by Kim Soom
He must have been almost the same age as that student. Only once did a Korean soldier come and go from her at the comfort station in Manchuria; he was from Chaech’ŏn,North Ch’ungch’ŏng Province. The Japanese さ, written in red inside a circle on his armband, meant he was a so-called student volunteer taken into the Japanese army, according to Kŭmbok ŏnni. There was a Korean soldier who came once in a long while to Kŭmbok ŏnni, and she referred to him as oppa, as if he were her older brother. Kŭmbok ŏnni said that she and oppa would have a smoke and talk about home and end up crying. When the soldier from Chaech’ŏn entered her she put her hand to his chest and her fingers felt all too fully the cracking and breaking of his heart. She thought she would see him a couple more times, but she never saw him again. And then Kŭmbok ŏnni’s oppa stopped coming. The girls believed that if a familiar face no longer showed up, then its owner must have died in battle.
The bus stop is located where three alleys come together. She looks about and spots a magpie nest resting precariously among the branches of a gingko tree. With its sooty color and circular shape it resembles a broken-down bamboo basket, and it looks for all the world like it’s been abandoned. Perhaps it was built by one of the magpies Nabi brought her from its hunting expeditions. And when her thoughts reach this far, a question occurs to her:
Whoever taught these birds to fly around gathering twigs and then weave them into a nest?
This “in the beginning” question is followed by a train of similar questions:
Whoever taught newborn puppies to nurse even before they open their eyes? Whoever taught ladybugs to lay their eggs on leaves? Whoever taught brood hens to sit atop their eggs?
The bus trundles up the slope, makes a great half circle, then lurches to a stop in front of her.
As she absently watches passengers getting off, she feels a gentle tap on the shoulder.
“Where’re you heading, ma’am?” It’s the woman from the alteration shop, just back from market, to judge from several black plastic bags she’s holding. From one of them comes the smell of fish.
“I’m going to see someone . . .”
“Who might that be?” The woman looks at her dubiously— because of the magpie incident?
“Someone—”
“Yes, but who?”
“Someone I have to see . . .”
The woman cocks her head, doubtful, and with downcast eyes examines the brown pleated skirt and the pink knit cardigan. “I don’t know who the lucky one is, but you sure are lovely, all dolled up like a newlywed.”
“A newlywed? Me? . . .”
“You’re not going very far, are you?”
“Far?”
“Yes, far.”
“No, I’m not going far . . .” Poker-faced, she shakes her head.
“Please be careful. Remember the number of the bus, and if you get lost, be sure to ask someone.” It’s as if the woman is drilling a child.
“Of course.”
“Aren’t you getting on?”
She boards the bus, feeling as if the woman’s words are ushering her on. There are vacant seats in front but she goes all the way to the rear to sit.
The bus glides down the road it just labored up. Sunshine fills the interior. Her eyelashes flicker in the blinding light and a name flutters like a butterfly onto her tongue.
P’unggil . . .
Her name in the ancestral village before she was taken to Manchuria at the age of 13. She always thought it was part of her when she emerged from her mother’s womb, as much a part of her as her arms and legs, absolutely inseparable. In her village she thought she could hear even the goats and the sparrows calling her P’unggil.
P’unggil-a!
Her memory of Kŭmbok ŏnni calling her name is so vivid she looks around the interior of the bus to see if Kŭmbok ŏnni is there.
Even after Pongae was swept away in the river, haha and otosan continued to have the girls taken “on business” to the outpost. It hadn’t rained for some time and the river was down but still turbid.
They were about to pass a riverside village. The village was draped in an eerie silence, and the girls wondered if anyone lived there—until they saw a lone woman facing the river. The woman’s black hair fell to her waist, and all she herself could think of was Pongae.
“It’s Pongae,” she murmured.
Hearing this, Hyangsuk lifted her head from where she’d buried it against her upraised knees. Hyangsuk hadn’t seen Pongae disappear into the river. Hyangsuk picked her ear with a finger, then buried her head in her lap again.
“I want to go home. I miss Mom’s cooking. I want my scoop of barley rice with the kimchi on top,” whimpered Kunja.
She herself wanted to wave to the woman, wanted to wave before the woman grew distant. And so she rose, and the moment she raised her hand she fell into the water. Whether she stumbled or whether a gust of wind was responsible, she never knew.
The current was like a noose around her neck and she pushed at the water, at the same time reaching with her feet for the river bottom but feeling only a fathomless emptiness. Seaweed-like vegetation wrapped itself about her ankles and she was pulled under. She couldn’t see her nose in front of her face, the water was so murky, and then suddenly it turned clear, revealing a bier adorned with flowers. Inside lay a girl, she herself. Her flower-bedecked face was chubby like that of a baby who has feasted on mommy’s milk and dozed off.
So this is how it ends. At the very instant she accepted her death she heard a voice blast out.
“I got her!”
Hands pulled at clumps of her hair.
“P’unggil-a! P’unggil-a! . . .”
“Open your eyes, come on.”
Sprawled out on the ferry deck, she registered the girls’ faces.
“You’re alive!”
“P’unggil ŏnni’s alive!” Yŏngsun bawled.
“Do you know who we are?” said Kŭmbok ŏnni.
She felt Kŭmbok ŏnni slapping her and that’s when she realized she was alive. Looking up at the sky, she began to sob.
“Don’t cry.” Kŭmbok ŏnni sat her up and pulled her close. Rubbing her back, Kŭmbok ŏnni said, “You’re not dead, you’re still here, so there’s no need to cry.”
Just do what haha says. Only now, more than seventy years later, does she feel she understands Kŭmbok ŏnni’s entreaty: You have to survive, no matter what.
It occurs to her that in going to see the last one she’s going to see Kŭmbok ŏnni— and Haegŭm, and Tongsuk ŏnni, and Hanok ŏnni, and Hunam ŏnni, and Kisuk ŏnni. . .
What should I say first? That I really missed you? That I was in Manchuria too? . . .
She’s finally on her way. It’s like this journey has been in the back of her mind her whole life. It’s thanks to the woman at the Seoul Beauty Parlor that she learned how to get to the hospital where the last one was admitted. Coincidentally, it’s the university hospital where the woman goes for her regular check-up. She herself assumed the last one lived in another city. And that that’s where the hospital is. Why didn’t it occur to her that the last one might be living nearby?
Though she so longs to meet her, the prospect of actually doing so has her trembling with fear.
The minibus stops in front of a drugstore and half a dozen passengers scramble on. The empty seats are filling but the one next to her remains unoccupied. And then a woman as petite and fetching as Haegŭm follows a boy on board. She herself taps the seat next to her to indicate it’s vacant. The other woman, who’s been looking for an empty seat, approaches and sits her boy there. The boy glances at she herself with gentle mischief in his eyes and she responds with a beaming smile.
She feels languid and the dream she awakened from at daybreak comes back to her. Holding the hand of the girl in 15-bŏnji, she walks toward a river. At the riverside she sits the girl down, then sits beside her. Cupping water from the river in her hands, she washes the girl’s face. Dark, scummy water drips from it. She keeps washin
g the girl’s face until the water dripping from it is clear.
Before she knows it the minibus has entered a busy intersection. Looking out at the world beyond the window, she realizes anew:
That she still lives in fear.
And she’s still at the comfort station in Manchuria, a 13-year-old girl.
AFTERWORD
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton
Why did it take seventy-five years for a Korean novel to be written about the Korean girls who endured sexual slavery during the Pacific War? This was the first question addressed to us in an interview by Justin Maki, New York City correspondent for the Kyodo News Agency, in late 2018. The same question could likely be asked about other traumas endured by Koreans in their modern history: the subject matter is simply too painful to write about.
If an experience is too painful to write about, imagine how much more painful it could be to make that experience public. Compound one individual’s experience with the experiences of the millions of individuals directly affected by one or more of the man-made catastrophes afflicting the occupants of the Korean Peninsula in the modern era—the recruitment of young men and women into sexual servitude, forced labor, and military service by Imperial Japan from the late 1930s through 1945; the massacre of civilians in both Koreas before and during the Korean War (1950–53); the massacre of citizens of the city of Kwangju, South Chŏlla Province, by elite South Korean military forces in May 1980; the torture apparatus and extrajudicial executions used in South Korea from its birth in 1948 until the democratization of the political process there in the late 1980s—and we have a persuasive answer to the rhetorical question posed by historian Bruce Cumings in his foreword to our 2009 volume of trauma fiction in contemporary Korea, The Red Room: “Is it possible for an entire nation to have post-traumatic stress disorder?”
From a distance it is all too easy to consign awareness of historical outrages to a dim corner of our consciousness. Not until we are confronted with direct evidence of a disaster—the written or oral reports of the survivors, victims’ names on tombstones, works of art and literature offering us images and words of the victims, all of which we might understand as testimony—are we forced to acknowledge the magnitude of the trauma and the urgency of the need for healing.
Our first encounter with testimony by a Korean survivor of sexual servitude during the Pacific War was occasioned by a 1995 essay, “To Live without Shame” by Hwang Kŭmju, which appeared in the short-lived but influential journal Muae. But not until we discovered the myriad voices whose testimony constitutes much of the detail in Kim Soom’s 2016 novel Han myŏng did we begin to appreciate the courage of those among them, starting with Kim Haksun in 1991, to go public with their testimony. And only then, at the realization that only thirty-one of the self-reported survivors of sexual servitude were still alive, did we realize how urgent it was to bring this novel to an English-language readership.
We soon found, though, that our sense of urgency was not shared by publishers (and we ultimately approached thirty-two of them)—in spite of their knowledge that One Left, our translation of Han myŏng, had been awarded a 2018 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant—only the second Korean project to be thus recognized since the endowment of this fund in 2003. “How are we to market this book?” they asked. As a historical study or as a work of literature? One publisher (which now accounts for more literature in translation than any other American publisher) found it more of a history book and, citing unnamed “stakeholders,” suggested we find an academic publisher. We thought this an excellent suggestion, for we had published several volumes of Korean fiction in translation through the same academic press that had published an English translation of Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s pathbreaking work (mentioned by Bonnie Oh in the foreword to this volume) on sexual slavery in the Japanese military during World War II. This publisher, though, perhaps influenced by the assertion of an outside reader of the translation that the novel was voyeuristic, remarked that the “comfort women” issue had been sensationalized in both Korea and the United States. The publisher was concerned that readers of One Left would consider it conventional and unnuanced. We were therefore advised to seek a non-academic publisher.
Far from being an unnuanced treatment of the “comfort women,” Kim Soom’s novel deserves credit for the narrative distance maintained between author and subject matter through the use of the survivors’ voices. Indeed it was Kim’s decision to structure her narrative on the foundation of the voices of the survivors themselves that distinguishes her novel from the few English-language novels in which we find images of the survivors. The novel is also objective in giving voice, albeit sparingly, to the Japanese soldiers, who in many cases were also coerced into service on behalf of Imperial Japan’s war effort. Moreover, those who fear that the novel is a case of Japan bashing should note that among the various characters responsible for coercing the Korean girls into sexual servitude, either through blandishments involving a “good job” in a factory or through threats, are Koreans themselves—a fact demonstrated through research conducted by Chunghee Sarah Soh for her pioneering study The Comfort Women.
In recent years it has become increasingly common to find the word necessary embedded in back-cover blurb-speak for works of fiction and nonfiction alike. This overused term is appropriate for One Left, though, for two reasons. First, against all odds, the process of truth and reconciliation is gaining momentum in South Korea, and literature remains a viable channel through which truth can be illuminated and the first steps toward healing from trauma, both individual and collective, can be taken. Second, it is necessary for an American audience to realize that Korean history, society, and culture, no less than those of any other nation, maintain a tradition of co-optation of the female body for the “greater good” of the dynasty or nation. To this day the United States continues to play a role in this co-optation in the form of militarized prostitution, by virtue of the American military presence on Korean soil since Liberation in 1945.
One Left is our translation of the Korean title, literally “one person,” of Kim Soom’s novel. “One left” reverberates in a variety of ways: At the end of the novel, among the registered survivors of sexual servitude only one is left, and she lies on her deathbed. The protagonist wishes to assure this “last one” that after her passing there will still be at least “one left,” she herself. “One left” also refers to each of the hundreds of thousands of Korean girls who left the ancestral village and the Korean Peninsula for truncated lives behind military lines. The final scene in the novel also involves a departure: the narrator leaves for the hospital in which the “last one” lies, there to testify to her that she herself is left. This departure, though, involves a fundamental reclamation of agency, in that the protagonist recovers her own given name, P’unggil, a name by which she has not been addressed for some seventy years. In this way, author Kim Soom has launched a process of recovery that will return to historical memory not only the hundreds of thousands of individuals who experienced sexual servitude in the Pacific War but more generally the millions of individuals, male as well as female, in Korea and throughout the world who have been traumatized by ideological dogma and state violence.
The euphemism comfort women has long been used in reference to those who experienced sexual servitude during the Pacific War. These individuals might more accurately be thought of as girls, at least at the time they entered servitude. It should be pointed out that the ages mentioned in the text are to be understood in terms of calendar years—that is, the number of years in which an individual has lived at least one day. One may then assume, for example, that a girl identified as 14 in the text would by the Western counting of age be 13.
A number of individuals deserve credit for helping this translation of Kim Soom’s novel see the light of day. We are grateful to the selection committee of the 2018 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants and to Justin Maki of Kyodo News Agency, who first became aware of our translation through news of this grant. Mr. H
. Lee, a Korean official in Seattle, spent long hours elucidating the arcane particulars of Korean versus American tax law. Author Kim Soom handled endless pages of queries with aplomb, and her agent, Rosa Han, mediated negotiations among four parties—author, translators, Korean publisher, and American publisher—a thankless task at a time when the publication of Korean literature in English translation has become an increasingly mercenary enterprise. Eiko Cope assisted with the occasional Japanese phrase in the Korean text. Chunghee Sarah Soh, professor of anthropology at San Francisco State University, and Bonnie Oh, emerita distinguished professor of Korean studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, encouraged us from the outset. A residency at Seoul Art Space, Yeonhui, in May 2019 and a residency at the T’oji Cultural Center, outside the city of Wŏnju, Korea, from September to October 2019 provided us with the opportunity to polish the translation. Bruce Fulton wishes to acknowledge the extensive background research conducted by Ju-Chan Fulton. Finally, Larin McLaughlin, editor in chief of the University of Washington Press, is to be commended for wholeheartedly taking on a project on ground that dozens of other publishers, commercial and academic, feared to tread.
REFERENCES
Cumings, Bruce. Foreword to The Red Room: Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, vii–xii. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009.
Hwang Kŭmju. “To Live without Shame.” Translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl from a Korean version edited by Chung Chin-sung. Muae: A Journal of Transcultural Production 1 (1995): 194–203. Hwang’s testimonial is accompanied by an essay by Chung Chinsung, “An Overview of the Colonial and Socio-economic Background of Japanese Military Sex Slavery in Korea” (pp. 204–15) and a portfolio of paintings by Miran Kim (pp. 216–20).
