by Mark Sampson
The man turned back to his comrades, gave them a nod of understanding. They nodded back. We can help her. The man returned to Meiko, looking as if he wanted to take a step closer to her, but wouldn’t.
“We’ve been discharged,” he said gently. “We have a transport coming to Xingshuan the day after tomorrow, to move us to a port city. I can’t remember its name, but we will have passage home. Back to Korea. Back to Chosun.” The cellar doors suddenly squeaked open and a few of the girls peeked out. Meiko turned to them, then back at the soldier. He held his cap at his waist. “Let us help you,” he said to her, then repeated it to the girls, calling over to them. “Let us help you. We can take you home.”
And Meiko thought: What is this I’m sensing? Is this death creeping in? Are these the chivalrous brothers I’ve been waiting for?
Meiko was surrounded on all sides by her people. Korean girls staring up from the hole in the ground in the distance. Korean men hovering over them.
“What is your name?” one of the other soldiers asked Meiko. “Child, what is your name?”
And so Meiko raised it high, like a treasure she had kept hidden from everyone.
“Eun-young,” she muttered, drawing out the name that her mother had given her, a name to be spoken only behind the closed doors of her family house. She said it again with more conviction, finding her voice.
“My name is Eun-young.”
Part 2
That She Would Abandon a Good Man
Chapter 10
The Japanese couple watched the young girl as she watched the sea. The girl stood at the metal rail on the starboard side of the ship and stared out at the black water as it parted with eerie quiet beneath the ship’s bow. The Japanese couple had been watching her for a long time and knew what she was thinking. The girl trained her eyes onto the northeast point of the horizon, the direction in which the ship was headed. The couple was sitting behind her a few feet off on a wooden bench bolted to the wall near the galley door. The girl had her back to them as she watched that horizon, waiting for the first faint sign of land to rise out of the fog.
I’m going home, the girl thought. My name is Eun-young. I’m going home. And I’m going home a whore thirty thousand times over.
She placed her feet on the bottom rung of the rail, raised herself up, the sea wind blowing her hair to one side as she took in a breath of spindrift. At the sight of this, the couple behind her rose suddenly, the man stepping ahead of his wife ready to rush across the deck. Eun-young let her eyes fall all the way down the ship’s iron hull and into the whispering foam below, the deep, lulling darkness. She trembled a little, tightened her toes around the rail, lifted herself higher. But then, as quickly as she made her ascent, she backed off. Stepped down from the bottom rung and returned her feet to the deck’s wet surface. She turned and was startled to find the Japanese man almost upon her, his face full of concern, his wife stricken with feminine panic behind him.
Eun-young just shoved past the couple, back toward the galley door. Not tonight, she sniffed at them with a glance. Not tonight. But maybe tomorrow.
There were just eight of them left now. Three girls — Takako, Eri, and Nako — had hanged themselves before they had even left China. A fourth, named Akemi, had flung herself over the rail of the ship just a few hours after it had pulled away from the pier. That’s why the other passengers were watching the girls so closely now. Which made no sense to Eun-young. What difference does it make to these people if we end our lives? she thought. Why are they so determined that we see Korea again? They think the battle is over. But it’s not over for us. The possibility of a future is waging war against the shame of our past.
The girls did not speak much to each other on the ship, even when they sat together in the galley for meals. It was like a silent agreement: They would not air what each of them was thinking of doing as the ship moved across the water. So Eun-young watched the other passengers instead — the smattering of discharged soldiers and the Japanese civilians travelling to Korea before moving on to Japan. Funny, how these passengers could keep an eye on the girls without actually looking at them. Was there any doubt as to what they were? The filth, the obvious trace of disease, the hair choked with lice, the way they lowered their eyes whenever a man walked by. Fuck you all, Eun-young wanted to say. The shame should radiate from you, not from us. Mostly, though, she just watched the Japanese couple who had confronted her at the rail. During one meal, the two of them were eating together on the other side of the galley when the ship listed hard to the left. Eun-young watched as the wife’s glass of juice pitched over, the liquid racing to the table’s edge and into her husband’s lap. The woman was so apologetic, getting up with her napkin at once — and Eun-young expected a brief flare of anger from the husband. Was anything else, after all, possible from a man? Instead, he laughed. Cupped his wife’s head in his hand, pressed his forehead into hers, wouldn’t even let her sop up the mess before he kissed her. And then they laughed together. This benign moment between a husband and his wife left Eun-young feeling hollowed out, a husk sitting there in her chair.
She saw them later, walking arm and arm on the deck. The man hadn’t even bothered to change his pants.
On the last day of the journey, Eun-young woke early and found herself wandering the upper deck in a state of near hypnosis. She started to imagine what would transpire once she saw her family again. If her brothers were still alive, they would not be able to look at her. If her mother was still alive, she would fall to her knees at Eun-young’s feet and pour out a symphony of thanks. If her father was still alive, his face would crush up in disgust at the sight of her. And if her baby sister was still alive — well, she didn’t know. Ji-young had only been ten years old when Eun-young, five years her senior, was taken away. Would she have gone through these things, too? It was a question Eun-young had sometimes thought about at night during the quiet times in the camps. Is Ji-young being raped, too? Surely she had been too young. Surely the monsters who had done this would have left her alone.
Eun-young was snapped out of her daze by the sudden blare of the ship’s horn. It rang out in a seemingly ceaseless bellow. Eun-young found herself hurrying to the front of the ship before the horn even stopped, nearly crashing into the rail when she got there. She looked out over the blue-green water. In the distance was the thin line of land that she’d been watching for before. Jags of mountains. Fog. The slightest wisp of rambling green hills. For an instant, she doubted where this place was, where the ship had taken her. Her heart heaved a little. It wasn’t until she could see Pusan Harbour, its long lean piers, its buildings snuggled into the mountains, that she guessed where she was.
It took another moment for her to realize she had once again placed her feet on the bottom rung of the rail. She clung there for a bit before stretching her torso out, dangling it over the distant water. Her feet scrambled onto the second rung, and then the third. All she had to do was pitch her weight forward and gravity would do the rest. Send her down the side of the hull like a coin dropped for good luck into the rushing foam below.
A hand seized her just above the elbow. Yanked her back to the deck. Of course it did. She turned to see the Japanese man. He pulled her as far from the rail as possible. Practically threw her against the wall of the ship, though there was no malice in his strength. She glanced around, but the man’s wife was nowhere to be seen. Probably she was still below deck, still in bed. Eun-young could not look at the man. As daft as his gaze was, she still cowered below it. He took her by the arm again, led her back to the rail. She let him. He held her in place. Pointed at the land as it crept closer to the front of the ship. Spoke to her in serviceable Korean.
“It’s yours now,” he said meekly. “All of it — it belongs to you. Don’t throw it away, like your friends did.”
Mouth quivering, Eun-young pulled herself out of his grasp. Spoke to him in flawless Japanese. “You have no idea what they took from me,” she choked. “Why live? Why, when
I will never experience a fraction of the joy you give your wife?”
If it all belonged to her, it was hard to tell. The girls did not encounter a single Korean face after disembarking and moving through the long lines at the pier, where they were herded like bovines into a narrow garage overlooking the sea. Instead, they were greeted by a small band of American soldiers. Tall in their green fatigues, they were talking in the clumpy staccato of what Eun-young assumed was English. They acted as if they owned the whole country, lining the girls up in a row on the concrete floor of the garage with gruff, incomprehensible instructions. There, an army doctor moved from girl to girl, checking her head for lice. When he finished, he nodded at the men and left the room. A few minutes later, he came back lugging a large plastic tank with a long rubber hose and a spout as thin as a pencil. The soldiers straightened the girls up and then pantomimed them covering their noses and mouths and squeezing their eyes shut. They did what they were told. The doctor moved from girl to girl, spraying each of them with a colourless powder reeking of chemicals that shot out of the spout in a throat-choking cumulus. It filled their hair, their ears, the pores of their skin, ran down the front of their throats and into the tattered clothes on their bodies. Decades later, Eun-young would learn that this horrible mist was most likely DDT. The doctor was generous with it, ignorant of what it could do to the human body. The girls didn’t complain. The stuff did an excellent job of killing the lice.
Moved to a different part of the garage, they were showered, given fresh clothes to wear, then taken to a small cafeteria in an adjacent building. There, they ate grey, flavourless food among American soldiers, who eyed them up and down with interest. When they finished, the girls were taken back to the garage and lined up again. There, they found a Korean man waiting for them. An administrator of some kind, wearing an American business suit. Once the girls were lined up in front of him, he gave them each one thousand won and told them to take it to the nearby train station, where they could buy tickets home to their towns and villages.
The girls did as they were told. It was the late part of the evening before they arrived at the Pusan train station. There was a large chalk departure board at the front displaying different destinations written in Hangul. Eun-young could not remember the last time she had seen the Korean alphabet. She pointed out various locales for the girls who could not read. Then they moved to the tellers’ booths to purchase their tickets. Kwangju, Kyungju, Seokcho, Suwon, Seoul. The girls would be parting company now, finally. They did not make a huge performance out of saying goodbye. There were Koreans here at the station, hundreds of them, and the girls didn’t want to attract undo attention with a weepy, dramatic end to this, their unfathomable ordeal together.
Eun-young’s train to Seoul boarded just before midnight. She sat a window seat in the front row of the first car. There were both Americans and Koreans filing into the seats all around her. She could not look at them. She just stared out the window and waited for the train to begin moving.
Dawn in Seoul. The streets were just coming to life when Eun-young stepped onto them for the first time in two and half years. It was hard finding her precise way back because the street signs, written in Japanese for her entire life, were in the process of being torn down and replaced with signs written in Hangul. There were also, she noticed, many signs in English now.
A steep hill led from her neighbourhood’s main street all the way down to her parents’ small house. It was paved with broken cobble, littered with trash, and laced with laundry lines strung from one iron-tiled roof to another. As Eun-young made her descent, she remembered how her mother would look up this hill for hours at a time in those months before Eun-young was taken, waiting for her sons to return from the war. This ritual would no doubt have extended to Eun-young after she was taken. How many mornings would her mother, in great grips of despair, have waited outside their door, hoping that Eun-young would complete this very act — to walk down the hill alive, returning as suddenly as she had vanished.
When she arrived at the bottom, she found the small windows of her family house darkened, greasy, and the garden on the side lawn bare. She looked around but her mother was nowhere to be seen. Eun-young waited, trembling near the stoop. I should run, she thought. My life ended here two and a half years ago. I am dead as far as this place is concerned. I do not exist. I do not even —
A young girl came around from the back of the house carrying a basket of laundry. She stopped when she saw Eun-young standing in the narrow street. It took a moment for Eun-young to realize that this was her baby sister, Ji-young. It took just as long for Ji-young to realize that the disheveled urchin standing at their door was her older sister. The basket of laundry fell. The girls’ bodies crashed into each other, nearly becoming one. A wail boomed over the neighbourhood like an old iron bell. The girls collapsed onto the cobbles, nearly wrestled on the ground. Tears flowed down Eun-young’s throat and she struggled to find her voice. She pried a convulsing Ji-young away, held her by the shoulders.
“Mother,” she said. “Where’s Mother? Has she not been waiting for me?”
“ Aigo, aigo,” Ji-young spewed. “She waited for you every day. She did. Aigo. Eun-young, you are ten months too late. Why didn’t you come home sooner? Aigo. Mother couldn’t wait any longer. Her heart — her heart could not wait any longer.”
And everything crushed inward then. A shock like a river, and a grief like rain. The loss of a mother to a heart attack. The loss of brothers to the anonymous death of war. The two girls wailed and wailed together. A red and blue flag, hanging out of a neighbour’s window, snapped in the wind.
Their noisy anguish soon turned into the silence of mourning, a kind of shame. They took their grief inside the house, away from the eyes of neighbours, and Ji-young made them breakfast. She went to the iron stove to boil a pot of rice, standing in that slight groove in the floor where their mother always stood. Eun-young watched as Ji-young lit the stove, set the pot of water, measured the rice in an old tin cup, poured it in, and began stirring. Her sister was still just a girl, Eun-young noticed, her body flat and shapeless, yet holding a nascent litheness and certainty that would attract men’s stares before long. She was showing off a twelve-year-old’s expertise at the stove.
“You’ve become domesticated,” Eun-young said.
“I’ve had to be,” Ji-young replied. She smoothed her hands over her dress before joining her sister on the floor at the table. “It’s been just Father and me,” she said, her words quaking, “since Mother’s heart gave out back in December. I’ve had to take care of him.”
“Where is he?”
“He worked the night shift at the factory. I expect him home any minute.”
A silence fell between them. Eun-young felt a tightness grip her shoulders.
“He said you were taken to a munitions factory, in China,” Ji-young went on. “Is that true? Very dangerous work, I assume. Is that how you got that scar over your lip?”
Eun-young turned her face away.
“Hey, don’t be ashamed of it,” Ji-young said. There was an innocence to her tone, to the way she touched Eun-young’s hand. “I’m sure however it happened, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Did the Japanese not come for you?” Eun-young asked.
“They did come for me,” Ji-young replied. Her face grew stern. “The Jungshindae came by every week. But mother and father hid me in the cellar each time they did. I haven’t seen anything beyond our front door since you left. They weren’t going to lose another child to those bastards. But they’re gone now. And I’ll be starting school soon. Father said it was okay, now that the Japanese are gone.”
Lose another child. I am a lost child. Eun-young let her gaze fall to the table.
Ji-young squeezed her hand. “Don’t think about it. You’re home now. It’s over. The Japanese are gone. Our country is going to belong to us again. We can start everything anew.” She tried to smile at her older sister. “You’re seventeen now
. We’ll have to talk to the matchmaker and find you a chungmae. It’s time.”
Eun-young found her head shaking involuntarily, her face cresting into a frown.
“Oh, Eun-young, please don’t tell me you’re still holding out for a yonae. You know that you —” Fresh tears spilled out of Eun-young’s eyes. Ji-young startled. “Eun-young, I didn’t mean … I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …” The rest was written on her face: I didn’t mean you’re too ugly now, with that scar, to find a yonae.
“I’ll get the rice,” Ji-young said meekly, getting up from the table.
They ate in silence, rice and kimchi. The kimchi hadn’t been left long enough to ferment; Ji-young was still learning. They had just cleaned their plates when they heard a rustle outside the door. The girls stood. The latch lifted and their father stepped in, his head down.
“Ji-young? Ji-young?” he called out, his voice heavy with exhaustion. “Why did you leave the basket of laundry in the street? Are you mad? Did you —”
He stopped when he saw two girls, not one, standing in his home. His whole body went slack when his eyes met Eun-young’s. It was like he was staring at a ghost. Eun-young moved her arms over her chest, as if pulling closed an invisible coat. Certain he could read every shame written upon her. She looked into his face and for a moment thought she saw the slightest hint of kindness there.
But then his mouth turned down. He marched up to Eun-young and paused. Then he struck her as hard as he could.
Eun-young crashed to the floor, nearly hitting her head on the table. As she fumbled around, her dress hiked up around her hips, revealing the graffiti of scars on her legs.
Ji-young screamed. Went to their father. But he shoved her away, ignoring her wordless pleas. “Stand over there, Ji-young. And don’t say a word. Not one word — or your fate will be hers.” He hovered over the prostrate Eun-young, looking down at the legs spread into a crawl in front of him before she could pull her dress back down. The sight seemed to confirm everything. He grabbed her from behind and tossed her to her feet. She stood before him, not daring to touch the syrupy blood that tickled under her nose.
