Comfort Woman

by Nora Okja Keller

  Because of this likeness, this link to the dead, my daughter is the only living thing I love. My husband, the missionaries who took me in after the camp, my sisters, if they are still alive, all are incidental. What are living people to ghosts, except ghosts themselves?

  My oldest sister understood this. When my second and third sisters ran away together to look for work as secretaries or factory workers in Pyongyang, the oldest sister tried to keep our father’s business going by marrying our closest neighbor. The neighbors didn’t have much money, but they had more than us and wouldn’t take her without a dowry. How could they buy cattle without any capital, they reasoned.

  I was her dowry, sold like one of the cows before and after me. You are just going to follow second and third sisters, she told me. The Japanese say there is enough work for anyone in the cities. Girls, even, can learn factory work or serve in restaurants. You will make lots of money.

  Still, I cried. She hugged me, then pinched me. Grow up now, she said. No mother, no father. We all have to make our lives. She didn’t look at my face when the soldiers came, didn’t watch as they herded me onto their truck. I heard them asking her if she wanted to come along; your sister is still so young, not good for much, they said. But you. You are grown and pretty. You could do well.

  I am not sure, but I think my sister laughed. I hope that she had at least a momentary fear that they would take her too.

  I am already married, she said.

  I imagine she shrugged then, as if to say, What can I do? Then she added, My sister will be even prettier. She didn’t ask why that should matter in a factory line.

  I knew I would not see the city. We had heard the rumors: girls bought or stolen from villages outside the city, sent to Japanese recreation centers. But still, we did not know what the centers were like. At worst, I thought, I would do what I’ve done all my life: clean, cook, wash clothes, work hard. How could I imagine anything else?

  At first that is what I did do. Still young, I was kept to serve the women in the camps. Around women all my life, I felt almost like I was coming home when I first realized there were women at the camps, maybe a dozen. I didn’t see them right away; they were kept in their stalls, behind mat curtains, most of the days and throughout the night. Only slowly were they revealed to me as I delivered and took away their meals, as I emptied their night pots. Hanako 38, her name given because her face was once pretty as a flower. Miyoko 52, frail and unlucky as the Miyokos before her. Kimi-ko 3, with hair the color of egg yellow, which made the officers laugh when they realized the pun of her name: Kimi the sovereign, Kimi the yolk. Akiko 40. Tamayo 29, who told the men she loved them and received gifts and money that she, stubborn in her hopes for a future, would bury in the corner of her stall.

  Unless they had to visit the camp doctor, their freedom outside their stalls consisted of weekly baths at the river and scheduled trips to the outhouse. If they needed to relieve themselves when it was not their turn to go outside, they could use their special pots. It became my job to empty the pots. I also kept their clothes and bedding clean, combed and braided their hair, served them their meals. When I could, I brought them each a dab of grease, which they would smooth over their wounds, easing the pain of so many men.

  I liked caring for the women. As their girl, I was able to move from one stall to the next, even from one section of the camp to another, if I was asked. And because of this luxury, the women used me to pass messages. I would sing to the women as I braided their hair or walked by their compartments to check their pots. When I hummed certain sections, the women knew to take those unsung words for their message. In this way, we could keep up with each other, find out who was sick, who was new, who had the most men the night before, who was going to crack.

  To this day, I do not think Induk—the woman who was the Akiko before me—cracked. Most of the other women thought she did because she would not shut up. One night she talked loud and nonstop. In Korean and in Japanese, she denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop their invasion of her country and her body. Even as they mounted her, she shouted: I am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive. I am seventeen, I had a family just like you do, I am a daughter, I am a sister.

  Men left her stall quickly, some crying, most angrily joining the line for the woman next door. All through the night she talked, reclaiming her Korean name, reciting her family genealogy, even chanting the recipes her mother had passed on to her. Just before daybreak, they took her out of her stall and into the woods, where we couldn’t hear her anymore. They brought her back skewered from her vagina to her mouth, like a pig ready for roasting. A lesson, they told the rest of us, warning us into silence.

  That night, it was as if a thousand frogs encircled the camp. They opened their throats for us, swallowed our tears, and cried for us. All night, it seemed, they called, Induk, Induk, Induk, so we would never forget.

  Although I might have imagined the frogs. That was my first night as the new Akiko. I was given her clothes, which were too big and made the soldiers laugh. The new P won’t be wearing them much anyway, they jeered. Fresh poji.

  Even though I had not yet had my first bleeding, I was auc tioned off to the highest bidder. After that it was a free-for-all, and I thought I would never stop bleeding.

  That is how I know Induk didn’t go crazy. She was going sane. She was planning her escape. The corpse the soldiers brought back from the woods wasn’t Induk.

  It was Akiko 41; it was me.

  My husband speaks four languages: German, English, Korean, and Japanese. He is learning a fifth, Polish, from cassette tapes he borrows from the public library. He reads Chinese.

  A scholar who spends his life with the Bible, he thinks he is safe, that the words he reads, the meaning he gathers, will remain the same. Concrete. He is wrong.

  He shares all his languages with our daughter, though she is not even a year old. She will absorb the sounds, he tells me. But I worry that the different sounds for the same object will confuse her. To compensate, I try to balance her with language I know is true. I watch her with a mother’s eye, trying to see what she needs—my breast, a new diaper, a kiss, her toy—before she cries, before she has to give voice to her pain.

  And each night, I touch each part of her body, waiting until I see recognition in her eyes. I wait until I see that she knows that all of what I touch is her and hers to name in her own mind, before language dissects her into pieces that can be swallowed and digested by others not herself.

  At the camp, the doctor gave me a choice: rat poison or the stick. I chose the stick. I saw what happened to the girl given the rat bait to abort her baby. I did not have the courage then to die the death that she died.

  As the doctor bound my legs and arms, gagged me, then reached for the stick he would use to hook and pull the baby, not quite a baby, into the world, he talked. He spoke of evolutionary differences between the races, biological quirks that made the women of one race so pure and the women of another so promiscuous. Base, really, almost like animals, he said.

  Rats, too, will keep doing it until they die, refusing food or water as long as they have a supply of willing partners. The doctor chuckled and probed, digging and piercing, as he lectured. Luckily for the species, Nature ensures that there is one dominant male to keep the others at bay and the female under control. And the female will always respond to him. He squeezed my nipples, pinching until they tightened. See?

  I followed the light made by the waves of my pain, tried to leave my body behind. But the doctor pinned me to the earth with his stick and his words. Finally he stood upright, cracked his back, and threw the stick into the trash. He rinsed his hands in a basin of water, then unbound my hands and mouth. He put the rags between my legs.

  Fascinating, he said thoughtfully as he left the tent. Perhaps it is the differences in geography that make the women of our two countries so morally incompatible.

  He did not bother tying me down, securing me for the night. Maybe he thought I was t
oo sick to run. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t want to. Maybe he knew I had died and that ropes and guards couldn’t keep me anyway.

  That night, with the blood-soaked rags still wedged between my thighs, I slipped out of the tent, out of the camp. Following the sound of my mother beating clothes against the rocks, I floated along the trails made by deer and found a nameless stream that led in the end, like all the mountain streams, to the Yalu.

  3

  BECCAH

  I record the lives of the dead:

  Severino Santos Agopada, 65, retired plumber and member of the Botanical Garden Society of Hawaii, died March 13, 1995.

  Gladys Malia Leiatua-Smith, 81, died April 9, 1995. Formerly of Western Samoa, she is survived by sons Jacob, Nathaniel, Luke, Matthew, and Siu Junior; daughters Hope, Grace, Faith, and Nellie; 19 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.

  Lawrence Ching III of Honolulu, died April 15, 1995. Survived by wife, Rose, and son Lawrence IV. Services Saturday, Aloha attire.

  When I first started writing the obits for the Honolulu Star Bulletin—as a graduating journalism major in awe of my first adult lover, U of H legend and the Bulletin’s managing editor, Sanford Dingman—I read the certificates of death, faxed fresh from the mortuaries, with imagination: creating adventures for those born far from their place of death, picturing the grief of parents having to bury a child, feeling satisfaction when someone died old, surrounded by the two or three generations that came from his body.

  Now, however, after six years of death detail, treading water in both my relationship and my job, I no longer see people, families, lives lived and wasted. I no longer struggle over the script, thesaurus in one hand, hoping to utilize obscure synonyms for “die” so that my obits would illuminate my potential, attracting praise and admiration from the great Mr. Dingman. Now I deal only in words and statistics that need to be typed into the system. The first thing I do each day after I log on is to count how many inches I have to fill, computing how many names and death dates need to be processed.

  I have recorded so many deaths that the formula is templated in my brain: Name, age, date of death, survivors, services. And yet, when it came time for me to write my own mother’s obituary, as I held a copy of her death certificate in my hand, I found that I did not have the facts for even the most basic, skeletal obituary. And I found I did not know how to start imagining her life.

  When I was a child, it did not occur to me that my mother had a life before me. Always, when I asked for stories about her past, they were about me, starting from my conception. “How did you and Daddy meet?” I would ask her. “When did you know you were in love? When did you decide to have me?”

  In those days, I believed my mother’s story that my parents met when she was a famous singer in Korea. “Once on a time, I sang on stage,” my mother would boast, “and your father came to see me. He was in love.”

  I imagined hot spotlights blinding her eyes, a large stage empty except for my mother, dressed in stripes and glittering sequins. When I was in elementary school, and easily influenced by Auntie Reno’s sense of fashion, that was my idea of glamour. The first outfit I chose for myself was a plaid and denim bell-bottom pantsuit, which I wore three times a week in the fourth grade. I wore it despite the hoots of the boys and the stink-eye and snub-nose from Janice “Toots” Tutivena and her Entourage, until the crisscrossing stripes faded at the knees and the bell-bottoms flapped above my ankles.

  I believed my mother’s story, even though when I heard her singing to the spirits, I thought not of music but of crying, her songs long wails of complaints and demands and wishes for the dead.

  I believed it because I wanted to believe that my voice would rescue me, transport me to a new world. I lived with the secret hope that I had inherited my mother’s talent and that I would soon be discovered—perhaps singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in our school’s Xmas Xtravaganza. When my class took its place in the cafetorium and began singing our carol, I knew my voice would float out above the voices of the other students. Slowly, one by one, the rest of the singers would fall silent. One by one, the parents and teachers in the audience would rise to their feet, drawn closer to the stage by my voice, as pure as a bell. Then, when the song came to a close, the audience would erupt into cheers and applause, and one man—prererably Toots’s father (who in real life sold vacuum cleaners at Sears but in my perfect daydream was a movie agent)—would point to me and shout, “What a voice! What poise! What a smile! The new Marie Osmond!”

  Whenever I was alone, I’d sing—usually something by the Carpenters or Elvis—in preparation for my discovery. I would sing so hard I’d get tears in my eyes. My singing moved me.

  One afternoon I crawled into the bathtub, pulled the curtain to make a private cave for myself, lay down, and sang “Let It Be,” over and over again. Somewhere between my third and seventh renditions, my mother came in to use the toilet.

  “What’s wrong?” she shouted.

  “Nothing,” I growled. “I’m singing.”

  My mother yanked open the shower curtain so hard the bar fell onto the floor.

  “Hey!” I squealed as I sat up. My mother loomed over me, the curtain clutched in her hands and pooling into the tub. The bar, suspended by the curtain’s rings, knocked against her thighs. I almost asked, “Are you crazy?” but stopped myself before the words escaped and became concrete, heavy enough to break into the real world.

  “Are the spirits after you too?” she panted. “Do you hear them singing, always singing?”

  “No!” I shouted at her.

  “Sometimes they cry so loud, just like a cat cry, so full of wanting, that I worry you will begin to hear them, too.” My mother closed her eyes and started rocking. “Waaaooo, waaaaoooo,” she wailed. “Just like that.” She stopped rocking and glared at me. “You have to fight it.”

  I put my hands over my ears. “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,” I sang over and over again. “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,” I chanted each time she opened her mouth to add something else.

  Finally she shut her mouth and didn’t open it again. Then she shook her head, just looking at me lying in the tub with my hands plugging my ears, singing tonelessly, “I can’t hear you I can’t hear you I can’t hear you.” When she turned and walked away, kicking the curtain out in front of her, I was still chanting, “I can’t hear you,” though the words had lost their meaning.

  I was discovered not during Ala Wai E’s Xmas Xtravaganza but during the tryouts for the May Day Pageant. And not by Toots’s father but by Toots herself.

  I was not naive enough to try out for May Day Queen or her court. I knew that I never had a chance, since I wasn’t part Hawaiian and didn’t have long hair. But I did want to be in the chorus that stood next to the stage and sang “Hawai‘i Pono’i” as they ascended their thrones.

  During the after-school tryouts, as I waited for my turn to sing next to the vice principal playing the piano, I watched the kids ahead of me turn shy and quiet, their squeaky voices breaking under the weight of the accompaniment. I vowed my voice would be strong enough to fill the entire cafetorium and rich enough to eat for dessert.

  When my name was called, I marched down the aisle, a long gauntlet of chewed sunflower seeds spit at my feet by the Toots Entourage. My slippers kicked up the littered shells so that they flecked the backs of my calves. I kept my eyes on the stage, on the piano, and on Vice Principal “Piano Man” Pili, who alternately smiled encouragement to each struggling singer and glared into the audience in an attempt to stifle whistles and hoots and shouts of “Gong.” But as I walked past their seats, I heard Toots and Tiffi Sugimoto hiss, “Look dah fancy-pants! ‘I stay blinded by dah light!’ ”

  1 tossed my hair and glided onto the stage. Clearing my throat, I nodded to Vice P Pili, smiled and waved to the crowd—right at Toots—and tapped my foot: one and a two and a three!

  To this day, I am not sure what happened, or how it happened. I had prac
ticed—in the bathtub, walking to school—until I knew I was good, until I made myself cry. But that day, some devil-thing with the voice of a big, old-age frog took possession of my throat, and “Hawai‘i Pono’i” lurched unreliably around the cafetorium : “Hawai‘i Pono’iiiii, Nana i Kou mo‘i ... uh ... la la la Lani e Kamehameha e ... mmm hmm hmm ... Hawai’iiiii Po-oh-no ‘iiiii! Aaaah-meh-nehhhh!”

  At least I was loud.

  As I slunk off the stage, I heard Toots and her Entourage laughing and howling like dogs. “Guh-guh-guh-gong!” they barked.

  They followed me out of the building and pinned me against the wall. “You suck,” said Toots.

  “Yeah,” said Tiffi, a Toots wannabe. “You suck.”

  “You gotta be the worst singer in the school,” Toots said. “We don’t want you in our chorus.”

  “We don’t even want you in our school, you weirdo,” said another Toots follower.

  “You’re the weirdo,” I snapped back. “Just so happens I got the talent of my mother, who was a famous singer in Korea.” After I said this, I realized some things were better left unsaid.

  “Yeah, right,” said Toots.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I said, then added, compelled to defend myself, “They just have different singing over there.”

  “Hanyang anyang hasei-pasei-ooooh,” Toots screeched. “Yobos must have bad ears!”

  The girls laughed and stepped closer, the half-moon made by their bodies tightening around me. “You’re nothing but stink Yobo- shit,” said Toots. “Nothing but one big-fat-shit liar. ‘Oh, my mommy’s a famous singer.’ ‘Oh, my daddy was rich, with a house on the Mainland, and I had one puppy.’ ‘Oh, next year my daddy going come get us and move us back.’ Yeah, right.”

  Toots pushed my shoulder. “This is what’s true: You so poor that every day you gotta wear the same lame clothes and the same out-of-fashion, stink-smelling shoes until they get holes and still you wear em. You so poor you save your school lunch for one after-school snack—no lie, cause we seen you wrap em up in your napkin.”