by Kim Soom
“So I won’t lose the snails . . .” The words pop out before she realizes it. Oh no. She can’t finish the sentence.
“Snails?” Suddenly the playful smile is gone. He inspects her.
“Uh, nothing . . .”
“You said something about snails . . .”
“Did I?”
“Halmŏni, why don’t you talk with your children about a dementia checkup? My mother-in-law just had one. What I’ve learned is that with dementia, like every other condition, early detection is best.”
She’s still not responding. With a smug expression he leaves.
She waits until his footsteps have trailed off down the alley, then opens her left fist. Where did they go? She gazes searchingly at her palm.
She and some other girls were at an outpost high in the hills. At nightfall the soldiers called the girls to warm themselves around the campfire. The girls gathered in a circle around the toasty fire. Their pale faces turned rosy. A soldier passed around a canteen of gaoliang. After two rounds of the strong spirit Hyangsuk launched into a song she liked to sing. She’d learned it from a kamikaze pilot when she was at a Taiwan comfort station.
“Take off bravely, over the bamboo groove, over the golden waves and silver clouds. No one is there to send me off or wish me luck, no one except my Yuriko, you’re the only one . . .” 3 Yuriko was Hyangsuk’s Japanese name.
The chattering girls started to cackle and the soldiers chuckled.
She herself was the least worked up. Mopey-faced, she cast her gaze among the girls and soldiers and beheld the smiling face of a dead girl. It was Kisuk ŏnni, who had bled to death in an opium-induced stupor.
She was trying to return the smile when a soldier tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to see the man offering her the canteen.
As she grabbed it she grumbled, “Drop dead, you fucking idiot!” 4
The soldier’s face crumbled and a slap landed on her face. The canteen was knocked to the ground. The only Korean the Japanese soldiers could understand were curse words.
A name catches in a recess of her memory and her lips twitch and then release a moan that verges on a lament. That girl disappeared one day without saying goodbye. She heard hushed talk among the girls washing their sakku that the girl was six months pregnant.5
He was an officer of short stature with a mustache sparse as toothbrush bristles. Seeing her swollen genitalia were causing her pain, he stuck his penis in her mouth. Startled, she clenched her teeth, leaving deep bite marks on his organ. Cursing in a growl that sounded full of coal dust, he shoved her against the wall and then flung open the door and called otosan. Otosan rushed in and hauled her out to the yard, where he beat her to a pulp and she lost consciousness.
When she came to, her left arm was woefully swollen, the upper-arm bone fractured and dislocated.
“Oh my, back from the dead.” Hanok ŏnni was relieved. “It’s been two days!”
“We were sure he was going to kill you. It’s wonderful to have you back!” 6 said Miok ŏnni as she ran her hand down her chest.
Haha made her take soldiers before the fracture healed.7
The days were sweltering and more girls were vexed with sores and pus from their swollen privates. Those who had difficulty walking got around by crawling. If the trip to the outhouse was a chore, they used a can. Yŏngsun’s navel turned blackish red from late-stage syphilis.
Miok ŏnni’s belly ballooned to the point that she couldn’t take soldiers, and every visit to the toilet left her whimpering. She was sure she was pregnant and feared the baby would pop out and fall into the toilet pit, which seemed bottomless. Haha switched her to kitchen work. While the other girls were serving the soldiers Miok ŏnni gave birth onto a flour sack on the kitchen floor.8 Less than ten days after the delivery she resumed taking soldiers. While she was on duty the sick girls tended to her baby. When the baby was able to hold his head up, haha swaddled him and went off to the Chinese village. Soon the girls were whispering that haha had sold the baby to a Chinese quack dentist.
Ch’unhŭi ŏnni came unstrung and was seen roaming the hallway in the uniform of a petty officer sleeping in her room.9 Haha made her keep taking soldiers.
“Clean her up, girls!”
Ch’unhŭi ŏnni had not washed up, and her crusted face looked like a peanut shell. She herself took Ch’unhŭi ŏnni by the wrist and led her to the wash area. She sat her down in front of the faucet and turned the water on.
“Where’s my mom? She wasn’t there when I woke up . . .” Sooty water dripped into Ch’unhŭi ŏnni’s half-open mouth.
“She’s out in the fields.”
“The fields? What for?”
“To dig some potatoes.”
Ch’unhŭi ŏnni’s face froze. “Mom, where did you go?” Ch’unhŭi ŏnni said, clinging to her arm.
“I didn’t go anywhere,” she answered.
“Mom, don’t you ever go anywhere without me!”
“Of course I won’t.”
After breakfast she went back out to the yard and saw otosan punching Ch’unhŭi ŏnni in the head.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay holed up in your room? Why are you slinking around out here?” Harder and harder he punched her.
Around midnight an officer arrived. He asked her name. She’d taken more than thirty soldiers that day and could barely keep her eyes open.
“Why don’t I make a name for you—Takeko.” Which increased her stock of names by one.
As much as she’d abandoned hopes of returning home, she couldn’t get over envying the girls who could remember their home address.
Kunja gave her home address: “North Kyŏngsang Province, Ch’ilgok County, Chich’ŏn Township . . . you keep going on a sickle-shaped little road and then you’ll see my house . . . you can memorize the address for me in case I forget.”
She herself learned the address by heart and had a vivid image of Kunja’s house in her mind even though she’d never been there. Her home too was at the end of a little road.
Before she knew it, she who had arrived at age 13 at the comfort station in Manchuria was turning 20. In the meantime she had grown about as much as the distance between two knuckles. Of the girls who had come to the comfort station seven years ago, only two remained—she and Aesun. Punsŏn had been taken away by otosan. Yŏnsun and Haegŭm with the wrist tattoos declaring their sistership had gone separate ways.
She had been the youngest in the train heading endlessly north seven years ago, and now she was one of the oldest.
Otosan brought two more girls. One of them was 13 and this girl’s naïve expression, dark cotton chŏgori, and funny-looking ankle-length pants made her look like a ghost of she herself way back then at the Taegu train station.
“How’d you end up here?” Yŏngsun asked the girl. “You’re only a baby.” A cigarette was burning at the tips of 16-year-old Yŏngsun’s fingers. “Well, now that you’re here, what can you do? Maybe it’s your fate . . .” Yŏngsun puffed on the cigarette and the acrid smoke rose, veiling her face before thinning out.
Haha came up with Japanese names for the new girls. “From now on you’re Sadako,” she said to one of them, having forgotten that was also Hanok ŏnni’s Japanese name.
Hanok ŏnni, sprawled out after returning from her injection at the medical station, was about to burp but instead went into a convulsive shudder when she heard haha’s shrill voice.
It was the summer of 1945 and haha was pacing around and sobbing, as was her daughter. A rumor that Japan was losing the war circulated among the girls and made them anxious. They believed the defeat of Japan meant their death.10
As she was heading for the toilet, otosan gnashed his teeth and barked at her, “You bitch, wait till I kill you!” 11
The soldiers grew more agitated and violent, giving off a goat-like stink. They often drank alone and then brawled with one another.
Breakfast had long since finished and yet no soldiers had rushed in. The girls were relieved
but at the same time nervous—there had been no news of a battle, which would have explained the soldiers’ absence. Haha’s radio turned mute, and otosan drove off in his truck as soon as he finished his breakfast. The girls assumed he’d gone to fetch more girls. The roster of girls had peaked at thirty-nine but that summer had thinned down to thirty-two.
The sun hung high in the sky but still no soldiers showed up. She and Hyangsuk sat across from each other, legs splayed, picking crab lice from each other’s pubic hair.
Hyangsuk’s cheeks were puffy where an officer had smacked her the night before, making her look like she was sucking on a huge candy. She’d already taken twenty-plus soldiers when the officer arrived, and she felt as pulpy as a sea cucumber. Feeling mistreated and unwelcome, the officer yanked her out of bed and slapped her.12
Hyangsuk then opened up to her about being raped on her way to the comfort station. She was on a military train that had set out from P’yŏngyang. Three full days into the trip the train suddenly screeched to a stop. Apart from a freight car she rode in with thirty other girls, the train was packed with soldiers and military supplies. The freight car had no windows—not that there was anywhere they would want to escape—and was pitch dark, which made it difficult to tell day from night. An amplified voice now made an announcement, but the girls couldn’t catch the meaning. The door clunked open and two soldiers appeared. Bayonets leveled, they ordered the girls out. The girls remained crouched for a moment, studying one another’s faces in puzzlement, then realized they had to move. Outside, more than a hundred men were waiting. They flocked toward the girls and dragged them into the fields. The girls’ silk ch’ima fluttered above the new shoots of grass.13
“How could they do such a thing with heaven above watching!”
Haha cooked a cauldron of barley and rice for rice balls. This was surprising enough, but then each girl was given two rice balls instead of the usual one.
“Eat up, girls. God knows how long we have left to live!” 14
“Why do you say that?” Yŏngsun asked her.
“Why? Our Japan’s about to be defeated by America. When she dies, we die and you die too.” 15
That evening an NCO staggered into the yard, smashed a bottle, stuck it in the ground, and drove his head onto it.16
Kim Kunja: “Nae ka sarainnŭn han” [As long as I live], testimony before the Hanguk kyoyug’wŏn, February 7, 1997.
Ch’oe Chŏngnye: Kangje ro kkŭllyŏgan Chosŏnin kun wianbu tŭl, vol. 2.
Cxx (pseudonym): Tŭllinayo?
Hwang Kŭmju: Kangje ro kkŭllyŏgan Chosŏnin kun wianbu tŭl, vol. 1.
Yi Yongsu: Kangje ro kkŭllyŏgan Chosŏnin kun wianbu tŭl, vol. 1.
Ch’oe Illye: Kangje ro kkŭllyŏgan Chosŏnin kun wianbu tŭl, vol. 2.
Ch’oe Hwasŏn.
Kxx (pseudonym; b. 1923): Tŭllinayo?
Kxx (pseudonym; b. 1923): Tŭllinayo?
Ch’oe Hwasŏn.
Kim Punsŏn: Kangje ro kkŭllyŏgan Chosŏnin kun wianbu tŭl, vol. 2.
Ch’oe Hwasŏn.
Kim Ŭigyŏng: photo essay, House of Sharing, Kwangju, Kyŏnggi Province, Korea.
Han Oksŏn: Yŏksa rŭl mandŭnŭn iyagi.
Yi Yongnyŏ: Kangje ro kkŭllyŏgan Chosŏnin kun wianbu tŭl, vol. 1.
Yi Sangok: Kangje ro kkŭllyŏgan Chosŏnin kun wianbu tŭl, vol. 1.
7
SHE HAS DISAPPEARED from the edge of the veranda, where she sat just a few minutes ago. Her shoes snuggle up against each other as if wanting never to part company.
She’s huddled off to the side of her bedroom. Before her are several newspaper clippings. She picks out one of them, about the size of a sheet of paper, and places it right in front of her. In the corner of the sun-yellowed newsprint a woman with a steely expression appears in a black-and-white wallet-size photo. Her eyes focus on the woman, whose name is Kim Haksun.
Kim Haksun . . . one evening she appeared on television, weeping like a faucet. She herself wept too, unable to swallow her mouthful of food. She couldn’t contain her tears as the other woman cried.1
It was August 14, 1991—how could she forget? She was watching television by herself like on any other day and was astonished to learn of another living woman who had had the same exact experience as she.2 “. . . I’m living proof, and I can’t help weeping in despair when I hear such an outlandish denial that no such thing happened . . .” 3
Which was why the woman had decided to summon the pool of reporters and let the world know of her experience.
The article is underlined here and there with red ink. Picking up the clipping, she reads the underlined areas. She doesn’t read the sentences from start to finish but takes them in chunks, as if from a chopped-up frozen fish.
It’s just me
No one to worry about
In such a harrowing life
God kept me alive till now For this mission.
If I die, then that’s that. Who would be interested in the miserable life of a woman like me . . .
Why couldn’t I hold my head up like other people?
I am here to tell you that I am a victim! 4
Next came other comfort women, one by one, going public. “Me too, I’m a victim.” “Me too, a victim.” “Yes, me too, a victim.” “Me too, I’m a victim.” . . .
She heard on and off that the government had launched a program to register former comfort women. All one needed to do was report at a government office with a photo or other proof of identification, and once registered, the person would receive a living allowance.
She takes another clipping and reads it aloud, glancing at a black-and-white photo of an old woman.
“. . . It was so difficult trying to make a living, so in 1993 I decided to register at the provincial office after hearing I would get assistance. Then someone from the office came to verify and confirm my experience. I hate talking about that stuff, it was really irritating, it upset my stomach, gave me a headache, and she interrogated me for hours: How many soldiers did I take? When the soldiers came in, how did they pull down their pants? Did I get syphilis?
“On she went, all that stuff I hated to talk about. . . . It was the worst interrogation, and I was going crazy. Was she having second thoughts? Or doubts about my past? Maybe so. But why on earth would I lie to her? Just for the sake of a government subsidy? . . .
“If I had a kid who could have helped out with my hospital bills I never would have thought of registering! I’ve lived my whole life hiding the truth . . . why should I spill everything at an age when I’m ready to croak. I blame it all on my unlucky fate, but now I’m mad at our government. What did I do wrong except being born poor and falling for the sweet lies of crooks?
“When I ran away from the comfort station I had syphilis. The pain I went through to cure that godawful disease! . . .
“This poor girl I know was able to get married, but when her husband came down with syphilis and her past came to light, he kicked her out. After that she gave birth to a boy, but at the age of forty he developed a brain disease. His doctor wanted to see the mother, so he called her in and asked if she’d ever had syphilis. All she could do was weep in silence and then she left. You see how evil that disease is? The poor woman—she never meant to but she destroyed her son’s life. He’s no longer in a psychiatric hospital but he has psychotic episodes. I doubt the doctor told him the cause, but even so the son’s been threatening to kill the mother, saying she ruined his life by letting him into the world through that filthy hole of hers.
“Imagine how she felt! I take a daily aspirin but that day I took two of them.5
“After registering, I felt lonelier. My sister tried to persuade me not to register, she didn’t want her kids’ marriage prospects affected, and sure enough, once I registered they stopped coming to see me.6
“I’ve been receiving government assistance since January of 1994.” 7
She can’t fathom how those girls have lived so long suppressing their past. Though
she herself has kept mum the last seventy years.
Kim Haksun unleashed her confession after only fifty years.
She wanted to report along with Kim Haksun—I’m a victim too! Whenever those words came to mind she’d find herself stuffing her soft cotton hankie in her mouth.
I’m a victim too . . . they took me to Harbin in Manchuria and made me do godawful things . . . dirty things, and I was only 13 . . . just a baby. . . . These words shot up whenever she met her sisters but ended up caught in her throat.
It seems only a few days ago that she heard 238 women had registered, so how is it there’s now only one left? As she shakes her head she hears the ticking of the clock.
She looks up at the clock on the wall, with its round face and dark hands.
There’s no time.
The time it takes a bird to alight on a branch and take off—perhaps our life is that brief, eternal though it may seem?
Before she realizes it, there sits in front of her a sheet of paper instead of the newspaper clippings. In her right hand is a black marker.
She has never kept a diary or written a letter. How she wished to write home from Manchuria. But she knew neither her home address nor how to write, not even her name. Most of the girls at the comfort station were likewise illiterate. And knowing what she might have composed, she realizes how fortunate it is that she didn’t.
Hello Mother, hello Father, I’m here in Manchuria.
Every morning the soldiers line up for me.
Soon I’ll be dead.8
Ignorant though she was, she worked briefly as a maid at a university president’s home—until two weeks later, when her flustered gaze at the grocery shopping list gave her away and the wife fired her the following day.
She was well into her fifties when she learned how to read and write. She picked up a hangŭl primer at the stationery shop outside a grade school and began studying it. It took three months for her to be able to write her name. She’s since copied it ten thousand times or more, but still she dithers and her hand trembles if she’s called upon to do it.
