by Mark Sampson
“Grounded?” Her mind flips through vocabulary until she finds it. “Oh shut up!” she barks. And I laugh.
With our passion sapped and the memory of it fading behind us, I already feel Jin pulling away from me. Shoals of doubt, shoals of distance, shoals of What the hell just happened? swimming between us on the couch. She sits up, pulls her legs under her. Finds the remote control, pops on the TV.
“Jin, c’mon, turn it off.”
“No. Let’s watch something.” She surfs through the channels — talking heads, noisy action movies with Korean subtitles, overwrought singing contests. I can’t bring myself to watch. Instead, I stroke her hair, trace a knuckle over her shoulder and down her long, lean side. She doesn’t respond, doesn’t even look at me. She’s so beautiful. I’m scared to tell her how beautiful she is.
Her face tightens just then. “What the hell is all this?” she asks.
I turn to find myself once again staring into CNN. The news ticker rushes along the bottom of the screen, and above it a stony image of Saddam Hussein. Not an image. A statue. We watch as the camera switches to a long shot, showing his body in full: A single arm raised in avuncular salute over a square packed with people. There is a thick rope and pulley hanging loosely over the statue’s neck and shoulder.
“What’s going on?” Jin asks.
“I don’t know.”
We watch a long preparation, U.S. soldiers in beige desert wear working and then clearing out. At first nothing happens, but then the rope grows taut, tightened by the pull of an armoured vehicle. Another moment and Saddam begins to bow to the crowd. His fall is slow, incredibly slow at first, but then picks up speed as his legs break and he slumps drunkenly over his own pedestal. The statue hangs there for an eternity, detritus and shoes flying through the air at its head. Jin and I watch in a kind of silent sobriety.
“Michael, do you think …” she says. “Do you think it will …”
And then it does. Breaks loose of the pedestal and comes crashing to the ground with a heavy lurch. The crowd rushes it, leaps onto it even before the torso comes to a full stop. The tall arm waves at the sky. The people are plowing onto the statue, dancing on it, stomping it, smacking it with the soles of their shoes. Jubilation and tears and arms pumping in the air. The CNN commentators have caved to their jingoism: this is why they believe America has come.
“Do you think it’s staged?” I ask.
“Staged? What does this mean?”
“Do you think they’re —” I clear my throat. “Do you think they’re faking it?”
Jin looks at the TV, then back at me, a kind of once over, then to the TV again. I’m suddenly very aware of my nakedness. She blows a hair out of her eyes as the dancing and cheers go on. “No, it looks genuine. But I’m thinking of what you and Jack were talking about tonight. I still say he’s wrong and you’re right. This,” — and she nods at the happy images glowing at my living room — “this isn’t a simple … a simple — what was the word you used?”
I hesitate. “Seduction.”
“Right. This isn’t a simple seduction. This won’t be simple at all.”
The TV eventually comes off but we’re too lazy to move back to my bedroom. Jin curls on the couch to sleep, but in an unwelcoming way; there really isn’t room for both of us. So instead I move to the cold floor, sit with my back against the chilly wall. I’m not going to sleep. I’m going to sit exactly like this for the whole night and watch Jin as she dozes. A few hours pass and then she stirs, opens her eyes to find me staring at her. She sits up and stretches. Then, without a word, slips off the couch and heads to my room. From the darkness, I hear her pulling her clothes back on. She takes forever. When she finally comes back out, she’s got her handphone open, looking at the screen and pressing buttons. Sending a text message, to her mother I suppose. She sits back on the couch, her knees together. Texting, texting. Not looking at me.
“Jin …”
She claps the phone shut. “Hey, did you sleep at all?” she asks.
“I didn’t want to sleep,” I reply. “I wanted to kiss you until the sun came up.”
Corny. So corny. A wave of unease passes through her. She’s resumed that bashful, closed-off stance from last night, chin down and buried, hair falling in her face.
“Michael, I have to go. I have places I need to be.”
“Jin …”
She shakes her head, but then grows still. Sighs. “Ask me,” she says. “Go on and ask me.”
“Jin, are we going to try to love each other?”
She looks up but not at me.
“You’re afraid to love a waegookin,” I say.
“I am afraid,” she clips, turning to me. “Is that so wrong?”
“I’m afraid, too. But so what? Jin, there are right decisions and there are wrong decisions. But you can never make a right decision from a place of fear. You know that.” I lick my lips. “So fuck fear. Fuck it. Throw your fear out the bloody window, for Christsake. And then give your heart to me.” It sounds almost like an order.
Her bottom lip comes out. She’s thinking hard. Eyes me up and down in my nakedness. But then nods. She nods.
Yes.
Yes?
Yes.
And I collapse into relief without showing it. Without knowing what this victory will mean, what these words, this conquest, will really lead to.
Chapter 9
The sound of tears mixed with the sound of laughter. That’s how it rang out in Meiko’s head, a percussive echo swelling in the silence that had descended on the camp. Her laughter at the men’s misery; their tears over the bomb, their pock’tan. This was the abandoned month of August, the reversal of fortune. The silence she had prayed for.
Evidence of the soldiers’ desertion lay strewn through every crevice of the comfort station. Wooden crates were left to rot in the long grass of the field. Shells and other ammunition were stacked like cordwood along one wall, never to be fired. Crumbling army boots, soles gaping with holes and laces limp, lined up like urchins along the north stoop. The camp’s charcoal stove, littered now with the ledgers’ ashy remnants, had fallen cold.
It took a while for the girls to organize themselves after the men had left. They came peeping out from behind their curtains, faces ripe with disbelief. We are alone, they communicated to each other, to themselves. Who will take care of us now? We’ll have to take care of each other. The girls latched on to Meiko almost immediately; to them, her scarred legs read like a map of sedition, her laughter at the soldiers a proclamation of bravery. Of course she would know what to do. Of course she would take charge.
There was the issue of food. The men had left them virtually nothing. Just a smattering of stale rice balls and soggy radishes. They gathered up what they could find; it filled half of a table in the mess. How many are we? they asked, and counted themselves in Japanese. A dozen. A dozen girls. This food would not feed twelve girls for long.
They bickered briefly over what to do. One girl, named Hiri, still too terrified to speak, pantomimed her opinion, patting the air with her open palms: We need to stay here. She mimicked the actions of a sniper, but Meiko was uncertain what she meant: We leave and run the risk of getting shot? Or the enemy knows of this camp and we should stay in the hopes of being found? Just say it in Korean, Meiko wanted to bark at her, but could tell Hiri was too frightened, even though the camp manager was long gone. Another girl, named Akiko, came to their gathering with her box of Gyumpo bills. Flapped a handful of them in the air. We are flush with cash, she seemed to be saying. She pointed sternly out the window, to the Chinese landscape beyond it. Obvious what she wanted: to take the money and find a village to buy food and passages home. The girls turned to Meiko, as if only she could cast the deciding vote. She nodded. “We’ll die if we stay here,” she said. The girls flinched for a moment at her use of Korean. But then nodded in agreement: it was okay, now, to speak their native tongue. “If we stay and this food runs out, what then?” Meiko went on. �
��We can’t eat Gyumpo bills. Better to use this food to get us to the nearest village, and then this money to get us — to get us to whatever awaits after that.” Her words caused many of the girls to redden in shame. To whatever awaits? We’re washed-up whores, all of us. What could possibly await us after this?
But it was agreed they would leave. The question was, in which direction? They had to piece together the best plan, like a mystery, from what the soldiers had rambled about in moments of indiscretion to the few girls who understood Japanese. A consensus bubbled to the surface: the village of Xingshuan, to the south of them. The men had talked about it, this nearby oasis of good sake and good music, a town that excited them upon their return from battle because it meant their convoys weren’t far from the comfort station and the girls who awaited them there.
So it would be Xingshuan. How many days by foot? Three? Five? Five would be too many — their food would run out. It would need to be three. And they would need to leave right away.
The girls prepared themselves. Drew jugs of water from the well in the courtyard. Gathered up whatever clothes they could find — discarded tunics and old blankets left in wooden corners. They loaded their supply of rice and vegetables in canvas sacks. And most importantly, they gathered up their boxes of Gyumpo — these bills, given to them in the lightest gestures of remorse, accumulated over countless months of rape. The girls would carry them through the wilderness clutched to their chests.
They left the camp behind to trek through scorched hills and bare ginkgo trees. Along the way, they encountered burned-out army trucks and bullet-riddled bodies half-buried in muck, and deep pockmarks in the ground where shells had fallen. The late summer heat soaked the girls as they worked their way around these horrors. “Keep the morning sun to the left,” Meiko chanted as she led them, more a distraction than an order, “and keep the evening sun to the right.” Each night they settled into a ditch with their blankets and slight rations of food, fearing the appearance of bandits or worse, broken-up Japanese platoons looking for one last plunge into conquered flesh.
The village of Xingshuan appeared to the girls after three hard days of hiking. It stretched over a plateau on the south side of a broad, babbling creek. They walked the iron bridge into town to discover a hybrid atmosphere of jubilation and chaos. Thick pillars of smoke rose into the air from burning homes. Streets were strewn with abandoned corpses and shattered glass. And yet people were out in the streets dancing, singing folk songs, burning Japanese flags and pictures of Hirohito. The girls wandered into the village like their own small army and drew less-than-welcome stares from the locals.
They found a street market near the centre of town. Wandered into a mad avenue of haggling to discover a modest ransom of food for sale, more than they had seen in months. A couple of the girls rushed to the first table they saw, lined with root vegetables and shellfish. Taking out their boxes of Gyumpo, they grabbed handfuls of bills and began trying to communicate to the tired-looking man behind the table. He did not move when he saw the money; his face connoted nothing. They waggled the bills at him. He shook his head, said something back to them in Chinese, which they didn’t understand. They flapped the bills at him again. The man raised his arms angrily. The girls pleaded with him, their Korean falling out of their mouths in long rambles. The man practically spat at them, then folded his arms tersely over his chest, not willing to spend another second dealing with these girls who had wandered in from God knows where.
They moved back to their group, tremulous. How to express what had just transpired? They didn’t need to: Meiko could tell what had happened. She turned to the other girls. “Worthless,” she said. “He’s not taking any Gyumpo. These bills are absolutely worthless.”
Tears began to well over their starved faces. They moved from table to table, their Gyumpo bills out and presented like hats begging for alms, but each proprietor met them with the same reaction. One woman selling bags of rice was able to speak to them in broken Japanese. “You giving me Gyumpo? No! Nobody take army money anymore. War is over. You have yen? You have yen? I can take yen. No yen? Really? Not twenty yen among you? Then no rice! No yen, no rice! Japanese bastards gone! Army money is no value. No value at all …”
The girls drifted from stall to stall, their Gyumpo bills falling like leaves at their feet. Each rejection caused their hunger pangs to swell up inside them like little fires. They turned to Meiko, expecting her to provide some wisdom that would make this situation dissolve like mist. But she had nothing for them. Her words were as worthless as the Gyumpo bills they had lugged all this way.
The girls moved to Xingshuan’s outskirts; there, they could see where the war had drawn its final lines — deep trenches through the woods, the shells of burned-out houses. The girls, filthy and starved, wandered among these homes trying to find anything edible, anything of value that they could sell or trade for food. But it looked as though others had come before them and picked these homes clean.
Meiko led her little army beyond the town’s edge. There, they roamed like exhausted ghosts through the remains of a large house by the creek that had been reduced to rubble. Meiko kicked aside a blackened chamber pot, watched it sail across the debris. It landed with a strange sound — the hollow thump of wood. She ran over and began clearing away chunks of brick and concrete to find wooden doors sunken in the ground a few feet outside where the foundation had been. She pulled the doors open and the stale air of a cellar struck her face. She called the girls over and they descended down together out of the rain.
Through the pale afternoon light falling in, they could see sagging wooden shelves along the cellar’s earthen walls. And on them, lined up like pig’s heads, stood large glass jars coated in dust. Chinese preserves. The girls gasped in glee. A veritable banquet. Pickled plums and cabbages, floating shark fins, bean curd and pickles. They yanked down some jars, unscrewed the tops and sat eating feverishly on the floor, a moment of weakness before realizing that they should pace themselves. Sated, they sat in joyous silence, almost wanted to laugh at their luck. Here was shelter, here was food, and here was darkness to mask them from marauders.
In that hole in the ground, they were free to live as themselves. They relished in their safety, the lack of fear. In the cellar’s darkness, they entertained each other with stories, sang folk songs, created games to play with pebbles and sticks. Above ground, on the hunt for supplies, the girls became ghosts again, lost shadows trapped between the living world and the dead one.
Groups of them took turns each day making excursions beyond the cellar to gather water and anything else to help them survive. On one trek, a girl found an old iron pot half-buried in mud, and after giving it a wash in the creek, they had something to cook with. They built a small fire just outside the cellar doors and made a thin stew with some of the preserves. There was a raucous celebration one day when a group of them came back from another trek with a large crow they had caught and strangled. They plucked and gutted the animal and had fresh meat in their evening stew.
It was on an early morning touched by autumn’s chill that Meiko bent the rules and ventured out of their hiding place on her own. She woke with a distended ache in her bladder. Instead of waking one of the others to go with her, Meiko climbed the stairs on her own and stepped out into the cool morning air. She headed to a thatch of long grass and squatted down, hiking up her ratty dress. As usual, the urine burned all the way out of her swollen genitals. When she finished and straightened herself, Meiko decided to take one of their jugs, stacked in rows by the cellar doors, and fetch their morning water. She walked to the creek’s edge, dipped down and submerged the jug in the water. Pulled it up when it was full and capped it.
Then she turned, and saw a group of men watching her.
Meiko froze, dropped the jug. She saw the men’s uniforms before she saw their faces. Japanese army fatigues. She tried to scream, but her voice merely crackled out of her like static. She felt abruptly naked as their eyes fell on her
, her rags melting away to expose a broken body primed to be broken again. Five men. She could not raise her head.
One of the soldiers stepped forward, took off his dirty, frayed cap and gave her a little bow, nearly bashful.
“Hello,” he said in Korean.
Meiko looked up at him. His was not a Japanese face. The man wore the clothes of the Emperor’s army but he was Korean. A Korean man. It had to be an illusion, a trick of the eye, a symptom of her illnesses, her hunger and lack of sleep. Meiko looked again. No. All five of them were Korean. And she let her mind slip back to thoughts of her two brothers conscripted into the Japanese military so long ago. She hadn’t seen a Korean man since her abduction to China. If there had been some in the platoons that visited the camps, they weren’t allowed anywhere near the girls.
Meiko trembled all over. She was certain of what was about to happen. A Korean face … but a Japanese uniform. What will they want? Will they hold me down and rape me right here at the creek, taking what the Japanese had denied them? Will my noises bring the girls out to see what’s happening, and will the men chase some of them down while the others flee into the forest? We’ll scatter like dust. It’s over . Our little lives here in the cellar are over.
The soldier cleared his throat. “You have no reason to be afraid, my child,” he told her, again speaking in Korean. He gestured toward the cellar doors in the distance and the jugs lined up there, the cooling fire, and the blankets drying on chunks of concrete. “You have friends?” he asked. She didn’t answer, but he nodded anyway. “How many are you?”
Meiko did not speak, would not betray the girls. She looked hard at the men, her eyes turning sharp. They didn’t react to her hostility, and this made Meiko even angrier. Why are looking at me so innocently? Why are you ignoring what I so obviously am? What do you want? Shall I jiggle my cunt at you? Shall I lay in the mud and let each of you have me? What do you want? What do you want?
