by Junghyo Ahn
“Two other women like you came here yesterday to buy a house, and I want to know the reason why so many women are suddenly interested in buying houses here,” the old man went on. “Tell me. Why do you need a house in this village all of a sudden?”
The woman with a hooked nose spoke for her companions, “We need a house because we have to live here. We don’t know how long for, but we will have to stay here at least three or four months. Maybe longer.”
The old man kept silent, waiting for a further explanation.
She continued, “You’ll have real prosperity for several months at least. We plan to settle down here for some time and enjoy business. Are you satisfied now, old man?”
Old Hwang frowned at the young woman’s insolent tone.
Glancing at his father, Young Hwang decided to intervene. “What business is there for women like you to do at a country village like ours?” Sokku asked. “What do you do for living, anyway? You don’t look like farmers to me.”
The three women stared at Sokku, wondering if this young man was making fun of them. They soon realized he was not. Then the hooked nose one blurted, “We’re whores.”
At first the old man and his son did not believe what the woman had told them. “What did you say?” asked the old man.
“Whores,” the hooked nose woman repeated. “You know. Prostitutes. Anything else you want to know about us?”
The old man, breathless from astonishment, said in a choked voice, “You mean you’re going to open pleasure houses here and do that business with the villagers?”
The three women burst into laughter.
“Whai is so funny?”
“Sorry we laughed, old man, but we couldn’t help it. You see, we don’t do our business with farmers. There’s not much money in it. Maybe you two really don’t know anything about us. People call us ‘U. N. ladies’ or ‘Yankee wives.’ We work only with the Yankees.”
“Yankees? But we don’t have Yankees around here.”
“You will have them all right. A lot of them. And soon.”
“What do you mean by that?” Sokku said.
“An American unit will arrive soon, and when they move their base here …”
“Wait a minute,” the old man said. “You mean the foreign soldiers are coming here again?”
“Sure. That’s the reason we’re in a hurry to find a place to open our shop.”
“So you’re planning to make money by being prostitutes for the foreign soldiers in this village,” the old man mumbled as if to himself.
“Yes, sir. This godforsaken village will prosper and become a boom town. Every miserable farmer in this area will get rich if he makes the right moves quickly enough. In wartime, you have to work for soldiers in every business. And you should be grateful to God in Heaven that a whole unit of them is going to be stationed here.”
Old Hwang was stupefied by this unexpected news. Why should he, or anybody in the county, be grateful to God for the coming of foreign soldiers? That a whole bunch of the bengkos was coming to stay for months was bad news enough, but this time wicked women would swarm to his village, too. They would invade this community and infest it like dung flies with houses of shame right under his nose.
“What a disgrace,” the old man muttered. He resumed his usual stern manner and ordered his son, “Sokku, take these women to the ferry and send them back to wherever they’ve come from.”
The old man spat angrily and strutted into his house.
The three women did not leave the village without putting up verbal and even physical resistance. Sokku had to drag them to the ferry by force. The shameless women kept kicking and scratching and screaming and swearing all the way to the river.
“What the hell do you think you are? Do you own this village or something? No son of a bitch ever drove us out of any town. You bastards won’t be able to keep us out of this damned place for long either.”
Even while they were being carried away to Cucumber Island by the boat, they kept shrieking and cursing at the top of their voices. “Fuck you, old man! You will pay for this. We’ll come back and fuck everybody in front of your gate! I’ll fuck your son and piss in your face!”
When they were gone, the old man ordered the snake hunter never to let the women set their feet in his hut because they were immoral, sinful creatures who were determined to corrupt and destroy the community. The snake hunter said, with a displeased grunt, that he understood what he was supposed to do quite well. Then the old man instructed Pae, the official village chief, to pass the word to every farmer of Kumsan, and to all the other villages in West County, not to sell any house to the undesirable outsiders. He also dispatched the miller to the town to confirm the rumor that the Americans were coming.
What the Yankee wives had said proved to be true. The Yankee wives were on the move constantly, traveling up and down the country with the bengkos; whenever the soldiers moved to a new place, they would pack up and migrate with their “steady customers” or “temporary husbands.” They were scouting for their new business sites near the base the Americans were about to build on Cucumber Island.
That afternoon and the next morning, more “U.N. ladies” came across the river looking for a house to let, but not a single farmer would discuss the matter with them. The villagers respected Old Hwang’s instructions. Besides, nobody wanted the indecent women, who associated with the rapist soldiers, to live next door. In the meantime the villagers, especially the women, discussed the imminent arrival of the Yankees and their prostitutes with apprehension and fear. The adults were embarrassed by their children’s question, “What’s a whore, dad?”
When they realized that West County was completely closed, the new Yankee wives had to find places elsewhere. But Old Hwang, as well as the other villagers, had the snake hunter’s shack to worry about.
The boys enjoyed the war more and more as the days passed. Before the war, they were happy enough to play all day with a water beetle or a mole cricket. When war broke out they realized that the world was full of wonders they had not even dreamed of. They looked forward to the arrival of the Yankees. When they actually appeared, the boys were so delighted that they went across the river every day to watch the bengkos build their camp.
Prior to the arrival of the soldiers themselves, huge trucks brought steel beams and plates and a lot of soldier-workers began to construct a bridge between the town and Cucumber Island. When the bridge was completed, trucks rolled onto the islet early in the morning and unloaded hundreds of bengkos, both black and white, who pitched their A-tents and started to dig ditches and erect frame structures. Bulky plywood crates piled up on the sand and among the thriving weeds. The soldiers also installed a fence of barbed wire around the highest area of the islet. Weird, heavy machinery with caterpillar wheels and huge plough-like blades came next to remove the dense grass and level the ground outside the fence. Then they started making roads and building Quonset structures at the southern end of the camp.
On the first day of the bengkos’ arrival, the village women hid again in their shelters at night, but no Yankees came across the river. The next night and the third night passed. When the new Yankees had done no harm to the county for a week, some farmers came to Old Hwang to seek advice as to whether the women should continue to hide all night so long as the foreign soldiers were stationed in the islet. The old man told the village chiefs of the county to let their wives and daughters sleep at home, for it was getting very cold after dark these days. Hwang also instructed them to organize lookout patrols of the young men of the county, who would guard the river every night in shifts, spot any bengko coming across the river and alert the farmers.
The bengko soldiers camping on the islet behaved very differently from the savage army that had gone north. None of the newcomers ever showed up at Kumsan, not even in the daytime. They were busy constructing a small town within the barbed-wire fence.
One day the four Kumsan boys went to Cucumber Island as usual to yell �
�hey, bengko, give me chop chop, give me chop chop,” to the soldiers guarding the fence and get some C-ration cans or chocolate bars. It was a bad day for the boys, because they met no bengkos at all until they reached the main gate near the Soyang ferry. The two guards at the gate had nothing to give them either.
Then Chandol saw a plank sign nailed atop a long pole by the guardhouse. The sign carried the bengko letters “OMAHA,” and underneath it, the equivalent Korean letters in clumsy handwriting.
“0 Ma Ha?” Chandol said. “What is 0 Ma Ha? Sounds like somebody’s name. Anybody know who 0 Maha is?”
Nobody did.
“Hey, Toad, how about you? Do you know who 0 Maha is?”
Kijun said he had no idea.
“Hasn’t your uncle told you about it?” Chandol asked.
Kijun managed to save his face later because it was his uncle, after all, who found out that Omaha was the name of a town in America.
“Omaha” was not the only sign that was put up in the islet. Somebody erected a sign in the shape of a milepost that, like the Omaha sign, carried both in English and Korean the words “Texas Town,” at the entrance to another village a few hundred yards distant from Camp Omaha’s main gate. This second village was not constructed by the bengko soldiers, but by dozens of Korean carpenters and workers brought in from the town. With broken planks from ammunition boxes, tin plates from beer cans and sturdy cardboard from C-ration cartons, a team of two or three carpenters worked a miracle, creating one shanty a day. Built wall-to-wall, the board shacks on the barren slope looked like one big beehive.
As the shanties were completed one after another the Yankee wives, carrying big bulging suitcases, came to Texas Town. Soon the shanty town was fully occupied by the prostitutes.
Sister Serpent and Sundok returned to Kumsan around the time when the soldiers and the Yankee wives started building Camp Omaha and Texas Town.
Old Hwang summoned the snake hunter once more. “Let me have the money you received from those women,” the old man said. “I’ll return the money and tell them myself to stay away from this county.” The snake hunter went back to fetch the money, grumbling, and did not come out of his den again all afternoon. The boatman came to the Paulownia House late that night to report that the snake hunter had left the village in secret.
“He said he was going to town for the night, but I doubt he will ever return, Master Hwang,” the boatman said. “He was carrying two bundles, and one bundle rattled with bowls and kitchen stuff when he put it down on the boat, and the other bundle contained clothes and bedding. He sure looked like he was leaving here for good. He even carried a bag with wriggling snakes in it.”
The old man told Sokku to go and check the riverside shack. The boatman was right. The snake hunter had packed everything worth taking with him and cleared out.
When Yonghi and Sundok showed up at the village again, Old Hwang had to go to see the two women himself, accompanied by his son, to tell them his wishes. The women were sorting and hanging their colorful clothes on the wall of the musty room, while an ancient carpenter, who was as emaciated and wizened as a dried fish, surveyed the shack to decide what repairs were needed.
When Old and Young Hwang were both present for a discussion or negotiation with another party, it usually was the son who did most of the initial talking so that his father need not waste his breath on trivial details before making his major statements. Naturally, Sokku tried first to politely persuade the women to show some consideration for the community, to find another place to open their business. Yonghi ridiculed his request that they leave. Then Old Hwang offered to reimburse them for whatever money they had paid the snake hunter, but the women did not seem to understand that they should be ashamed of themselves.
“What the hell does this old cock think he is anyway?” said Sister Serpent, not a bit intimidated. “An MP or something? What right do you have to tell us to stay away from this place? I bought this house with my own money, and nobody is going to drive me out of my own house. You think you can treat me like dirt because I’m a whore, but, you fucking bastard, you’ll see that you have it all wrong.”
Old Hwang, his face flushed with shame and rage, strode back home, for he realized logic would not work with these degenerate animals. Half an hour later, the boatman was summoned to the Paulownia House.
“If those two women who bought the snake hunter’s hut or any other women at Texas Town ever ask you to row the boat for them to cross the river, you may not do it. You must never let yourself be tempted by any offer they might make. If the filthy women or the foreign soldiers reach this side of the river on your boat, that will be the last day you’ll see this village. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Master Hwang.”
Yom, the boatman, knew well enough serious consequences might arise if the bengkos came to Kumsan again, but there was another reason—possibly the most important reason imaginable for him—that he had to follow the old man’s instructions. This was harvest season, and the villagers would soon collect and give him his yearly payment in crops. He could not afford to offend Rich Hwang or the villagers at this time of year.
When the two women showed up at the ferry the next morning to go to Texas Town to fetch a carpenter to fix up their shack, the boatman flatly refused to serve them.
“If I let you set as much as one of your toes on my boat, Rich Hwang will throw me out of the county,” Yom said.
Sister Serpent tried to coax him into rowing the boat for them, but no smiles, no offers of money, nothing worked. Yom kept repeating “no way, no way,” without even looking at the women. While the two women were arguing with the boatman, Pae, the village chief, came down to the ferry to go and look at Cucumber Island on Old Hwang’s instructions, to see if it was safe for the village women to pass through on their way to town. As Pae scrambled onto the boat and Yom raised the pole to push the boat off, Sister Serpent grabbed the mooring rope.
“Look here, boatman,” she said. “You have to cross the river anyway because you have a passenger. Why don’t you just let us go along?”
The village chief decided to intervene. “Listen, women,” he said. “This boat is a public property of the West County inhabitants, and we decide who can use this boat and who cannot. It has been decided that nobody from Texas Town will be allowed to use this boat. So, if you can’t swim, you can fly across the river.”
“Did you hear that?” Yonghi said in anger. “Did you hear what that son of a bitch said?” An outburst of colorful oaths followed.
Appalled by the foul language gushing out of the painted lips of the young women, Pae told the boatman to get going. “Yes, chief,” said the boatman, snatching the rope from Yonghi’s hand.
“Chief?” Sundok said. “How about that, Sister Serpent? That cripple must be the village chief around here. No wonder these people behave so strangely. Let me ask you something, chief. What’s wrong with you folks here? I don’t see anything but asses around here. Does your tribe eat hay? And who the hell is old man Hwang? Why does that old cock put his nose in everybody’s business? Tell me, chief, how many times a day do you have to lick his shoes?”
But all the ranting in the world did not help them. Left alone at the ferry, tired from screaming and not knowing what to do next, the two women agreed that they were hungry. And then they recalled that there was a woman in the village who might be able to help them out of their ridiculous plight. They hurried to the Chestnut House.
Yonghi barged into the house, hailing Mansik’s mother noisily, faking delight and surprise as if she had come across one of her best friends in a strange town. “How have you been, Mansik’s mother?” She climbed up to the stoop without waiting for Ollye’s invitation. “I told you I’d come to see you soon, didn’t I? Friends in need are …” Then she breathlessly swore at Old Hwang and the cripple of a village chief and the boatman. “How on earth could they do this to us?” she asked in a conspiratorial tone, suggesting that they were sharing persecutio
n by a common enemy. “This village could make a lot of money if you had a few bars for the American soldiers, you know, but these hicks are simply too stupid to see this God-given opportunity to get out of their miserable life of digging the dirt like worms until their last day. We’re bringing luck and business to this place, but these ungrateful bastards treat us like filthy rags.”
Then Yonghi told Ollye what had happened at the ferry. She wanted to know if there was some other way they could get across the river. Ollye said there was a bridge far upstream, but it might take one full day to get to the islet by that route.
Yonghi said, “By the way, what is your name?”
“Ollye.”
“Ollye? Sounds too rustic. Anyway, you must get a lot of grief from these characters all around you. Oh, I almost forgot to ask you. I wonder if you have some rice to sell us. We ran out of the bread and ham we brought with us yesterday, and we have nothing to eat until we get back to Texas Town. I doubt if anybody else in this village will sell us anything because they’re afraid of being punished by old man Hwang. You are not afraid of that old man, are you?”
Ollye was not afraid of Old Hwang, not any more. For Ollye, Old Hwang was no longer a person to fear or avoid. Like everybody else in the village, the old man had ceased to exist for her. But she really had little rice to share with them.
Ollye gave the Yankee wives one gourd dipper of rice as well as a handful of sesame leaves, dried mushrooms and some hot pepper paste.
Yonghi paced before the shack, glancing now and then at the boat crossing the river, back and forth, with only one or two passengers aboard. Sundok was taking a nap in the dark humid room that still seemed to smell of snakes.
Yonghi was aware that the old man’s tactic was working. She wondered what Old Hwang had in store for her next, and whether she should fight back or give up and go over to the islet to build her own shanty in Texas Town. Fighting would consume her time and energy, and she was not sure if this seedy shack was worth that trouble. But she would not give up the shack unless she was sure to get all her money back. She cursed her own stupidity. Why had she not thought first of building a tent house or a shanty on the islet, like everybody else? She could have started there, small, and then expanded her business later on. She used to think she was one of the best at her trade, but apparently she still had a lot to learn. These days there were many smart girls who knew how to get ahead. When the war broke out few women had heard of prostitution, not to mention whoring for foreign soldiers, but competition was now getting tougher every day.