‘Quiet,’ Keiko hushes her, cupping Hana’s face in her hands. ‘Stop shouting, girl.’
They huddle around her, hugging her, stroking her hair, but she struggles against them. Her throat is soon raw, but Hana continues to scream. Keiko finally slaps her cheek.
The smack is followed by a heavy silence, and then muffled sobs as a few of the girls in the kitchen begin to cry. The soldier orders them all back up to their rooms. Keiko guides Hana into the brothel and up the stairs, depositing her into the room where the girl she once was died.
Emi
Seoul, December 2011
Everywhere Emi looks, banners with One Thousand Wednesdays emblazoned across them greet her eyes as she stands with the crowd in front of the Japanese embassy. The weekly demonstrations began in 1992, and today, the one thousandth Wednesday, there is still no resolution for the surviving women.
There are already many demonstrators and supporters gathered even though it is still early, but the buzz of energy feels muted, like the funeral of a great leader where a kind of celebratory sadness permeates the crowd. Emi looks up at the hulking embassy building. All the windows are shut and the blinds are drawn. Emi catches other women eyeing the embassy windows, and she knows they are all wondering the same thing: Are they in there, watching? Do they feel remorse or did they call a holiday for their embassy workers? Perhaps they are all on her island enjoying a day off. Bitterness settles in her stomach, slowly burning like coals at the end of a blazing fire.
‘Are you too cold? Shall we sit over there, sheltered from the wind inside one of the tents?’ Lane asks.
‘No, this is fine.’ Emi didn’t realise she was shivering, but now that Lane has pointed it out, the cold is all she can think about. She shoves her hands into her coat pockets.
‘I’ll buy us some hot chocolate,’ Lane offers, and disappears into the crowd.
A man taps on a microphone. ‘Test, testing, hello, hello …’
Emi zones out in the midst of the hubbub. The man’s voice booming through the speakers, the murmur of the crowd, the Japanese eyes hiding behind shut windows, they all blur into the background. The only sensation Emi cannot block out is the cold. It penetrates the layers of fabric wrapped around her body and pierces through her thin and wrinkled skin. It was cold like this the night she lost her father. The memory catches her off guard, and she is forced to let it in.
It’s a strange and terrifying thing, witnessing a person’s death. One moment he is there, breathing, thinking, full of motion, but then the next moment there’s nothing. No breath, no thought, no heart beating. The face slack, emotionless. Emi saw her father’s face like that, wiped of the terror it had held only a moment before. He was gone in the blink of an eye. She had closed her eyelids, a mere flutter, opened them, and he was dead.
She has never told anyone the story. It was easier never to think of it, to block it out so that she didn’t have to relive it. But now she’s too old to keep the memories back. Her body is worn out, just like her mind. They are starting to resurface at all hours of the day, invading her solitude with pain and regret. Sometimes, old wounds need to be reopened to let them properly heal – that’s what JinHee says – and Emi still has not healed from watching her father die.
In the midst of the crowd, Emi lets her father’s face fill her mind. His kind, peaceful eyes look back at her, and she sees him like he was, full of life and grace rarely seen in times of turmoil. It was 1948, and Emi was fourteen years old. The Korean War had not yet begun, but the tension on her island between the police the South Korean government had sent to keep order and the leftist rebels had grown into a fierce guerrilla war. The Jeju Uprising had begun, leaving many dead on both sides.
The police came into her village under cover of darkness. The howling December winds concealed their approach. A bang and then the front door to the house flew open. Policemen rushed in and pulled Emi and her parents from their blankets. They dragged them out into the frozen night air. She was crying and confused, but the policemen smacked her and beat her parents, shouting at them to shut up. The men were young and angry, but Emi didn’t know why they were targeting her family. She had no brother or uncle to join the leftist rebels, no one to bring the wrath of the police down upon her family. They were merely citizens existing in a country torn in two by powers greater than themselves.
One of the policemen grabbed her father and pulled him out in front of Emi, facing her mother. He pushed her father down onto his knees and held a curved knife to his throat.
‘This is for hiding the rebels,’ he said, and then time stopped.
Emi watched in disbelief as the blade sliced across her father’s neck from left to right. Blood streamed, staining his nightshirt black in the dim night. His terrified eyes didn’t leave her mother’s, and Emi thought he looked more afraid for her than for himself. Then they glazed over into lifelessness. Her mother wailed into the sleeting sky, but another young policeman kicked her in the side of the head. She fell into silence. Emi screamed and crawled to her father.
‘Don’t be dead,’ she cried over and over again. ‘Father, don’t be dead.’
A policeman wrestled her off of her father’s limp body. Emi tried to slip out of his grip, but he only held on to her tighter, bruising her arms.
‘Stop fighting me, or I’ll cut your throat, too,’ he warned.
‘Leave her. She’s covered in blood,’ another policeman said in a commanding voice.
Emi looked up at him. He appeared older than the others, and he seemed in charge.
‘Killing makes me need it,’ the policeman said, wrenching her arms until she knelt in front of him.
‘We aren’t finished yet. There are more houses to visit. Then you can do as you wish.’ He glanced at Emi and then walked away.
The policeman holding her seemed to think about it a moment. He spat on the ground and then nodded. He kicked Emi in the centre of her back. She fell over onto all fours, and he kicked her again. She slammed into the cold, wet ground and covered her face with her arms.
‘Get yourself cleaned up and maybe I’ll return for you,’ he laughed. He adjusted his trousers and straightened his coat.
They left as quietly as they had arrived, like tigers in the night. Emi and her mother held her father’s body between them as they sat silently watching their home burn down. It had all happened so fast that Emi didn’t have a chance to see who had lit the fire. When she looked around, she was shocked to see bright lights dotting the hills as other homes burned. If she listened very carefully, she could hear distant cries beneath the howling wind, or perhaps it was her mother’s silenced voice screaming inside Emi’s head.
The policemen had burned down nearly her entire village. She buried her father in a shallow grave, covered with sand she had carried by the bucketful from the beach because the earth was too hard to penetrate beyond a few inches. Her mother knelt beside the grave and wept. Others came to help, a few old women and even older men. The policemen had carried away most of the young men and women, along with the boys and the girls. No one wanted to think about where they had been taken. They just wanted to bury their dead and find shelter. Emi didn’t know why the policeman had helped her the way he had. He had saved her from a terrible fate.
‘How can they do this to their own countrymen?’ an old woman asked no one in particular as Emi scattered the sand over her father’s body.
A few old men tried to explain the fear that existed between the Soviet Union and the United States, but no one could explain away the death dealt by blood brothers.
‘We are all Koreans,’ the old woman said again. ‘The Japanese have gone.’ Her face was lined with time and hardship. She had survived colonisation only to suffer a new kind of occupation.
Emi returned to burying her father. Like the rest of the people in her small village, her family had done its best not to get involved with the guerrilla rebels or the police. All she could think about was the fact that her father had survived the
Japanese occupation and the war but had died by his own countrymen’s hands.
Emi and her mother followed the small group of survivors out of the village and down near the coast. The old man who had spoken earlier said that he had lived on the island for nearly eighty years and knew of a cave, hidden off an inlet along the shore. Her mother barely managed the day-long journey. It was as though a tether attached her to her dead husband and pulled her backwards two steps for each one she managed to take away from him. Emi had been diving for five years, and her body was lean and muscular. She used her diving strength to half carry, half drag her mother to the safety of the cave.
The cave sheltered nineteen people. Emi recognised a few faces, but most were from the other side of the cove. She wondered whether her best friend, JinHee, had survived the massacre, but no one dared leave the safety of the cave to search for others, except for one woman. A mother left to search for her daughter, stolen as their home burned down. She returned to the cave broken, her face ashen-grey. No amount of coaxing could persuade her to tell them what she had found, but Emi imagined the worst.
At night, the mother would wake up screaming her daughter’s name. Emi would cry herself to sleep, covering her ears to block out the woman’s agony.
Afraid to light a fire in case the policemen located their hiding place, they froze through the night, teeth chattering, deep within the cave. Emi and her mother huddled together with two elderly women to share their body heat. The men lay together, too, but the December winter was too harsh. The oldest among them soon began to die, quietly slipping away as they slept.
Emi and her mother helped the old men move the frozen bodies to the back of the cave, where they remained preserved by the cold. Emi made herself think of JinHee’s wild stories just before falling asleep, as though remembering them would ensure her friend survived. Imagining her friend alive in another cave on the island kept Emi going, even in the face of her grief for her father and her changed mother.
They ate what they could find inside the cave, moss growing on the walls, insects creeping in the dirt, and a few creatures Emi suspected were probably rats or worse. After four weeks of near starvation, Emi’s mother decided it was time to go back. They leaned on one another, blinking in the January sunlight, as they exited their hiding place.
They were both weakened and suffered in the wretched cold, walking all the way home through newly fallen snow, passing buildings burned to the ground without encountering a single soul. When she saw the black cinders that were once her family home poking through white tufts of snow, Emi felt too numb to cry. Everything was gone. Everything. The place that had once housed her family, had held memories of each of them within its walls – her sister’s serious expression as she taught Emi how to read, her father’s voice as he sang while playing his zither, her mother’s delicious dishes cooked with tenderness – all was burned to ash.
Where were they now, Emi wondered, her father’s spirit and her sister’s absent body? Her mother knelt in the ruins and covered her face with her hands. After a long silence, Emi led her mother to the site where they had buried her father.
The mound was covered over with a layer of virgin snow. Tiny twiglike footprints trailed zigzag tracks across the small hump. Emi looked up into the white sky, where seagulls soared, gliding on the cold January wind. Were they visiting her father, perhaps paying homage to his departing spirit?
Her mother knelt beside the mound and bowed her forehead to the ground, touching the snow. Gentle sobs escaped her, and Emi knelt next to her, hugging her shaking body. She felt so thin, like an old woman. Her mother was not yet forty, but the war had stolen too much from her, her eldest daughter, then her husband, and now what was left of her youth drained away into the frozen earth with her home. Emi sobbed, too, mourning for them all, the living and the dead.
Voices drifted towards Emi, and she sat up, listening. The wind seemed to die down into silence, and the seagulls overhead cried their high-pitched warnings. Then she heard it again, men’s voices.
‘Mother, someone’s coming,’ Emi whispered just as the voices sounded behind them. The tips of rifles held aloft marched towards them.
‘We must go,’ Emi whispered, and attempted to lift her mother to her feet, but she wouldn’t budge.
Emi’s heart raced. It had been a mistake to leave the cave. If they survived this, they would return to its safety. A small grove of tangerine trees blackened from the fires remained standing below a rise in the terrain. If she could just get her mother to her feet, they could hide behind the trees and wait for the policemen to pass, Emi thought, forgetting the fresh layer of snowfall.
‘Please, Mother,’ she begged, pulling her with all her strength. ‘We must hurry.’
They rushed over the small rise and down into the tangerine grove. They hid behind a tree that loomed above the rest, even though half its branches had burned to dust in piles on the ground. The cold weather had kept the roots from burning, but it would never recover.
The policemen’s voices ceased as they came upon the ruins of the house. Emi listened as they sifted through the ashes. She crouched protectively over her mother as they knelt, shivering from the cold.
‘Look here,’ a policeman called to the others.
‘What is it?’ another one answered.
‘Fresh footprints.’
Then silence. Emi imagined them inspecting her footprints, following them over the hill, being led to her hiding place. She had been foolish to let her mother go back. She knew her mother wasn’t in her right mind; they were frozen, starving and grieving. Surrounded by death, Emi had been glad to leave the cave that had become like a tomb. She had so desperately wanted to see what was left of her home.
The teenage boy who rounded the tree first wore a thick, padded coat with a yellow scarf around his neck. He spoke to her in a soft tone.
‘Are you injured?’ he asked. He glanced beneath her at her mother, pressed against the tree. ‘Is she OK? Is that your mother you’re protecting?’
Emi couldn’t respond. She simply kept her arms around her mother. The other policemen came near, and their silent curiosity hung heavy. Emi waited for the harsh words, the cruel fists, and the pain that would follow. She bowed her head.
‘Is she deaf?’ one of the policemen asked.
‘I think she’s in shock,’ the younger one answered. ‘It’s OK. We’re not here to harm you. We’re searching for survivors. Come with us. We’ll take you somewhere safe.’
He reached out his hand, and Emi shrank away. Her mother lifted her face and spat on his coat. He took a step backwards. The other two policemen shouted at her mother and started towards her with their rifles high in the air, preparing to smash them against her.
‘No, stay back. It’s all right. They’re just afraid. They’re covered in ash,’ he told the men. ‘Remember the house we passed, and the burial mound …’ His voice faded as he inspected Emi’s face.
‘They murdered him,’ Emi said.
The three policemen froze and stared at her.
‘Who did?’ the boy with the soft voice asked. He lowered himself so that they were eye level. ‘Did you see who did this?’
‘Don’t tell him anything,’ her mother whispered.
Emi looked into her mother’s dark eyes. They flashed a warning at Emi. She looked back at the young man.
‘They came in the middle of the night. We could see nothing. It was too dark.’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked, his voice still kind, as though he wanted to help her. As though he truly cared.
She nodded. He stood up and seemed to think about her words for a moment. He looked out over the fire-ravaged tangerine trees. Emi followed his gaze and couldn’t help remembering running through the shady grove during hot summers with her sister, laughing at nothing. The sudden memory took her by surprise, and she couldn’t shake the feeling she would never see it like that again. Everything was gone. The policeman took in a breath, and it rushed out heavily t
hrough his nostrils.
‘Bring them,’ he said.
Emi was taken aback by his altered tone. His soft demeanour was instantly replaced by military efficiency. The other two policemen lifted Emi and her mother to their feet and led them away from their home. As they passed her father’s grave, her eyes lingered on the smallness of the mound. In her mind he was a large, robust man who towered over her with strong, protective arms, but death had taken that image away, leaving behind a small rise that in time would become barely noticeable. She stared at the ground as they led her past familiar stones and seashells along the path, her treasures brought up from the sea. She struggled when she saw the truck, but it was too late.
The policemen took them to the local station, which was a swirl of bodies, some uniformed, others in bloodied rags, their voices a cacophony of anger, pain and fear.
An old woman sat against the wall, cradling her son’s blood-soaked head in her lap. She was still and silent, while all around her chaos raged. Emi clasped her mother’s hand in hers as tightly as she could, as the policeman dragged them to a makeshift waiting area. People huddled together in small groups, some crying, others shocked into silence. He left them and spoke to the officer at the reception desk. He looked over his shoulder a few times as he filled out a form.
Emi looked at each face around her and recognised no one. Where were the people of her village? Emi suddenly feared they were all dead, then pushed the thought from her mind. She glanced at her mother but couldn’t bear seeing the vacant expression on her prematurely aged face.
The policeman returned and Emi squared her shoulders, trying to express her disdain for him, but he seemed not to notice.
‘We’ll wait here until they call us.’
White Chrysanthemum Page 10
