Comfort Woman

by Nora Okja Keller

  They came to us in fear as well as lust, lining up against our stalls to spend their scrip and themselves on our bodies. Some would spread our legs, pinch our vaginas, checking for discoloration, open sores, pus, disease—which meant, for them, not death but demotion in rank. Though each shipment of women included boxes of condoms, and though the doctors tried to control outbreaks of syphilis through injections of 606, venereal disease spread through the camp, manifesting itself in the labia and vaginas of the women. When the fist-sized eruptions swelled the women shut and spread to other body parts, climbing toward lips and eyes, the officers took the women out of the camp. Transferred, they called it, but I believe the officers abandoned them in the woods, disposable commodities.

  Near the end of the war, they became less politic. Before I left the camp, I saw one more delivery of goods. After the trucks unloaded a half-dozen girls—looking dazed and frightened and younger than myself as they were packed into the service quarters—the commanding officer strode, his light automatic rifle swinging like a walking stick, toward the sick house.

  Iriwa, iriwa, he shouted, luring those who could still walk outside with his Korean. Come!

  One of the women, named Haruko, her wide, hopeful face distorted by blisters, and another woman—not infected but grossly pregnant—staggered against the doorframe. Before they could voice a question, he shot them, then he opened fire, showering the hut with a spray of random bullets.

  Splinters of wood and blood exploded in rapid, concise bursts, the numbing reverberations of gunfire intermingling with the brief, shrill screams of the dying. When the screaming subsided into low, tentative moans, the commander gave orders to torch the remains of the hospital. And while it burned, smoke and ash soaking the camps with the smell of roasting meat, he whistled the “Kimigayo,” his national anthem.

  But despite their fears of disease, the men still visited us, propelled by the greater fear of death. The day and night before a battalion was scheduled to leave, the women of the camp did not sleep. Again and again, the same men took their turns with us, until they could no longer create an erection. Touch! they would yell at us, Suck! and when nothing happened, some would beat us about our heads and pojis. Others, though, would merely want to spend their half-hour allotments burrowed into our breasts, being cradled like a child. And when their time was up, these were the ones to pluck curling wires of my pubic hair, which they would carry to the front with them, talismans against danger and against fear.

  If they had asked, I would have pulled them myself, woven them into an amulet. Not to keep them safe from but to attract harm, each one of my hairs a wish for death and a call for justice.

  After the night Induk came to me, opening my body to her song, I saw the soldiers’ fear of death and disease in my husband’s eyes. His fear that instead of saving me, he had damned himself. That he could not pass the test his God devised for him. And I knew then that he would not use me again like that.

  I knew then that he could not.

  14

  AKIKO

  My baby’s head is round—round as a rare and perfect river rock polished by the force of water.

  I love her roundheaded perfection, my daughter’s head shape so like mine, and like my mother’s when she was a child.

  While I was growing up, my mother would study her daughters for signs of herself, then make pronouncements binding us to her and to our fates. To oldest sister, Soon Ja, she would say: Our hair is like seaweed, so black and slick it can never hold a comb; watch that you don’t fly away. To Soon Hi, she’d say: You’ve got my dimples. Life has to pinch your cheeks hard to make you happy.

  My mother would tell third sister to hold out her hands, fingers pressed tightly together. See, she would sigh, see how the light shines through the cracks? Like me, you’ll have trouble holding on to what you most want.

  When she would look at me as if she was seeing both me and a memory, I knew what would come out of her mouth: Rockhead. Just like me, she’d say, shaking her head. You’ll have a hard life, always banging against the current. Worse than a boy, more stubborn than a stone.

  But she would say these things with pride, so I would know that she loved me.

  And every time she called me Rockhead, I’d ask her, Why? How come? How do you know? What does it mean? pestering her for a story, hoping to learn more about my mother and, in turn, about the secrets of myself.

  At night, when my mother unwound her hair, combing through the heavy silk with her fingers, I’d press against her, close as she would let me, and wait. If I was lucky, she would notice me. Baby Girl, she might say, pick out my white hairs. Or: Youngest Daughter, massage my temples.

  I’d sit cross-legged on the floor and wait for my mother to lie down and slip her head into my lap. I’d stroke her forehead, the sides of her face, the top of her head where the spirit escapes at night. When she’d begin to tell her story, I’d part her hair into sections, using my nails to find and pluck the white strands. As she talked, I’d stick the oily roots onto a sheet of one of the underground newspapers—Daedong Kongbo or Haecho Shinmun—that found their way even into our village. And after the story, after my mother fell asleep, I’d crumple the paper into a ball and burn it in the underground flues that warmed our floorboards. As I drifted off to sleep, breathing in the scent of hair and smoke, I’d imagine that words wrapped in my mother’s hair drifted into our dreams and spiraled up to heaven.

  My mother was told that the most famous fortune-teller in Seoul, paid to read her head at birth, said that she was the most roundheaded baby she had ever seen. In a roundheaded family that valued head shape along with money and auspicious birth charts, this was the highest praise.

  The fortune-teller predicted that because of her roundness, because of the class she was born into, and because of the sign she was born under, my mother would be very spoiled and very happy. Everything would roll her way.

  This was true for perhaps the first seven years of her life.

  My favorite tales when I was growing up were my mother’s own baby-time stories. When we played make-pretend, my sisters and I pretended to be our mother, whose early days were filled with parties in Seoul and candy and fancy Western dresses. I pictured most of the things she told us about by finding something in my own life to compare it to and thinking: Same thing, only one thousand times better. When she told us about a doll from France with blue eyes painted in a porcelain face, I took my own pine-and-rag doll, put a cup over her head, and imagined a toy a thousand times better.

  The one thing my mother talked about that neither my sisters nor I could imagine or comprehend was ice cream. We just had no reference for it in our own lives, and when we’d push our mother for a definition, her descriptions left us even more dubious and mystified.

  It’s like sucking on an ice-cold, perfectly ripe peach, my mother once tried to explain.

  Then why not just eat a peach? we asked.

  Because it’s not the same, my mother said. That’s just what it feels like in your mouth. It feels like a ripe peach and like the snow, and like how a cloud full of rain must feel if you could bite into it.

  I remember biting into my own honey-and-nut candy that my mother made for us during the harvest and watching her talk. She would shut her eyes, but I could see them move back and forth, back and forth, under their lids. She seemed very magical, like a princess from heaven, when she talked about ice cream.

  When I came to America, I was surprised to see how common and how cheap ice cream was. Once I found out what it was, I bought one carton of each flavor I could find—cherry vanilla, strawberry, mint, pistachio, Neapolitan, chocolate chip, butter brickle. We’d have ice cream every night after dinner. At first my husband encouraged me, glad that I was becoming American. But then he found out that I was also eating ice cream for lunch and for breakfast. And that I cried after eating a bowl of a particularly good flavor, because it reminded me that when my mother was a roundheaded child princess, she took a bite out of
heaven.

  After he found out about these things, my husband put me on a diet. He taught me about “Mulligan Stew,” the four basic food groups, telling me, Your body is a temple.

  I try to maintain my baby’s round head. I make sure her hats and headbands aren’t too tight. When I shampoo her hair, I am careful that I don’t use too much pressure and leave unintentional dents. I make sure she sleeps on her stomach, so her skull won’t flatten out in the back, and I maintain a constant vigilance, checking on her throughout the night so that I can catch her when she flips over. This is hard work, and I do it in secret because I do not want to hear my husband talk about God and genetics. I know better, because of my mother, than to think that head shape is fixed for life.

  In the years before her head changed, my mother’s father was a middle school official. He was the one who gave my mother her doll from France, her fancy dresses, her taste for ice cream. He was also the one who taught her her lessons, drilling her in math and history. Because of him, my mother wanted to be the best girl student in the primary school.

  I studied, studied, studied, my mother would say, so I could be the best. But every time we took the tests, I always placed second. Number one was always my best friend, whom I hated at that time of year.

  Every year, she said, I wished to be number one. One year, though, I figured out that my wishing it wasn’t enough to make it happen, because my best friend was also wishing to be number one. Her wish was blocking my wish. So that year, when it came time to write our wishes on the paper we would burn and send to heaven, I told my best friend she should wish to be the prettiest girl, since she was already the smartest. When she said okay and I saw her write this down, I snuck away and wrote on my own paper: I wish to be number one in the school.

  My mother would always become sad at this point in the story, and when my sisters and I asked if she got her wish, she’d always say, Yes, and I’m sorry.

  The year my mother’s wish came true was the year Japan invaded Korea. The year her father and his colleagues were taken away. The year that her best friend had to drop out of school because her family could not afford to pay the fee demanded by the Japanese Provisional Government, could not spare the money for a girl.

  My mother’s generation was the first in Korea to learn a new alphabet, and new words for everyday things. She had to learn to answer to a new name, to think of herself and her world in a new way. To hide her true self. I think these lessons, these deviations from the life she was supposed to lead, from the person she should have been, are what changed the shape of her head.

  Those are the same lessons my mother taught me, the morals of her stories, and because I learned them early, I was able to survive what eventually killed my mother. Hiding my true self, the original nature of my head, enabled me to survive in the recreation camp and in a new country.

  At the camps, both the women and the doctors always talked about the monsters born from the Japanese soldiers’ mixing their blood with ours. When I became pregnant, I could not help worrying about what my baby would look like, wondering if she would be a monster or a human. Korean or Other. Me or not me.

  Now, as I look at my Bek-hap, my White Lily, I do not know how I could have doubted her perfection. Her hair, reddish brown at birth, is now growing in black. Her eyes, though brown, are neither my husband’s shape nor mine, are instead what the face readers would classify as dragon eye, the best in size and curve. And her head is round. I cup her tiny head in my palms and whisper, I am so proud of you. You are a rockhead like your mother and your mother’s mother. Only a thousand times better.

  15

  BECCAH

  I waited under the angels. In fat splendor, they lounged along the eaves of Reno’s house in Kahala, peered over copper gutters turning green from rain and humidity, peeked out from behind marble columns imported from Italy. Toward the center of the courtyard, one of the heavenly imps—who Reno claims was modeled after her youngest grandson—frolicked in a fountain, spitting water at the koi that trembled at his feet.

  I never pictured angels as carefree children, naked in their happiness. While my mother and I still lived in The Shacks, I had always imagined the angels in heaven as stern-faced men draped in beards and clothed in the voice of my father. In the dimness preceding sleep, they often visited me, looming over my bed to threaten me with the end of the world.

  “Read this,” an angel would say, shoving a stone tablet into my face.

  I would try to open my eyes wide, try to focus on the tablet that melted even as I tried to read it. “Aaagh,” I croaked, wanting to say something, anything, to delay heavenly retribution. But I was always too late, the tablet turning to water and the words hopping off the page like little black frogs before I could decipher even the first letter.

  “Daddy, Daddy,” I would call out as my bed was ferried down the river toward hell. “Save me.” But the angel would only laugh, opening his mouth as wide as Saja’s before a meal.

  By my mother’s stories, too, I knew angels sometimes came into the world as changelings: testing the worthiness of men’s souls, they visited the world dressed in the skins of frogs, toads, and bums.

  “Angels,” my mother explained, when I asked her whether angels were good or bad, “come to collect the dead, carrying them off to either heaven or hell. This is what your father told me: if they’re good depends on whether you are good.” She stopped talking for a moment, considering, then added, “I have seen them, Beccah-chan. They are everywhere and could be anything, watching you, often disguised as the ugliest creatures on earth. If they ever catch the opportunity, angels will jump into the skin of humans, so remember to keep watch, keep track, take care. Never clip your nails at night. Burn the hair that falls from your head—don’t leave any part of yourself laying around for an angel to absorb.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, sorry I had asked my mother anything. “You already told me.”

  My mother cocked her eyebrows at me. “Beccah,” she said, “remember the Heavenly Toad.”

  I was always reminded about the Heavenly Toad whenever I questioned my mother’s wisdom, resisted her orders. “Tell your teachers to open all the north-facing windows,” my mother would say at the start of every school year, and when I would balk, she’d add: “Remember the Heavenly Toad.” Or when I was sent to demand payment for the yearly blessing my mother performed for neighbors who never asked to be blessed: “Remember the Heavenly Toad.” Each time I heard the reminder I jumped, ready if not willing to do the dreaded task. The threat of the Heavenly Toad suc tioning his arms around my body and propelling me away from my mother was enough to spur me into action.

  The Heavenly Toad meant deception and separation. Although the dead often remained with the living, sharing the same home as their loving descendants, the Heavenly Toad sometimes tricked and kidnapped the unwary, spiriting them toward heaven or hell and away from the family.

  “I am telling you this,” my mother said, “so that you will know what to do when I am dead.”

  “Mommy,” I said, running to her, as I did when I was younger and she talked of her death, “don’t leave me, don’t die.” My arms circled her hips, my body a weight anchoring her to life.

  My mother placed her hand on my head. “When I die, I will become your momju, guarding and guiding you. I will not leave you. Unless.”

  I clung harder. “Unless what?” I breathed, almost afraid to ask.

  “Unless you forget about the Heavenly Toad,” she said. “When I die, you must prepare my body and protect my spirit before the Heavenly Toad angel grabs me and jumps to heaven.”

  When I groaned, she said, “Remember what happened to the parents in the story? Remember what happened to the daughter?”

  I had heard the story many times, but I still circled it carefully, as I would a real road. Though the story remained consistent, I could not decide what it meant.

  In the story, a poor fisherman pulled a giant toad from a dying river, and inste
ad of killing it, the man brought the toad home, where he and his wife raised it as the son they never had. The toad grew and grew, and when it was as large as a man, he decided to marry one of the daughters of the richest man in the village. “Make a deal with her father,” the toad son urged his parents.

  But they hemmed and hawed. “How can poor people like us propose marriage to such a great family?” they said and, though they felt guilty for mentioning it, added, “And you know, you are not even a human being.”

  The toad persisted until his father shuffled off to the rich man’s house to ask for a marriage arrangement. The rich man and his family refused, of course, and beat the father.

  When the father returned home broken and bloody, saying, “See? What did I tell you?” the toad son apologized and said that he would take care of everything.

  That day he caught a hawk, and that night he carried the bird to the rich man’s house. Sneaking into the courtyard, the toad climbed the tallest persimmon tree in the garden. Once settled in the branches, hidden by leaves and shadows, he tied a lighted lantern to the hawk’s foot and released it into the air.

  As the bird hovered just above the house, tethered to its master’s arm, the toad called out, “The head of this household shall listen to this message from the Heavenly King. Today you rejected a proposal of marriage, and now you shall be punished for your arrogance. I shall give you one day to reconsider your decision. As the Heavenly Messenger, I advise you to accept the toad’s proposal, for if you do not, you, your brothers, and all your sons will be killed. Your family name will be destroyed and you and your ancestors condemned to an afterlife as yongson. ”