‘Why, what have we done wrong?’ Emi asked.
‘Nothing,’ he answered, clearing his throat. He seemed uncertain.
‘Then why have you brought us here?’ Emi felt bolder the more sheepish he became. He was once again the soft-spoken young man who had first approached her in the tangerine grove, not the policeman who had ordered her into the truck.
‘That is not your concern. It’s government business.’
‘We have nothing to do with the government—’
‘Stop talking,’ he interrupted, grabbing her arm. His eyes darted around the room, surveying the people listening to their conversation. ‘You are here on my orders. That is all you need to know.’
She glared at him until he finally released her arm.
The desk officer called to them, and the three of them were ushered into a small office at the rear of the station. When the policeman shut the door, the misery of the world beyond that room was suddenly muted, leaving a patch of foggy quiet in Emi’s head. A large desk dominated the room, and behind it sat a man in a decorated uniform. Numerous medals and ribbons adorned his chest, and Emi wondered which countrymen he had killed to have earned such heavy badges of honour. She studied his face and waited for him to speak.
‘I have been told you are a haenyeo. Is that correct?’ he said, not looking up from the pile of paperwork in front of him. He seemed to keep reading even as he awaited her reply.
‘Yes,’ Emi answered, wondering how they had checked her family’s records so quickly.
‘And is this your mother?’ He looked up for a moment and glanced at Emi’s mother.
‘Yes.’
‘She is a haenyeo, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, you are very agreeable, I must say. HyunMo, you are a lucky one! She will make a suitable wife, I think. As long as you ask her the right questions, that is. Ha!’
He slapped his knee as he chuckled to himself.
‘Tell me, what is your family name?’
Emi paused. He had said wife. She didn’t understand.
‘Her father was Jang,’ HyunMo answered before she could speak. He did not look at her but kept his eyes on the desk.
‘Jang? Good, strong family name,’ the officer said, and wrote it down on the form. He signed the bottom of the form and slid it across the desk towards Emi. ‘Good, now sign here.’ He offered her the pen.
The policeman knew her father’s name. Emi stared at him; her ears prickled with heat, and her mouth felt dry.
‘Take the pen, girl, and sign your name on the line, just there above mine. See? Right there,’ the officer instructed, placing the pen in Emi’s hand.
‘What is this?’ Emi finally asked. She looked at her mother, but she was no help, staring at the floor, silently weeping.
‘It’s your marriage licence. Sign there.’
‘But, who am I marrying?’ Emi asked.
‘Why, him of course,’ he said, pointing to the policeman, the boy who had taken her away from her burned-down home, who knew her father’s name and her occupation. ‘Come, come, I don’t have all day. Sign it. HyunMo, you’ll sign next to her name.’
Emi turned to stare at HyunMo. He was much older than her but still a teenage boy. They expected her to marry him? She simply stood there, holding the pen, when the officer suddenly slapped her so hard that she fell to the floor. He had moved so quickly, rising to his feet like a striking snake, whipping his hand across her face with such power.
‘Get her to her feet.’
HyunMo carefully lifted her and kept a supporting arm around her as he nudged her back towards the desk. He seemed as astonished as Emi at the sudden violence. Her cheek throbbed, and her vision blurred.
‘You will sign this, now. HyunMo will be your husband. And then all three of you will exit my office, so that I may deal with the next citizens on my list. Do it now, or I will have him arrest you, and by the state of you two,’ he said, motioning towards their emaciated figures, ‘you won’t last very long in jail.’
Emi’s mother seemed to focus on the officer. She leaned over the desk, her hands gripping the edge of it. Her face became animated, her expression filled with vitriol. Emi was afraid of what she might say, but the officer cut her off before she could speak.
‘Do not attempt it, Mother. I wield the power of life and death over your daughter. One displeasing word from either of you, and I will not hesitate to send you in front of a firing squad. Tell her to sign the form,’ he ordered HyunMo.
‘Just do as he says,’ HyunMo urged, the look in his eyes apologetic.
Emi gripped the pen, but it shook in her trembling hand. HyunMo guided it to the correct line, and she signed her name. He took the pen from her and signed his name next to hers, Lee, HyunMo.
‘Good. Now get out. I have a busy day.’
HyunMo led Emi and her mother out of the office, back through the scene of despair in the crowded station, and into the cold January air. The blustering wind cooled the heat in her assaulted cheek. She rubbed it with her hand, still trembling from signing her life away.
‘Why?’ she asked after the silence between them dragged on longer than she could bear. They were walking back to the truck parked behind the station. ‘Why did you force a marriage between us?’
‘Our sons will inherit this island,’ he said without pausing. He opened the door to the truck and ushered her mother in.
‘Our sons?’ She was shocked that he expected them to engage in a real marriage, like the one her parents had. The notion was surreal.
‘Yes, and your land, the village’s, will be inherited back by us through our children.’
‘Us?’
‘The other policemen. Like many of them, I had to leave my home in the North and flee south of the line before the communists murdered me like they did my family. They took everything from me. From all of us. So we are marrying you to regain what we lost, but more importantly, to keep the communists out of the South, we must breed them out. It’s for your own good … and the good of Korea.’
‘I’m not a communist,’ she said, hoping that someone who had suffered so much might understand what she was suffering in that moment.
He looked at her directly, and his expression was void of emotion.
‘This island is full of communists. You are one whether you know it or not. By marrying me, you are no longer a threat. Get in.’
He held the door open and waited for her to climb into the truck, but she couldn’t move. The policemen had killed her father. Emi thought back to the darkness of that night. Was HyunMo there? Was that how he knew to come looking for her at the ashes of her home? Her stomach turned over and her knees gave way. HyunMo caught her in his arms and helped her into the truck.
Emi sat beside her mother, trying to remember. It was so dark that night, the sleet had pelted her eyes, and fear had blurred all the men’s faces. She tried to recall HyunMo’s image from that terrible scene, but it wasn’t familiar. Surely she would recognise her father’s killer if she saw him again. When HyunMo climbed into the driver’s seat, she gazed at him, trying to see him through the fog of memory.
Ignoring her, he started the engine and drove away from the station without another word. Emi couldn’t make his features match any of the men from that night. Slowly, she tore her eyes away from him and blankly stared out of the windscreen. Emi didn’t know where HyunMo was taking them, and the longer they drove, the more lost she felt.
Shivering in the square, recollecting events from long ago, Emi feels her age weigh heavily upon her. Her leg aches with a terrible pain, running up the back of her thigh and spiralling in fiery stabs upwards into her hip. The cold doesn’t help the pains of age or the memories flooding in from her past.
Lane returns bearing three cups of hot chocolate. Emi accepts hers readily, enjoying the heat that penetrates her mittens. She glances at the faces surrounding her. She is searching for something and nothing at once, hoping yet not believing she will notice something familiar, a
smile, a gesture, anything that reminds her of her childhood. She has come to the demonstration three times, and as she searches through the crowd, she feels like she is looking for something as obscure as happiness.
Emi sips from her cup; her tongue stings from the sweet, hot liquid, and her eyes keep moving over the bodies amassing around her, never resting on one face or hand for too long, afraid she might miss something – someone. Lane and her daughter sip from their cups, too, ever watchful of Emi’s eyes, but neither woman interrupts Emi’s quiet search.
Emi gazes at the people in the crowd, hoping that one of them will look back and that she will find her sister.
Hana
Manchuria, Summer 1943
Hana’s photograph now hangs with the others at the bottom of the staircase. Her face looks upon visiting soldiers who will know to queue in front of door 2 if they choose her for their allotted time. Enlisted soldiers get up to thirty minutes alone with her, officers an hour. She is like an item on a menu, perused, purchased and consumed.
The routine at the brothel is simple. Rise, wash, eat, then wait in the room for the soldiers to arrive. When the hour grows late, usually after nine o’clock at night, the remaining men will be sent home. Then she washes herself and the used condoms, disinfects and dresses her wounds if she accumulated any that day. They eat a meagre meal, then go to bed to start the day again. Ten hours a day, six days a week, she ‘services’ soldiers. She is raped by twenty men a day. The seventh day is chore day. She cleans her room and launders her ragged dress, and together with the other girls she cleans the brothel and tends to the tired vegetable patch in the yard, while awaiting the doctor’s visit every other chore day.
It took Hana two weeks to accept that there was no escaping the routine. The first week was the hardest. For three straight days, Hana ate nothing, and for three straight nights she cried uncontrollably. She later learned she was lucky not to have been put in solitary confinement in the basement, where they sometimes put girls who refused to conform or who required punishment beyond a lashing. On the third night of her tears, a knock at the door interrupted her dark thoughts.
‘Stop crying, little Sakura. It is enough.’ Keiko walked in. The woman’s voice startled Hana and she turned to look at her. Keiko risked punishment by coming to Hana’s room. They could throw her into the horrid solitary confinement cell beneath the brothel, and the thought that Keiko would take that chance stopped Hana’s weeping.
‘You must pull yourself together,’ Keiko scolded her, though her harsh tone didn’t match the pitying expression on her face. She leaned towards Hana and swept a lock of hair from her face. ‘I know what you’re thinking right now. That you want to die. We all wanted to die after our first few nights.’ When Hana didn’t respond, Keiko continued. ‘Don’t you want to see your mother again?’
Her mother. The word was a stab in the heart.
‘I’ll never see her again. I know that,’ Hana whispered, turning away from Keiko. The women’s voices at the market echoed in Hana’s mind then. Even if Hana lived through this and returned home one day, would that not drive her own parents to early deaths?
‘You won’t see her again if you die, that’s for certain. And you must think of your mother. She’ll never know what happened to you. She’ll be left wondering for the rest of her life.’
The image of her mother’s distraught face when her uncle’s sword arrived at their home filled Hana’s mind. She would have saved her sister from this horrible fate only to leave her with a broken mother. Hana would rather endure the worst torture imaginable than to destroy her family.
But the alternative surfaced in her mind. She would suffer day after day at the hands of soldiers, until – she wasn’t sure how long it would last. Until the war ended? Until she got pregnant? Or until she died? Her mother might never learn what happened to her.
‘I promise, you’ll see her again. You won’t be here forever. None of us will. We just have to put in our time, and then we can go home.’
Keiko continued talking, but Hana could no longer hear her. Home. It sounded so far away, like a place in a dream she once had. Was it really possible that she would ever find her way back? Was Keiko telling the truth? Would they send her home?
‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’
Keiko instructed her on how to wash herself, and when Hana didn’t respond, Keiko did it for her.
Hana didn’t have the energy to stop her. The antiseptic solution burned worse than salt water in a cut, but Hana didn’t cry out. Keiko talked throughout, as though filling the silence between them would make everything OK.
‘This war won’t last forever, nor will your time here. Take care of yourself in here, survive, and one day, you will be set free, and you will see your mother again.’
Hana looked into the woman’s eyes. This was the second time she had mentioned being set free. She still couldn’t judge whether Keiko was telling the truth, but the geisha didn’t look away. She seemed to dare Hana to dispute her. Hana remained silent. After a long moment, Keiko spoke again as though nothing had passed between them.
‘If you are to make the journey home one day, you will have to take care of yourself the best you can while you are here. And that requires cleaning yourself after each soldier’s visit, eating as much food as you are given, and washing your clothing and your room so that bugs cannot infect you with sickness. That is how we all will survive.’
When Keiko left her, Hana lay back down on the thin mat and stared into the darkness of her room. She listened to the new sounds that encompassed her: the other women in their rooms, the creaking of the roof above her head, the wind rushing through the eaves.
‘Please, Mother. Come and find me. Take me away from this place,’ Hana whispered to the empty room. She repeated the words over and over until they became a monotonous chant buried deep in her mind.
Now, two weeks later, Hana has learned to follow Keiko’s guidance and manages not to think too long on the notion of dying. Instead, she holds on to Keiko’s promise that they will all be set free one day and she will see her family again. The soldiers continue to line up outside her door. They don’t beat her if she lies still on the mat. It is as though they don’t care if she is dead or alive, just that she is physically present so that they can do what they have come to do.
One of the other girls, Hinata, offers Hana a special tea to numb the pain between her legs and along the length of her body. She takes a few sips but doesn’t like how it makes her feel afterwards. Dizzy, light-headed, and not quite present. She finds it difficult to stay awake. She learns later that it is opium tea and makes certain not to accept it a second time. In Hana’s school, the children were warned against opium. They were told that it was a sign of inferiority to consume opium, and that is why their enemy, the inferior Chinese, were all addicted to it.
Hana refuses the tea partly because she is afraid she may become addicted, but mostly because she needs to keep control of her mind. Hinata drinks the opium tea continuously throughout the day and night. It’s how she copes with the demands of the soldiers. It’s how she survives. But Hana knows it won’t work for her. She will lose control of her mind and slip back into thoughts of death. Her memory of home is strong, but so is the pain of remaining in the brothel.
Turning down the tea is her first step towards staying alive. With a clear head, she has the power to make herself retreat into her imagination. As the men visit her each day she withdraws from reality and sees herself diving deep beneath the ocean, escaping her surroundings. She learns to hold her breath as a soldier invades her body, and she feels as if she is really struggling to breathe before rising to the surface for air to fill her lungs. She never looks the men in their faces. It is better not to even think of them as people. Instead, they are machines sent to her throughout the day. She focuses on the promise that it will all come to an end, because it always does, and then she sleeps. She can control her mind and choose what she lets in.
Whe
n Hana rises each morning, her first thought is of the sea. The sound of the waves splashing against the rocky shore fills her mind. And then she wonders whether her mother is also rising with the morning sun. Is she preparing breakfast for her sister and father? Most mornings her mother makes rice porridge with flakes of seaweed and fish from the previous night’s dinner. Sometimes she fries an egg and slices it into thin strips to mix into the porridge. Hana can taste the salty broth on her tongue, and she finds herself salivating at the memory. In the brothel, they rarely have more than a couple of rice balls or a bowl of soupy rice prepared by the old Chinese woman. If they are lucky, a few Japanese pickles can be found lurking beneath. Their paltry vegetable patch is often raided by the soldiers, who are also desperate for food.
Water is drawn from a well located at the far end of the dirt yard. The girls take turns retrieving a fresh bucket throughout the day. When it is her turn, Hana takes as long as she can to carry out the chore. Even five minutes of respite is worth it.
If she isn’t stealing time by fetching water, she finds a reason to wash herself extra carefully before the next soldier enters the room. When they try to hurry her, she follows Riko’s advice and mentions venereal disease prevention, and if they press her, she lies and says she noticed red bumps or pus-filled sores on the previous soldier. Most of the time, she gets away with the lies, but once in a while the soldier won’t care. Those are the worst men to deal with. She quickly learns to say nothing and do as they wish. The quicker they are satisfied, the sooner they leave.
Late at night, after the soldiers are gone, Hana misses home the most. Lying on her musty tatami mat with her threadbare blanket pulled up to her chin, she yearns for the warmth of her little sister’s body lying next to her, the slow draws of breath of her snoring father nearby, and the constant rustle of her mother’s restless body searching for abalone in her dreams. Hana also thinks of her friends, the other haenyeo divers she worked with every day. She misses them all.
These memories distress her and yet sustain her. They invade the silence within her tiny prison, each comforting memory cutting her as though a blade is slashing across her flesh. The pain reminds her of her sacrifice. If she weren’t trapped in the brothel, her sister would be. She will endure the brothel because one day she will find her way back home. She will see her family again.
White Chrysanthemum Page 11
