Daughters of the Dragon: A Comfort Woman's Story

by William Andrews

  “You told me your sister died when you lived in Sinuiju.”

  “Yes, Chul-sun, that is what I told you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I put down my chopsticks. “Let’s go for a walk,” I said.

  A cold wind was blowing from the north as we left the restaurant. I took Chul-sun’s arm and pulled myself close to him. He stayed focused on the sidewalk. I pointed down a side street away from the crowded Itaewon marketplace. I told him I wanted to marry him and have a grand wedding with a reception, a tea ceremony, and all of our friends, just like he wanted.

  “But there is something you have to tell me first,” he said.

  “Yes, there is,” I replied.

  “Okay, tell me.”

  I could have made up a story about how Soo-hee had been taken away to work in a comfort station while I had stayed on the family farm. But I had to know if Chul-sun loved me for who I really was, just like Jin-mo had. If he did, perhaps I could love him, too.

  So as we walked, I told Chul-sun everything I had kept secret for so long. Everything—the comfort station, working for the communists, the kijichon. For the first time since I had escaped to the South, I exposed my true self, my ugly history. And when I finished, I knew that I had done the right thing. I prayed that Chul-sun would understand.

  At the end, I said, “If you still want to marry me after what I have told you, I will be happy to go home with you tonight.”

  I waited for his answer. After a while, he said, “You should have said no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He stopped and turned to me. His chin was set hard. “You should have said no, Ja-hee. When you realized the Japanese had tricked you, you should have let them shoot you. You should not have worked for the communists and you should have never gone to the kijichon.”

  “I should have let them shoot me? Chul-sun, listen to what you are saying.”

  “I know what I’m saying,” he said angrily. “I am saying the honorable thing to have done is to have said no!”

  As we stood on the sidewalk, the new streets and buildings of Seoul began to melt away, and in their place, I saw the comfort station, the huge iron statue of Kim Il-sung and the bar of the Hometown Cat Club. The people on the sidewalk became the Japanese soldiers who had raped me, the North Korean soldiers who had carried Jin-mo off to prison, and the American soldiers in the kijichon. “Chul-sun,” I begged, “please understand. If I had refused any of those times, I would have died. I was only fourteen years old in Dongfeng. I was too young to know. In Pyongyang, everything was so… so confusing. And at the kijichon, Soo-bo was starving. I could not let her die. Please, please accept my confession. Love me for who I am and I will love you too. Then we will be married and have a grand wedding.”

  I searched Chul-sun’s face for his answer. He wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve. “I told my family about our engagement,” he said with a voice jagged and hard. “I made a big show of it! And now, I have lost face. They will think I am a fool! I will never be able to look them in the eyes again.”

  “We do not need to tell them,” I said. “Only you need to know. But you had to know. Don’t you see? It is the only way I can be sure you accept me for who I really am. It is the only way I can marry you.”

  Chul-sun shook his head. “The receptionist, Mrs. Min, knows too. She told me you worked in a kijichon. I did not believe her. I didn’t think it was possible, but she was right. She knows!”

  My head began to spin. Chul-sun grabbed me and pushed me into a wall. His fingers dug into my arm. “How can I love you after what you’ve done?” he shouted. “You have dishonored me.”

  “Chul-sun, you’re hurting me,” I said.

  He glared at me, squeezing my arm harder. Then with a shove, he let go and stepped back. He looked down the street. “I cannot marry you. You are not who I thought you were.”

  The faces of my past swirled around me. I closed my eyes to make them stop. But Chul-sun was right, I was not who he thought I was. I had tried to keep everything a secret, but my past would always be part of me. I wished I could go back and refuse to obey the orders to work in the boot factory. It had set my life on an arc that years of honorable living could not bend straight. “Chul-sun,” I pleaded with my eyes still closed, “how could I have known the right thing to do? How?”

  “You should have said no!” he said. “And you should have said no to me, too.” He gave me a long, pained look and then he walked away.

  Eventually, the people and buildings in the street returned to normal and I turned for home. As I slowly walked through the busy streets of Itaewon and then over the long Map-o Bridge, I thought about my life and all that I had done. Had I made the right choices?

  I stopped halfway across the bridge and looked back at the city. The lights of Seoul twinkled all around me. Below, the Han River slowly rolled to the sea. There I decided Chul-sun was wrong. Yes, I needed his money to get a letter to Soo-hee. I wanted to marry him so Soo-bo could go to high school. I even wanted to get married for myself. But if I denied that I had been a comfort woman, I would betray my onni and all of my ianfu sisters who had died in the comfort station. No, I had a higher duty to fulfill than to uphold Korea’s reputation. After all, important men like Chul-sun and those who wanted to bury the Japanese atrocities so they could build their nation were doing a fine job of that. But telling what happened to us—how we struggled and how we were able to survive—was the only way Korea would become a great nation. I could not bury it.

  And I finally realized how I was to serve Korea. The two-headed dragon had protected me so I could tell my story as Soo-hee and Jin-mo said I should. It was a grave responsibility and I didn’t know how I would do it. But as I walked the rest of the way home, I vowed I would find a way.

  *

  The next day, the final loan agreement with Diashi Bank came through and the terms were more favorable than anyone at Gongson had hoped for. One reason given was that the chief Japanese negotiator was impressed with me. For one day, I was a hero among the women in the steno pool. “You will be made a manager soon,” Moon-kum teased as I walked by. “Then you won’t talk to us anymore.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Someday I will take over the company. And when I do, I will fire all the men.” The women laughed at my joke, covering their mouths as they did.

  All that day, Mr. Han smiled openly at me the way a proud father smiles at a successful son. At noon, I ate my lunch on a bench in Namsan Park near where Chul-sun had proposed. I did not hear from him or see him all day. In the afternoon, Mr. Han told me that I could go home early, so I left Gongson and took a cab home instead of the bus. That evening, I helped Soo-bo with her English homework and went to bed early.

  The next morning, when I walked by the steno pool, Moon-kum and the other women kept their eyes on their typewriters. When I said hello, no one returned my greeting. When I got to my desk, there were no contracts to work on.

  Mr. Han leaned out of his office. His face was cheerless. He told me to come in his office and close the door.

  The firing was quick and perfunctory. Mr. Han gave no reason. He just said that the Gongson Construction Company no longer wished to employ me. I received no severance pay for my ten years of service. I had no pension. At the end, Mr. Han held out an envelope. “Here is your back pay,” he said. “You must leave immediately.”

  I took the envelope and looked directly at Mr. Han. “I always did my best, sir. Ever since I was fourteen, I have tried to do the right thing.”

  The great, gray-haired attorney’s eyes softened and he nodded. “The actions that society deems respectable—what Confucius called li—is not always the most righteous. We must be loyal to the duty we have to our families, our ancestors and our country first—your yi—and only you can determine what your yi is.”

  He smiled sadly. “Thank you for your good work, Ja-hee. Personally, I am sorry to see you go.”

  I knew then that Mr. Han was a great
man, like Jin-mo and Colonel Crawford, and perhaps even like young Private Ishida in some way. It made me sad that I would never see him again. I bowed low and then smiled back at him. I got my coat and headed home. I held my head high as I walked through the Gongson Construction Company lobby past Mrs. Min.

  F ORTY

  Eight years later

  I handed out yellow pamphlets in front of the new history department building at Seoul National University. There was a spring breeze blowing through campus and I had to hold the pamphlets tight to my chest so they wouldn’t blow away. The akebia were in bloom and the air was heavy with their chocolate smell. All around me, students carrying books braced themselves against the breeze as they rushed to their classes. I pushed pamphlets at them as they walked by. Every so often, a student reached out and took one. It was my third day at the university and I had only a small stack of pamphlets left.

  I’d had the four-page pamphlets printed in a shop not far from my apartment. When the shop owner read it, he refused to do the job. I agreed not to tell anyone where I had them printed and gave him one hundred extra won. He quickly printed them and gave them to me in a plain paper sack.

  I was pleased with what I had written. The headline read, “Japanese Sex Slaves. We Were Not Volunteers.” The pamphlet explained how the Japanese military had forced me and thousands of others to be comfort women. It proposed that the Korean government force Tokyo to acknowledge their war crimes against Korean women and make reparations. So far, however, no one had responded to my pamphlets.

  I pushed a pamphlet at a female student with short black hair. I wanted to scold her when she stuffed it in her bag without reading it. I watched her as she walked to her class. She looked bright, happy and confident. Of course she did. She had her entire life before her. Her prospects in the modern Republic of Korea were good.

  As she disappeared inside the history building, I thought about how different my own life was at her age. I was smart and had an exceptional gift for languages. I would have thrived at a great university like this. Perhaps I could have become an attorney, a negotiator or a diplomat. But fate had other plans for me.

  And fate had other plans for my daughter Soo-bo, too. Without a father to get a family registration, Soo-bo had to quit her studies after Chul-sun broke off our engagement. And without an education, Soo-bo, thin and plain, had to work menial jobs to supplement my government welfare check. Even with her income, we barely got by.

  The breeze kicked up and I held the pamphlets tight. A middle-aged man in a suit trotted toward me down the concrete stairs of the history building. He held one of my pamphlets in his hand. He asked me what I was doing.

  “I am telling the truth,” I answered.

  The man’s hair was thick and gray and he wore scholarly glasses. “I don’t want to get you into trouble,” he said, “so I’m asking you to leave.”

  “Why?” I asked. “This is the perfect place to hand out my pamphlets. It talks about an important part of Korea’s history. These students should know. All Koreans should know.”

  The man glared at me. “Do not tell me what these students should know. I am the head of the history department here.”

  I felt my jaw tighten. “You are?” I said. “Then certainly you understand how important it is to expose what the Japanese did to me and thousands of other Korean girls. It is your history too, professor.”

  “What is or is not our history is what historians like me say it is,” the professor said, jabbing a finger at me. “And I say it did not happen.”

  “But it did happen,” I said. “It happened to me and my sister. Why do you deny it?”

  The professor looked around. “Because we are a modern nation now. If the rest of the world doesn’t respect us, we will never become a world power. So I insist that you take your pamphlets and leave or I will have to call the police.”

  “I will not,” I said. “I won’t leave and I will not stop. I refuse to be a proper Korean and suffer in silence for the rest of my life. As a nation, we’re a little too good at being the victim, Professor. Korea will never be great until we stop letting others use us. And it begins with making those who raped us admit what they did.”

  The professor sighed. “Very well,” he said. “I warned you.” He turned and trotted back up the stairs.

  I watched as the head of the history department of Korea’s most prestigious university disappeared inside the building and my blood boiled. Honor? To my fellow Koreans, honor was more important than the truth. But we would never have honor if we based it on a lie. And anyway, what did I do that was so dishonorable? Read the pamphlet. We were not volunteers!

  I turned to look for more students to hand my pamphlet to. Standing several steps away was an attractive, middle-aged woman. She looked both ways and then came to me. Our eyes met for a second and she handed me one-hundred won. Then, she quickly walked away.

  I went after her. “Wait!” I said, holding the money out. “Why are you giving me this?”

  The woman quickened her pace. I ran and caught up to her. “Stop a minute,” I pleaded. “Please. I just want to talk to you.”

  I placed a hand on the woman’s arm. She shrugged it away. “Leave me alone,” she said. “I gave you the money, that’s all I can do.”

  I kept pace for a few steps and then I stopped. The breeze let up for a moment and the air was still. And then I said loud enough for the woman to hear, “They told me I was going to work in a boot factory. How did they take you?”

  The woman stopped with her back to me. She stood for several seconds, and then dropped her head. She turned and looked at me and said, “They came for me in the middle of the night. My grandfather tried to stop them but they hit him with their rifles and knocked him unconscious. They sent me to the Philippines where they raped me for three years. I was only fifteen years old.”

  I went to the woman and put a hand on her arm. “I hear there are thousands of us,” I said. “Maybe hundreds of thousands.”

  “Yes,” the woman said looking down. “I have heard the same thing.”

  “If we work together, we can make the Japanese admit what they did.”

  The woman shook her head. “I have a husband,” she said simply. Then she turned and walked away.

  I clenched my teeth and marched to my spot in front of the history building. I thrust my yellow pamphlets at students. A male student looked at me disapprovingly. I pushed a pamphlet at him. “You have to know about this,” I said angrily. “If you don’t, it could happen to your wife or daughter.” The student walked away shaking his head.

  A female student came by and looked at me questioningly. “Korea will never be great until we admit this,” I said to her. “Take this and read it.” She took a pamphlet. She read the headline on the front. She thumbed through the pages.

  “I’ve heard rumors about this. Did it really happen?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It happened to me.”

  “Why don’t they want us to know about it?” the young woman asked.

  Before I could launch into a lecture about truth and honor, a man shouted at me from the stairs of the history building. “You there with the pamphlets,” he said, “stop what you’re doing.” Two policemen ran down the stairs to me. The young woman shoved the pamphlet back into my hand and hurried away.

  The policemen came up to me and took my pamphlets. “What are you doing?” I protested. “I’m not doing anything illegal.”

  They took me by the arm and led me toward the street. “Someone wants to talk to you,” one said.

  As we walked past a trashcan, they threw away my pamphlets and I could see there were already dozens of my yellow pamphlets inside.

  *

  I sat in a small, windowless room in the central government building. Across from me was an average-looking man who introduced himself as Mr. Cho, an agent for the national police in the Department of National Security. He told me I was not to hand out my pamphlets anymore. “In fact,” he said, “you
are not to go to the university ever again. Am I clear?”

  I pushed myself to the edge of my chair. “I am only telling the truth about what happened to me.”

  Mr. Cho tapped on the table and said, “Ms. Hong, you have an interesting record. It seems you’ve had a dishonorable past.

  “I have not done anything dishonorable, sir. That is what I’m trying to say.”

  “I see. And how does your family feel about what you’re doing?”

  “My family?”

  “Our records show that you have a sister living in the North,” said Mr. Cho. “She is probably a Communist, too. Have you been in contact with her?”

  “I have not seen my sister for twenty-seven years. She might not even be alive.”

  “And then there is your daughter, Soo-bo.”

  I hesitated for a second. “What about her?”

  “According to our records, she was born five months after you escaped to South Korea. That means her father must be your lover in the north, Pak Jin-mo. She is the daughter of a well-known communist.”

  “Leave Soo-bo out of this,” I said quickly.

  Mr. Cho nodded. “We will gladly do that. All you need to do is stop stirring up controversy. If you do, no one needs to know who your daughter’s father was.”

  I glared at Mr. Cho, and then I looked at my hands. Poor Soo-bo had suffered all her life. She didn’t have a father and she was the daughter of a comfort woman. She was an outcast and she lived in poverty. She had suffered enough. I nodded my agreement.

  “Good,” Mr. Cho said. “And now Ms. Hong, you may go.”

  F ORTY-ONE

  Twelve years later

  I should have found a husband for Soo-bo. I tried, but she was so sickly and I was so poor that no one—certainly no one worthy of my dear Soo-bo—would have her. So when Soo-bo got pregnant by a man she met near where she worked, it was my fault. I should have met the man, but I never did. Soo-bo never talked about him. And she never saw him again after she became pregnant.