by Mark Sampson
We stay like that for a long time. Maybe we even fall asleep a bit, there in our chairs. Time seems to liquefy, streak away like wax off a burning candle. I eventually look at my watch.
“Shit, I should probably go through.”
We stand in unison; and as I turn, I see that Jin has begun to weep.
“Why are you crying?” I ask.
She wipes the tears away, clinically, little tugs with the heel of her hand. She returns to me then, in full force.
“Michael, I’m not coming with you to Canada,” she says.
I swallow. Stand there, silent. I know exactly what she means, but decide to play dumb. “Of course you aren’t. You don’t even have a plane ticket. Jin, we’ve talked about this so many times. You’re coming in July instead.”
She shakes her head. “You know that’s not true. Michael, we both need to admit, here and now, that that’s not true.”
I try to laugh. “C’mon, you have no idea how nice Halifax is in the summer. You’ll miss the buskers if you wait until the fall and meet me in Ottawa.”
“Don’t joke. Don’t torture me.”
Stay ignorant. No matter what, stay ignorant. “Jin, I know this is an emotional day for you.”
“Michael, stop it. I’m not going to join you in Canada. You know that I can’t. This has to end. Today.”
“What, at Incheon fucking Airport? Oh come on.” I reach out for her hand but she steps back from me, out of reach, as if I’ve already become a stranger to her. I press my lips together. Grit my teeth. “What is this about? Are you worried about your dad? He’ll be fine. Carl comes home next month and can look after him. Are you thinking you’ll be left out, that you’ll miss things? Jin, it doesn’t matter. I promise you, we’ll come back here as often as we can. Three times a year, four times a year, ten times a year if need be. I don’t give a shit.”
“Michael, you’re being ridiculous.”
Despite my best effort to fend it off, I feel a hollow resignation come over me. It seeps into my bloodstream like lead. She has been waiting all day to spring this trap on me. No. She’s been waiting weeks, months. Ever since her mother died, really. Nine months of corroding cowardice, of self deception, of procrastination. Waiting until I’m standing right at the gates to my future before she musters the courage to carve herself out of it.
“So, what?” I say. “We split now, here at the airport? You couldn’t do this sooner?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
“And so what’s next, Jin? You get back on the bus to Seoul? Go back to your job, back to your father’s home? Wear hanbok on holidays and wait for a nice Korean man to marry you? Is that what you’re telling me? Is that what you want?”
Her accent seems so thick now when she speaks. “If it’s any consolation to you, no Korean will want to marry me. I carry the stink of other men’s pleasure on my body.”
“How can you fucking say that?” I’m just about ready to vomit. “What would your eemo halmoney think if she heard you talk like that? Eun-young would know, Jin. It’s disgraceful that you’d say that. About us. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She looks not at me nor beyond me, not at the floor in shame. She just sort of floats there in her thoughts, a dark searching stare.
“Look, let’s give this a week,” I say. “I’ll call you from Halifax next weekend. We’ll talk it over, and if you still feel —”
“No. I’ve made up my mind. I’m sorry, Michael. I’m so sorry. I will never forgive myself. I know I should have done this sooner, and that I’m a coward for waiting until now. But that’s the way it is. I’m sorry. But I’ve had to make some hard decisions in my life, about what I really need to be. I am transforming into someone you won’t recognize. The old Jin is gone. She’s been gone for a long while now.”
“Jin, you don’t need to do this. I will follow you wherever you need to go.”
“You can’t follow me, Michael.”
“I can. Please. You don’t need to do this.”
“I do. I have to do this.”
“But why?”
“Because I need to be Korean.”
She quakes there under the weight of that declaration. So alone, so fragile, and yet so determined. Resolved to leap off the ledge that I can’t talk her down from.
She wipes the snot from her nose. “I will never forget you. You are such a good man. You are. Believe that you are, Michael. And there is a part of my heart that will always —”
But I turn on my heels; a swing of my carry-on, and I am fucking out of there — off toward the security gates. I will not allow her to finish me off. I don’t even look back. Not once. It’s true. I leave her standing there in mid-sentence. Let her quaver under the destruction she has wrought. I don’t look back. Not once.
I get in line at the gate, surrounded now by strangers. There is a glass case to our right displaying the array of personal items we’re no longer allowed to take on board, like a police line-up of brands and logos: canisters of shaving cream, tubes of liquids and gels and sprays. And next to the display, big garbage bins in which to dump your belongings if necessary. I march through the frosted partition and the line bifurcates. Soon someone in an airport uniform waves me forward toward the long metal table. Makes me go through the security rituals. And what rituals they’ve become. Dump keys and watch and pens and coins into this little plastic tub, their collection plate. Off it goes on their conveyor belt toward the X-ray machine. (I worry vaguely about someone on the other side nabbing my stuff.) Now take off your shoes, put them up here. Really? Yes, take off your shoes, sir. Got a laptop? Take it out, please. Open it up. Turn it on for us. (They swipe it down with this oversized Q-tip.) Okay. Turn it off, close it up. You can go through now. (I stroll over the metal detector’s threshold with civilian innocence.) Beep beep. Okay, stand here, sir. Sweep sweep with the wand, and they find the culprit. Undo your belt, sir. Hold it open, nice and wide. Sweep sweep with the wand. Turn around. Lift your arms up, please. Sweep sweep with the wand. Okay, you can put your arms down. Move back to the table. I do to discover them checking my bag with their rubber-gloved hands, rooting and rooting. Behind them, supervisors watch to make sure everything is done right, the sacraments of this near-religious ceremony. Finally they say: you can go now. And I’m left to pack up everything, my whole life, all that they’ve disassembled and left strewn here. I do up my belt, reload my pockets, put on my shoes, strap down my laptop, fasten up my satchel, and sling it back over my shoulder, check for my boarding pass, and then I’m in one piece again and finally free to go.
And do you want to know the funny thing? I barely make it to my gate on time. They’ve already started pre-boarding the plane when I get there.
There is something about the airport in Halifax. It’s on the outskirts of the city, way out there, really, and its runways are surrounded by deep, thick forest. It makes for a strange landing experience. Your plane will glide over trees for the longest time, hovering above the unforgiving wilderness as you make your long descent toward the ground. It seems to take forever. You can’t see the airport from where you sit. You’ll stare out your window, down at the spruce racing toward the belly of your ship, and there will come a point at the end when you’re sure that the runway’s not even there, that the forest is truly endless, and that your plane has no choice but land on top of it. You will doubt the sound of the landing gear coming down. You’ll doubt the sense of slowness coming over the cabin, the gradual lunge forward. You will hover over the trees; you can almost smell the sap in their branches. But then the runway does appear in a flash, coming out of nowhere, its long strip of pavement ready to embrace you. And you feel that godless bump of tires touching tarmac and hear the roar of your engines as they negotiate the newfound earth. And you will be home.
It is late at night when my plane begins its descent into Halifax. Up here, I can see the lights of the far-off city hugging the harbou
r as I press my face against the window. Even in the pitch blackness beyond those lights, I sense the shape of a peninsula. It is the city. It is the land. This is not an island, floating alone in the sea. There is that sliver of ground that connects this shape to something larger. Connects it to everything. I watch that land, its trees, rise up to meet me. I brace myself for its touch.
To believe in a peninsula is to believe that you are not alone. That there is something there connecting you, plugging you in to something bigger. I swallow to keep my ears from popping as we make that last turn toward home. I ready myself for the scream of engines. The tires float over the top of trees, impossibly close, impossibly close. And then there it is: the runway. And when we finally touch down, I feel myself yanked forward with a great surge.
Chapter 23
She knew the directions for getting there by heart, had committed them to memory years ago even though she had never gone, not once in the decade since the House of Sharing had opened. Eun-young knew that this was a bizarre sort of reasoning: to want to know exactly how to find this place without ever feeling, until now, the gravitational pull to go there. It surprised her how easy it was to implement the directions that she had engraved into her brain. She took the 1113 bus to Kwangju and then a taxi from Twaechon terminal right to the House’s front courtyard, which overlooked six acres of property and the serene permanence of mountains in the distance.
She watched it all materialize in the cab’s windows as they pulled up. When they did, she paid her driver and then clambered out on her cane. Closed the door and stood there in perfect stillness as the taxi pulled away. The air was crisp with the first hints of autumn, cooler here than in Seoul. She looked up at the six mismatched buildings of the compound. How ordinary they seemed, she thought, so different from the monolithic image she had assigned to them in her mind. Still, there was no mistaking this place: out front of the courtyard, standing on a tall plinth, was a bronze statue of a comfort woman. Eun-young shuffled over to it and craned her neck upward to look at the brown face as it gazed out stoically. The woman, frozen in her sadness and accusation, was exactly what she was meant to be — a stolid totem to the unspeakable.
As Eun-young moved up to the main building and into the museum lobby, she sensed a paralysis come over her, her shoulders tightening with unmistakable claustrophobia as she stood near the arched windows facing out to the grounds’ grassy perimeter. In the foyer, a young woman manning the front desk looked up from her paperback and smiled when she saw Eun-young. “Welcome to the House of Sharing,” she called over. “Come on in. We are open.” Without waiting, the girl began to assemble an assortment of brochures by rote and then extended them to Eun-young as she took her tentative steps toward the desk. The girl watched as Eun-young didn’t even look at the pamphlets after she took them; so she began explaining aloud how the House worked: there was the museum proper, she said, two dormitories that housed the grandmothers (that’s how they were to be referred to — the grandmothers) who lived in the compound full-time, as well as a temple for praying, an educational centre, and a gallery for the paintings that the grandmothers created during their “art therapy” sessions. “There are also gardens all around the property that you’re welcome to look at,” she said. Eun-young knew every one of these facts already, had read about them a hundred times before coming here. The girl’s face blossomed with curiosity. “And what brings you to visit us today?” But Eun-young said nothing, didn’t even nod as she limped past the desk, past the girl, and deeper into the House.
She crept solemnly into the first exhibit she came across: the Room of Proof. Long hardwood floors, track lighting on the ceiling, and walls holding rows upon rows of mounted photos. They were black-and-white images, taken in and around the rape stations during the war. Eun-young paused, then stepped up to the first one by the entrance. The grainy picture showed three Japanese soldiers standing over a group of young women squatting in the mud. The men smiled gamely for the camera while the girls’ faces were downcast and blankly obedient. One of them was clearly pregnant. Eun-young glanced away from the picture, from the sudden bloom of memory it caused. She moved farther along the room. The next photo showed Japanese soldiers lined up outside what was clearly a rape stall. They were laughing amongst themselves as they waited their turn. Another memory spread like ink through Eun-young’s mind. The sound of: Hayaku! Hayaku! Hurry up! Hurry up, it’s my turn! Phrases she hadn’t heard, hadn’t thought of, in decades.
She stepped back, and back again, nearly to the centre of the room as claustrophobia slammed into her once more. She circulated her gaze around this dimly lit space. Every one of these pictures depicted something that Eun-young identified with instantly, a memory that she had buried under the waves of her swelling han. A tent. A truck. A wooden building. A glimpse of the Chinese countryside. Framed displays of identification papers, yellow and faded, marked with stamps she hadn’t seen in sixty years. She stood frozen there among them.
A couple of people came in through the doors on the opposite side of the room. Eun-young kept her head low as she listened to their voices echo around the walls in mid conversation. The first belonged to a young woman. The second belonged to a man. She listened intently. When she caught enough of the man’s voice, Eun-young jolted under the sound of it. He clearly worked at the House as a guide, was explaining something to the girl, but his accent was all wrong. It was wrong. There was no mistake that he was speaking Korean — in fact, he was speaking an obscure dialect from Daegu — but his accent was all wrong.
His accent drove bayonets into Eun-young’s ears.
She looked up. The young man was maybe in his mid-thirties, with long black hair pulled into a ponytail. He was dressed in slacks and a collared shirt with a plastic nametag fastened to his breast pocket. The girl he was speaking to looked like a university student: she had a canvas knapsack on her back and an assiduous look on her face. The man was just wrapping up an explanation of how the grandmothers went by bus to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul every Wednesday for their weekly protest. When he finished, the girl touched his arm and thanked him, and he bowed to her and waved goodbye. When she was gone, he was left alone in the room with Eun-young. He glanced over at her and bowed again, more deeply this time.
“Welcome to the House of Sharing,” he called across to her.
Fury rose up in her cheeks. She shambled over and got right into his face. “You’re Japanese,” she barked.
He nodded with weary resignation. “I am, yes.”
“What, what are you doing here?”
“I am a guide.”
“ Obviously. But, but you know what I mean. How on Earth — how do they …”
He just looked at her.
“How on Earth,” she tried again, “do they allow a Japanese man to work in a place like this?” Her eyes dipped for a moment to his nametag. It read “Sokasu” but was spelled out in Korean characters. So’ka’su.
He tried to smile at her. “I get that question all the time.” When she didn’t reciprocate, he added, “It’s a very long story.”
“I want to hear it,” she said. “Tell me. Tell me now. What … what are you doing here?”
He swallowed, pausing under the cloud of her hostility. But then began. And what amazed Eun-young was how this elucidation didn’t come out by rote, even though he probably recited it several times a day. He told her that his grandfather had served in China for ten years during the war, but had never talked about his experiences. One day, when Sokasu was still quite young, he found a box of his grandfather’s old army mementos, and inside was a photograph of a young Korean girl. When he asked his grandfather who she was, he replied by saying that she was a comfort woman. Sokasu didn’t know what the term meant. “When I pressed Grandfather about it,” he told Eun-young, “he just wanted to change the subject. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions. I think he was ashamed to even —”
“Was he a rapist?” she barked.
“I don’t know
. I’ll never know. He died without ever talking about it.” Sokasu plugged onward. Explained how, when he was nineteen, he moved to Tokyo for university. There, he became friends with a group of Korean exchange students — and from them learned so much about his country’s aggression against theirs, all the things that he had never been taught in school. “I mean, I knew nothing about Korea — other than it had been our colony. I had no idea what we had done here.” And from these friends, Sokasu learned what the term “comfort woman” really meant. “And so I had to come,” he said. “I had to see these grandmothers for myself.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Many years. I fell in love with the House immediately and started volunteering, mostly as a guide for Japanese tourists. But it took a long time for the grandmothers to accept me, to let go of their suspicions and their anger. But eventually they did. And now I work here full-time. It helps that I learned the language. I even mastered a number of Korea’s rural dialects.”
She felt herself soften towards him. “I noticed,” she said, nodding to the place where he had stood with the girl. “That must have been difficult. You speak very good Korean.”
“Thank you. It was hard. It took me years. But worth it. It allows me to be here, in this place, fully. It lets me be a part of the House.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Why do you think?” He looked so intently at her. “I am not guilty of anything; but I am still responsible.” He tilted his head at her. “And what brings you here today?”
Eun-young gazed absently at all the photos mounted on the walls around them, and the wattle on her neck began to tremble. To speak these words. This admission that she could not even speak to her own husband. This confession that rang of shame throughout her family. The disgrace that she brought to everything she touched.
“I was one of these women,” she creaked. When she looked back at Sokasu’s face, he was nodding; but there was something else there, just the slightest hint, barely noticeable, of incredulity. A reflex, perhaps. So she repeated her sentence, this time in flawless Japanese. “I was one of these women, young man.” His face grew dark. “That’s right,” she said to him. “You chose to learn my language. But they forced me to learn yours.”
