by Junghyo Ahn
Like an incorrigible gambler who keeps promising himself that he will never touch the cards again after one more big win, she had vowed to herself over and over again that she would quit when she made enough money to start a new life. When she made enough money to begin a “new” life, however, she always found a bigger new life to go after. When she’d left Hongchon for Chunchon, she was determined to make enough to be able to go back to Haeundae Beach in the southern port city of Pusan and open a club at which to entertain Yankees. She would be the mistress of the best whorehouse in that town. That was her latest ambition. She had gone through hard times, so she certainly had the right to enjoy a better life, but her dream was being thwarted by that impossible old man.
Sometimes Yonghi herself could not believe all that had happened to her in the past half year. Last spring, her parents and relatives at her hometown of Kumchon, Kyonggi Province, had been busy arranging her marriage with the fourth son of a pear orchard owner at nearby Yongju village. The wedding was scheduled for the lunar tenth month. Yonghi went down to Chochiwon to stay for three weeks with her aunt, who had volunteered to provide the whole trousseau for the bride.
War broke out while she was visiting her aunt. She hurried north to get back to her family, but all the territories north of Seoul had already fallen into the hands of North Koreans by the time she reached Anyang, a township thirty miles south of the capital city. She fled back to Chochiwon only to find that her aunt’s family had taken refuge in Pusan. With little hope of finding her aunt, she made the long journey to Pusan, skipping meals more often than she had one, sleeping in abandoned houses or out in the open, sometimes begging on the road for food. Traveling on foot most of the way, she reached Pusan in a month, but she had no means of surviving in that city which was crowded with refugees from all over the country.
Most of the time she could not even find a decent place to sleep. One night she went to sleep among the rocks on Haeundae Beach, a favorite spot for vagrants and homeless refugees. Three men came to the beach and had a drinking party. One of these men noticed her and came over. Her brief life as a refugee had already turned Yonghi into a shameless woman; she no longer believed in the virtue of chastity in the face of the need to survive. For food and transportation, she had slept, on separate occasions, with two strange men whom she had met on her way down to Pusan. If she had not offered herself to them she might have never made it to the city. She did not mind lying with a third man, if he could provide her with a room and warm meal.
Yun Piljung was the name of this beach bum. He turned out to be a professional thief. That night, and every night after that, he took her to a cheap, bedbug infested back-alley inn. They lived together at this cheap inn near the railroad. Now and then he pilfered from the American military base and Yonghi was responsible for selling the stolen goods on the black market. They barely managed to pay for the room and food by selling C-rations and Hershey chocolates and Chuckles and Lifesavers and instant coffee and chewing gum. Yonghi thought they needed one big break. To steal one big container stuffed with radios and electric machines from an American cargo ship—that was their biggest dream. It did not take long for Yonghi to realize that this man had taken her in hoping she would support him later on. When he found her a job at Bichuku on Haeundae Beach, he stopped working. At this club for American soldiers she worked as a maid, cooking and washing and cleaning, and made barely enough money to pay for their room.
It was only after she began to learn English that she found out “Bichuku” was in fact “Beach Club” garbled by the beach area inhabitants. This club opened a whole new world of wonders to her. She used to think all adult women wore the loose chogori coat and long chima skirt or baggy monpe pants, but the girls working at Bichuku pranced around the beach in tiny pieces of cloth called “bikini” that barely covered their nipples and the hair of their groins. She was fascinated by these half naked girls, with their permanented hairdos and colorful clothes.
Every night the club held a strange show called “strip tease” in which the girls undressed on the stage before the audience of foreign soldiers. The locals, including the children, swarmed to the barbed-wire fence around the club at night to watch the stark-naked girls making strange suggestive motions. Sometimes a drunk or two would try to climb over the fence to have a better view of the show, and American MPs were called in to drag them away. Some day, Yonghi dreamed, she would dance like that, applauded by many foreigners.
Yonghi admired and envied Hwaja, the most popular U.N. lady on the beach, who was always surrounded by several Yankees whenever she showed up at the club. Better known by her American name of Helen, she slept with a different man every night. And she was paid for all that fun, too! Yonghi compared the luxurious, happy life of Helen with her own miserable existence.
One day Yonghi asked Big Sister, the club owner, who also ran a brothel at Sombat, to let her work there as a U. N. lady. She was soon allowed to move into a shack at Sombat “U.N. Town.” This shack in the Red Light alley, like many other shacks owned by Big Sister, was called a “box house” because it looked like a box topped with a slate roof. Within the four walls, the box house had two rooms and a latrine. It had nothing more—no kitchen, no hall, nothing at all. Every door opened directly into the alley. They could hear what was going on in the next room and even in the next shack, through the thin walls. Sundok occupied the other room of Yonghi’s box house. They had stayed together ever since.
Yonghi was soon busy collecting steady customers among the Yankees who strolled into the alley so that she could quickly make enough money to buy the box house for which she now had to pay weekly rent to Big Sister. She served every customer as best she could to keep him coming back to her, for she wanted to be an independent U. N. lady.
When the logistical unit moved to Wegwan up north, she had to move along with the Yankee soldiers because all her steady customers belonged to that unit. By this time, she had made enough money to buy a house and run her own small business. Sundok came to Wegwan with Yonghi but they were no longer colleagues. For some time, even before they left Haeundae Beach, Yonghi had been working as a madam for Sundok; Sundok was in debt to Yonghi because she always spent too much money, while Yonghi had so many customers that sometimes she had to send some of them into Sundok’s room.
They moved again to Hongchon following the soldiers. At Hongchon Texas Town, Yonghi was known by the English name of Dragon Lady, and she was as famous and popular among the GIs as Helen had been at Bichuku. The nickname “Dragon Lady” had been given to her by a master sergeant called Jimmy, but she did not know it had been the nickname of a horrible empress in Ching China until she was told by a Major Kim Hijun, a Korean information officer, who used to entertain bengko friends at Yonghi’s house. Major Kim told her that Jimmy must have given her that nickname as a joke, but Yonghi decided to keep it.
Now Yonghi envied nobody. She believed she would get everything she had ever wanted. When she made her first trip to Chunchon, her business sense had been sharpened by experience so she saw the potential of this riverside village. Most bengkos did not mind filthy rooms as long as they had women underneath them, but there was no doubt that the customers would prefer a decent house by the river to a sweltering pigsty. She could charge a few dollars more if she opened a really high-class sex house at Kumsan village.
The snake hunter’s hut had only one room. They had to convert the snake pen to a room for Sundok. Then they would expand the kitchen, install a plywood partition, place two tables in the new hall, and Dragon Lady Club would be ready to begin its business. Yonghi planned to build at least three more rooms with plank boards and sand bricks in the back yard to house more Yankee wives later on. She might even build a small stage in the front yard for the strip show. By the time this Yankee unit moved away, she would have made enough money to go back to Pusan. She had planned it all out and the future looked promising, as far as she could see. But she had not foreseen this idiotic blockade by Old Hwang. At
the least expected spot, the enemy had been lying in wait for her.
“It’s all gone wrong because of that old cock,” she muttered, gazing across the river at the two trucks driving into Camp Omaha, raising a cloud of dust behind them. She stood up with a sigh and went to wake Sundok. “I think it won’t work,” she said. “Maybe we should clear out of here and move to Cucumber Island, after all.”
They cooked the rice, quickly finished lunch, packed their things up, and went to the Paulownia House to see the old man.
“All right, old man, you win,” Yonghi said to Old Hwang, putting her trunk down under the massive tree. “We’ve decided to leave this village. Just pay me back my money, and we will be gone forever.”
Old Hwang, carrying a roll of new wire screening under his arm, went over to the chicken coop to mend the rusted door. Ignoring the presence of the two women, he took his time slowly removing the crooked rusted nails one by one from the door frame and then straightening them one by one and then scraping the rust from the straightened nails by rubbing them one by one in the dirt. He knew he was winning the fight now and he did not need to hurry.
“I can’t pay you back the money right now because the snake hunter ran away with that money,” the old man said. “I don’t keep that much money at home. But you don’t have to worry. I’ll pay it to you when the harvest is over.”
For over half an hour Yonghi screamed and swore at Old Hwang, but he did not mind her foul language much, for he was enjoying his revenge. Yonghi and Sundok returned to their shack, swearing that they would not leave until they got the money back and that they would bring in all the whores from Texas Town to this village to turn the whole county into the biggest brothel in the world. But both the old man and Yonghi knew she would have to leave soon.
That evening, the old man instructed the boatman to let the women use the boat if they wanted to go to the islet.
THREE
0llye, who had been brooding in the dark, crouching motionless on the stoop outside her room with her chin resting on her raised knees, finally stirred. But she did not return to the silence of her room. She could not sleep. Slowly she stepped down from the stoop and squeezed her feet into her black rubber shoes. She quietly crossed the yard and cautiously pushed open the twig gate. Although she moved noiselessly so as not to disturb her children, she was nonetheless resentful that she had to sneak out of her own house like a thief.
She quickly passed the chestnut tree and hastened down to the stream, gasping in fear and anxiety lest anybody should spot her.
She passed the log bridge under which the little boy Bong had looked up at her with a frightened expression several days ago; she reached the willow bush by the brook where she could hide herself safely in the dark shadow; she breathed slowly to calm herself.
Like a bad farmer prowling in the dark, trying to steal some sheaves from the stacks of harvested rice in a neighbor’s paddy, she scurried from one dike to the next along the stream, concealing herself among the willows and bushes. There was no definite reason for her to go to the river but she headed for it anyway, driven by a vague instinct which told her that she would find shelter—or a way out—somewhere by the river, if anywhere.
She stopped now and then to take a look around. She had seen this landscape hundreds of times both at night and in the daytime, but tonight it looked so strange that she felt as if she had just returned home from a long journey. The full moon was yellow in black space and the overlapping contours of the peaks and ridges loomed frosty grey at both sides of the river to the south. The wild chrysanthemums glinted in clumps of lilac-violet and silken-silver on moonlit West Hill. The brook chattered noisily but the rest of the village was silent. This silence and the moonlight over the rectangles of harvested rice paddies reminded her of an abandoned cemetery.
This deserted nocturnal landscape, this world of darkness, now belonged to her for nobody was there to accuse her of intruding. Ollye was free for she was alone.
Ollye stopped under the aspen where the brook joined the river and glanced over at the snake hunter’s shack. The shack was deserted; Yonghi and Sundok had left Kumsan that morning to go to Cucumber Island. The two prostitutes had decided to rent a room at the shanty town for the time being rather than waste any more time waiting for the old man to pay them back for the hut.
She had been invited to the snake hunter’s shack for supper the previous night by the two women who insisted on expressing their gratitude for the rice Ollye had shared with them. She told Mansik to look after Nanhi and went to the hut after dark, for she did not want any villager to see her visiting the whores. It did not take long for Ollye to learn that the two women had another purpose for inviting her besides expressing their gratitude; they asked her to find someone who was interested in buying the shack. They did not mind taking a small loss, for they had no other choice but to move to Texas Town, and they were not sure Old Hwang would ever pay them for the hut. At supper they served their guest with bengko cans containing boiled sweet beans, juicy mashed meat, and potatoes dipped in gravy soup. Ollye had never tasted anything so delicious in her whole life. They also offered her a cup of brown water called coffee, but she did not like it as much as cool fresh water. They urged her to take some cookies and candies and a can of honey-tasting jam to her children at home. Ollye was surprised to find that there were so many novel and palatable things to eat in the world.
While Ollye was indulging in those delicacies, Yonghi cursed the hostile Kumsan villagers. “I’ve never seen people like them, really,” she said. “Bad neighbors are worse than wasps.”
“She’s telling the God’s honest ruth,” Sundok affirmed. “You should know who your real enemies are. And who your true friends are.”
Ollye was easy prey for Sister Serpent’s words. But she was so shocked by Yonghi’s next suggestion that she could not even swallow the potato in her mouth. Sister Serpent wanted to know if she would be interested in working with them. Ollye coughed several times in quick succession and wondered if she had understood the question. Yonghi asked Ollye to come to see her at Texas Town some afternoon if she wanted to become a U.N. lady and entertain bengkos.
“People say lots of foul things about us, but whoring isn’t as bad a business as you think,” Yonghi explained. In wartime, the best way to survive was to stick around with soldiers and there were certain benefits if you did business with foreign soldiers. “I can tell you many easy ways to make a lot of money, if you’re interested.” She declared that she was doing much better than anybody she had ever known in her hometown. “You never know what will befall you tomorrow at a time like this, and you have to consider yourself blessed if you know where your next meal is coming from while other people do not even know if they will still be around tomorrow. Think smart,” she said. “Smart people enjoy the war while other people get killed in it.”
“Hear, hear,” Sundok chimed in. “You’ve got a lot to learn, Ollye.”
Yonghi said the business would not last forever and they had to work a lot while they could, because nobody knew when the war would end and the bengkos would go home.
“Think hard, Mansik’s mother, and don’t waste this opportunity,” Sister Serpent advised, squinting at Ollye to see how well her words were working. “Even grasshoppers don’t miss their own mating season, and you’d better not let this precious chance slip through your fingers. Of course I know you have Mansik and … what did you say your daughter’s name is? Nanhi. That’s right. I know you have Mansik and Nanhi to think about, but you can’t just sit here and starve to death. At Bichuku I knew a woman who was older than thirty and had a child. And she knew how to conduct her business! Age and children don’t matter a bit if you know tricks to drive the bengkos nuts in bed. And to please a man is the easiest thing in the world, believe me.”
It was much easier for Ollye to imagine herself starving to death than becoming a Yankee wife. She doubted if she was capable of becoming a proper whore even if she wanted to be one. T
o offer her naked body to every man … that was simply unthinkable to her. Moreover, Sister Serpent was talking about whoring with bengko soldiers. She could never do that, never.
“What’s wrong with the bengkos?” Yonghi retorted. “All men are the same. Especially in this business. Nobody, not even the vilest-looking soldier, has more than one cock. I understand perfectly well how you feel about the bengkos that assaulted you. But soldiers are the same everywhere whether they’re Yankees or Mongols. Combat soldiers fuck and rape any women they find on their way to their deaths. What’s the big deal if a girl or two gets raped, they say, when soldiers get killed every day? But not all of them are rapists and murderers. There’re some nice guys too. If you find a really nice guy, your whole life changes overnight to an eternal feast. I hear they used to forbid Yankees to marry Orientals, but that law does not exist any longer. If you’re lucky, you can marry a Yankee and go to America. You don’t have any idea what a paradise America is. Lots of canned food. Nice warm blankets. And they say almost every family has its own car in that big country, Migook. They say Migook folks even shit better crap than us Hangooks. Think about the opportunity of going to Yankee country! I personally know several girls from Pusan Texas Town who married GIs and made their way to America. Play it smart and you will come to thank heaven for this war for bringing the bengkos to this country.”