bad, but dis house, jeesh!” She snorted loud enough for the realtor to wince. “Jus’ like one Leave It to Beaver house wit one open port garage, gimme a break.”

  “I like it, Auntie Reno.” I hung on to my mother’s arm and sniffed the air. I remember that the air was so fresh and alive it stung my nose, like I was smelling the rain through the sun. I think I thought that we could run away from Saja with his stench of Red Disaster, that the Death Messenger would never find us in this clean-smelling house that sang of green things. Now I think that it was just the first house I smelled that didn’t stink of roaches. “It smells like my dream home,” I said.

  Auntie Reno ignored me, as she did—and still does—when what I say isn’t useful to her. “Let me pick dah right house, okay? Image stay nine-tenths dah battle,” she told my mother. “And dat’s my job. You jus’ predict dah future, and we goin’ make it.”

  My mother drifted behind our realtor, a large, long-necked ostrich of a woman. As the realtor strutted through the kitchen and bedrooms of the house, swiveling her head toward the home’s highlights—the “refurbished cabinetry” and “economic use of space” and “quaint powder rooms,” all of which had Reno harumphing and rolling her eyes—my mother nodded her head and smiled politely. But when my mother peeked behind the pea-green curtains that hid the sliding glass doors of the master bedroom, she stopped smiling and nodding.

  The saleslady fidgeted. “Well, sure, the back’s not in the best shape now,” she said. My mother unlatched the door and pushed until the doors screeched apart. As my mother stepped onto the faded wood deck, just avoiding a jutting nail, the saleslady hopped forward to lead her away from the termite-hollowed railing. “But, ah, notice the potential. It, uh, it leads right into the garden.” We all looked into the backyard, where yellow-flowered vines of wedelia swelled in waves to drown out a border of fly-specked hibiscus bushes, where the heads of overgrown red ti shook on thin stalks above the roof. Banana trees dropped their rotting fruit, which lay one on top of the other, dying in layers. Pom-poms of white-and-blue ‘uki ’uki lilies swayed on wiry necks above nut grass that grew as high as my knees. The realtor stammered, then, trying to distract us once more, pointed toward the sky. “Look up!” she almost shouted. “The mountains! Now isn’t that a beautiful view of the Ko‘olaus!”

  Auntie Reno pressed her lips together. “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “I tink we seen enough.” She turned to go, but my mother continued to stand there, her eyes intense and far away, as if she were listening to something carried on the air.

  “Can you hear it, Beccah?” my mother whispered as she moved down the steps and into the yard. She forded through the grass, the wedelia, and the banana patch, all the way up to the rusty chicken-wire fence that marked the boundary.

  “Mommy?” I ran after her, brushing from my face and hair the mist of fruit flies that sucked on the rotting sweet bananas. “Do you hear Saja? Is he coming to get us?”

  “Hush,” my mother told me. She bowed her head, resting her forehead against the fence. Loops of wire pressed octagons into her face, just below the hairline, imprinting a headdress of chains.

  Auntie Reno, trampling a banana sapling as she clambered up to the fence next to us
, asked, her face sweaty and excited, “Is the girl right—you see spirits here?”

  “Shh,” my mother told Reno without looking up. “Listen.”

  Auntie Reno and I scowled at each other, but we quieted, trying to hear what my mother heard, trying to catch the wails of the restless dead carried by the wind.

  “There! Do you hear that?” my mother whispered. “The song of the river?”

  Although I was wrong in thinking that Saja the Soldier of Death would not find us in that clean-smelling house, I am glad that my mother did not die in our damp and dark apartment in The Shacks before she could know what it was like to live in a house with shiny wood floors and walls instead of mildewed carpet and peeling plastic wall paneling. Before she could forget about washing clothes by hand in a rust-stained bathtub and hanging laundry to dry out of windows that sucked in the sound and soot of street traffic. In the Manoa home, she marveled at the luxury of throwing laundry into an automatic washing machine and hanging it on a clothesline in the backyard to catch the smell of the sun among the banana trees and heliconia, the ‘uki ’uki and hibiscus.

  My mother loved the expanse of her yard, her wild garden; except for weeding and pruning the wedelia and nut grass whenever they threatened to choke the other plants, she let things grow how and where they would. In the late mornings, when the traffic died down, my mother would set up a lawn chair in that jungle and listen. She said that on quiet days she could hear the Manoa River and would dream of riding it to the ocean.

  When I walked into her room, shaking the bag of doughnuts, I thought she was sleeping off a trance. After a two-week trance, my mother would sleep for days; even after a brief spell, she would sleep so deeply I’d have to pinch her nose to make her wake up.