After a moment, I tried to pull away, but my father said, “No, Katherine, stay here for a moment.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t visit enough,” I said.
“You’re here now,” my father said. “And the last few days, I’ve been thinking about the past, about what I did wrong and what I did right.”
“You weren’t so bad,” I murmured.
My father waved his hand. “It’s not about good or bad,” he said. “But I have two great regrets in my life. One is not taking better care of you. The other is not being able to make your mother happy.”
“You did all right taking care of me,” I said in a small voice. I glanced at Linda.
She cleared her throat and stood up. “Do you think it’d be all right if I stepped outside for a moment?” she asked my father. “Just to give you and Katherine some privacy?”
“Yes, please,” my father said, and as she passed by, he took her hand in his and kissed it.
I waited a moment after she’d closed the door behind her. “Why couldn’t you make Mom happy?” I asked. “Didn’t you know how?”
“Oh, Katherine,” my father said. “I wanted to, but it was sheer arrogance to think I could. And ignorance to think that she wanted me to.”
He sounded sad, calling forth none of that false cheerfulness he’d always put on when talking about my mother. I reached out and squeezed his hand.
“I tried to make her happy too,” I said.
“You did make her happy, as much as it was possible to do so,” he said. “I know it’s long past time to tell you what I know of her life, but I lived with her for over ten years and she was always a mystery to me. I thought I could change what I knew—the trajectory of her life, I mean—but that was stupid of me. That’s where I went wrong.
“I’d been honorably discharged after being wounded in Germany and had returned home to care for you. You were not even a year old, and motherless, and I was afraid all the time of hurting or killing you by accident. It didn’t help that my own body was still healing—and sometimes I would lose my balance or a wave of vertigo would overtake me. For a long time, I found it hard to hold you except when we were both safely seated in a chair. I have sometimes worried that perhaps my uncertainty harmed you in some way, made it hard for you to feel steady and safe. But you were always a good child, quiet, and alert, and when I sat by your crib and read to you, you would listen as if you understood, watching me, as if I was telling you the secrets of the world.
“Sometime that year, I was invited to Washington to receive a Medal of Honor for my courage in battle. So I took you to DC along with your babysitter. After the ceremony I attended a dinner where I was seated next to a general who had recently returned from a tour in the South Pacific.
“He and I talked all through the dinner: not about the war, but about movies and books and places he had visited, and also, of course, about you. Later, after the dinner was over, he invited me to have a drink with him in the bar of the hotel we were both staying at, and I said yes, why not.
“As soon as we’d sat down in a little table in the corner, far from the other patrons, the general’s demeanor became serious, and he said, ‘Son, I have a favor to ask you.’
“I said, ‘Anything in my power, sir.’
“‘I’d like you to meet a woman,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking that since your child is motherless, perhaps this girl could serve as her caretaker.’
“‘Excuse me, sir?’ I said. And then I told him you didn’t need another caretaker, that I was managing with the help of a neighborhood woman.
“‘Please,’ the general said. ‘As a favor to me, just meet her. She has a room in this hotel, and I could have her come this instant.’
“I must have looked alarmed, because ‘Relax,’ the general said, reaching across the table and putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘Just meet her. You need not agree to anything. Let me tell you her story, and then you can judge whether or not she deserves a chance.’”
The General’s Story
“I discovered her in Coro Bay, that paradise of crystal seas and sand. We had won our first major battle there—and the Japs had abandoned their base. They’d left behind their ianfu, their comfort women—girls they’d kidnapped or bought from all over Asia, and whom they kept in the barracks for the pleasure of their soldiers. Our men were hungry to be with these women, ragged and thin as they were. But they were just girls, starving and covered in scars. There were seventy of them in all, sick and grieving and unable to go home. One had been branded with a hot iron in her privates. Several others had gone out of their minds. Those rocked back and forth, tore out their own hair, buried themselves into the dirt, writhing and weeping, and the soldiers had to hold them down just to feed them their meals.
“For the most part they withdrew from us when we approached, drawing back, blending in as much as they could to their surroundings, disappearing into each other. They retreated, became as invisible as possible, except for one, who met our gazes, indifferent, angry, and as cold as ice.
“Her name was Meiying, and the first time I saw her all her clothes hung off her body in dirty, shredded rags. Her bones were sharp and raised, as if they were sawing upward through her skin. Her eyes were two black and shining holes. It was hard to see the beauty she would become, and yet when I saw her, I felt a shudder of recognition shake my bones, and perhaps she felt it too, because when she saw me looking at her, she stood up in her bare feet, shaking the lice from hair. Cuts ran all along her body: someone had carved her up, but they had left her face alone. One cut on the inside of her thigh was infected, and that one was deep and gaping, stinking and leaking pus. When I touched it, she flinched away, and her skin was swollen and hot, so I took her to the medic, who gave her medicine and covered her body in poultices layered over in gauze and tape. She acted as if she was not aware of his touch, looking away into the distance as he tended to her wounds, her eyes set and hard. I watched her and was moved by her and brought her to my house to be cared for.
“I fed her from my hand the first few times, like a sick fawn, but she insisted on learning to eat with a knife and a fork as I did. I let her. Over time, she grew sleek and shining. The scar on her thigh remained dark and purple against her pale white skin. But oh, her eyes, her cheekbones—from her ravaged body emerged the beauty I’d sensed the first time I saw her, a beauty that surpassed anything I’d ever seen before. I became half mad with desire for her.
“I taught her English. Every night, I taught her words. And she learned so quickly that I realized she’d been learning on her own, for many months. Then I told her what my feelings were. I pressed my hand over hers. I could not resist pulling her close and kissing her fine, shining hair. I touched her as a father would, chastely, and with great care. I cannot tell you what joy it gave me when she yielded in my arms and gave herself to me of her own free will, the resistance in her body melting to softness.
“For a year we lived in that tropical paradise, but when I saw how the other men began to eye her, I knew something would have to be done. I sent Meiying to America with my own personal secretary, but in the last month, my wife has found me out. So this is why I am asking for your help. She is my greatest treasure, and there is nowhere I can send her, nowhere she can go. But if you’re willing to help me, perhaps she can help a poor motherless girl like your own.”
MY FATHER FINISHED THIS STORY and sat back in his bed, and took a deep breath, as if it had cost him something to recount it. “After the general told his story, I sat in silence for a long time,” he said. “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about Meiying.
“‘Very well,’ I finally said. ‘I will meet her. Please bring her down.’
“But now that the general saw that he had me, he said, ‘I think it is better if she doesn’t come down. It will be better if I don’t have to watch. No, it’s better if you go to her yourself.’
“I thought this was strange: Would he not want to protect her, to c
haperone the interaction, to make sure I would be kind? But he was the general, and I was used to obeying, and so I agreed to this plan.
“‘Wait here, and I will tell her you are coming,’ said the general. ‘She is in room 409. It is better if we do not talk again, but leave a message for me at the front desk. Yes if you will take her, no if you will not.’
“And again I was stunned at how easily he would hand over his charge, this woman he had described as his treasure. But I sat in the bar for another half an hour, thinking. This new development had eclipsed my medal entirely, as if this and only this was the reason I had come to Washington. So after half an hour had passed, I rose from the bar to find that the general had paid our whole bill, and somewhat unsteadily I took the elevator that led to the fourth floor, where Meiying awaited.”
Here my father paused. The day had passed from afternoon to evening, and behind him, the window that had been bright with sunshine when I first came in was dark. My father’s face was lined in shadow and he looked drawn and tired.
“Could I have some water, please?” he asked, and I leapt up, just as Linda entered bearing a tray with water on it, and his dinner.
“It’s time to eat now,” she announced.
My father looked at Linda and then at me. “Can we continue the story tomorrow?” he asked.
I wanted so much to hear what happened next, but I nodded and said I would wait. We had dinner together in the hospital with our meals balanced on our laps, and I looked at my father and Linda and was reminded of the dinners my mother and father and I had eaten off our laps when we were building the radio so many years ago.
THAT NIGHT, Linda stayed with my father in his room, and I went back to our old house for the first time in many years. I was surprised to find that my room had not been touched—my child’s bed, my child’s desk, my science posters, all my books, just as I’d left them. The old house seemed smaller and yet more cavernous with no one in it, and it smelled different than I remembered as I went from room to room.
I went into my father’s garage, which—though he had acquired more in the way of tools and old boxes—smelled exactly the same as I remembered, of sawdust and electrical wiring, and some deeper scent that was my father’s own. My beloved telescope was sitting in the corner where I’d left it the last time I’d visited. The old radio sat on the same small cart as always, its cables wound around itself, dusty from disuse. There were still two chairs in front of it: a large one for my father, a petite one for myself. The sight of those two chairs, sitting so faithfully side by side as they had through my long absence, broke my heart.
The next morning, I hurried to the hospital. My father was awake and looked better than he had the day before. I took up my chair beside him, but he said, “I was thinking that today, Katherine, if you’re up for it, perhaps we could go for a walk around the hospital garden.” He was in his hospital gown, hooked up to various IVs.
“Are you allowed?” I asked. “Can you walk?”
He pointed to a wheelchair. “I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind wheeling me around while Linda sleeps. She can stretch out in this bed.”
And so I agreed, and we went out into the cool morning air and onto the hospital lawn where drops of dew clung to the grass and wet my feet. I took my father to the gardens, and we found a bench for me to sit on, and I wheeled him around to face me. My father said, “Where did I leave off last night? Shall I continue?”
“Yes please,” I said. “You’d just gotten to Meiying’s room in the hotel when you stopped.”
“Ah,” my father said. “Yes. Our first meeting.
“When I knocked on her door, she opened the door and said, angrily, ‘Very well, come in.’
“I entered her hotel room, surprised at the crispness of her English, the coldness of the tone.
“She gestured toward the seat. ‘Sit,’ she said. ‘And tell me why you’re here.’
“Katherine, I don’t know how well you remember what she looked like, but in those days she was a flower. You could see that to touch her would be to spoil and crush her. But I understood the general’s madness, for the moment I saw her, to my shame, it was all that I wanted to do.
“‘The general said you were looking for a job,’ I managed to say.
“‘The general,’ Meiying said, with unchecked bitterness. ‘The general,’ she said again, as if the word itself was a joke. ‘Let me tell you about the man you call the general.’”
Meiying’s Account
“The first word he taught me was freedom: he wanted me to know I was free. The second word he taught me was liberation. He wanted me to know who had granted me that thing he called freedom. As if liberation or freedom can have meaning when you are taken from a world of men into a world of men, and all your possible futures diverge into unending other worlds of men, where your body will be used and traded, and words of love will be all that are given to you in exchange, as if this currency has so much value and your life so little that you should be grateful for these words.
“I already spoke English. I only pretended to learn what I already knew all along. My father had been a diplomat: there were five of us children in all, and I was the youngest and the only girl. ‘My jewel,’ my father called me. ‘My rose.’ When he returned from his trips, he brought gifts of ivory and gold, spices and tea. I was tutored in Japanese and English. That they would one day be the languages that would seal my fate, no one could have known, at that time.
“The general was so proud of his generosity—and he thought I would be grateful when he offered to one day take me with him to America, or to send me home. But what would be the point of going home? I told him my family was dead. I don’t know why I lied, but once I did, I found myself telling the false story as if it was the truth, and who knows—maybe by then, they were dead. I told him I’d seen my family killed before my eyes, and I wept, feeling as if my words themselves had killed them. Misunderstanding, he wept too, dropping tears into my hair. That man was so easy with his tears. I whispered ‘fool’ under my breath. I still don’t know what was worse: the false story I told, or the truth.
“When the war came, I was fourteen years old, and whenever conversation turned to what was happening in our country, my father made me leave the room. Though I wept hot tears at my exclusion, he would not yield. He and my brothers felt it was their job to protect me from knowing what the dwarf-bandits—that’s what they called the Japanese soldiers—were doing to the country. But as they talked and worried behind closed doors, I did not feel protected at all. Instead, a strange and terrible feeling began to rise up in my heart, that something bad was going to happen.
“And then one day we packed up our entire household, filling our wagons and sewing gold into our blankets. The war had reached the borders of our province. Taking all our horses, we began our journey to our house in the country. The journey itself was easy: we were never short on food, and when we passed other travelers, my father often gave bags of rice and gourds of wine to help them on their way. At night my brothers guarded our wagons, taking turns awake with their guns. I never felt endangered but was happy to be going to our country house, with its ponds and pavilions, the chrysanthemum hedges and all the green mountains around us, pointing their tips to the sky.
“We had two weeks of peace there before the dwarf-bandits found us. We learned of their approach too late, when we were already surrounded, and there was no way out.
“‘Don’t fight,’ I cried out when the soldiers burst into our house, ‘Don’t fight,’ and I don’t know if that was why my brothers stood up slowly, hands free of weapons—if it was my presence or my plea not to fight that was the hinge that everything turned upon next.
“The bandits marched in and took my brothers out of the house one by one, with their hands tied behind their backs. There, in front of the magnificent beauty of our countryside, one of the dwarf-bandits ordered my eldest brother to kneel. My mother screamed when he obeyed, and grasped at the sleeve of the so
ldier behind him, but he hit her across the face with his hand, and she fell to the ground.
“I was standing in the doorway, watching everything. I knew where my brothers hid their weapons, but I was afraid to turn my back on what was happening. I still thought my being there, my watching them, could keep them safe. The rest of my brothers were made to kneel. The soldiers raised their pistols to the backs of their heads and took aim. It was all so fast. That’s when I understood how close the line is between living and not living—a moment and then it’s done.
“But before anything happened, my father came out of the house, unarmed and shouting in Japanese, ‘Wait!’ He took me by the arm and together we ran forward.
“The soldiers turned around, guns still aimed at my brothers’ heads.
“‘I’ll trade her,’ my father said then, pushing me forward. ‘For my boys. She speaks English and Japanese. You can see how lovely she is, how graceful. I beg of you, spare my sons.’
“‘A girl is not worth four boys,’ said the officer on horseback, but even as he laughed he looked at me with assessing eyes. I shrank away. He said, ‘I will trade her for just one of your sons. I suggest you take the deal, it’s the best bargain you’ll get.’
“‘Leave me the oldest one,’ my father said, and his voice broke.
“‘All right,’ the officer said. And then leaning down to me, he said: ‘Come here. Don’t be afraid. I will not hurt you.’ I stepped forward. As my family watched, I let him take my hand. When he touched my face, I did not close my eyes or flinch. I let him do it.
“‘Please spare them,’ I said quietly, in perfect Japanese. ‘My parents. My brothers. Let them live.’
“The dwarf-bandit’s eyes widened. ‘You sound just like a Japanese girl,’ he said. ‘You have no accent.’ He glanced back at my family. He turned back to me and nodded once, as if making a decision. He said, ‘I will do this as a special favor to you.’ To his soldiers, he said loudly, ‘Let all of them go.’ And then he turned swiftly on his horse, and I let him hoist me up in front of him. I looked back at my parents. My mother’s face was smeared with blood, and she and my father were crying, but they said nothing as they watched us ride away. Through the dust and distance, I watched them let me go. That day and the next, I waited for someone to come and rescue me. I waited and I waited, but no one ever did.
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