The Spirit of the Dragon

by William Andrews

  That day arrived on a hot summer night years later. He came out of the restaurant and said, “Let’s go to MacArthur Park.” The park was out of the way from his boardinghouse, so I knew this was the day he was going to talk.

  We found a bench near the park pond. Hisashi looked at his hands and began to tell me his story. He told me how when he got to Tokyo, he immediately regretted taking the position with Doctor Ishii. He’d expected the research to be about how to help people recover from injuries and diseases. He thought he was going to learn a great deal about medicine. Instead, Doctor Ishii’s work was on biological warfare. “He created diseases so he could study their progression,” Hisashi said. “He injured people to see how they would respond. He didn’t care about healing them.”

  He said he wanted to quit right away and go back to me, but they wouldn’t let him. Instead, they made him a lieutenant in the army. He didn’t dare refuse the commission, but he couldn’t work for Doctor Ishii. He asked for a transfer. “I didn’t even care if it was somewhere outside the medical corps,” Hisashi said. “I only wanted to get out.”

  They didn’t grant him a transfer, and when he objected to what Doctor Ishii was doing, they told him to stay quiet. They threatened to destroy his father’s career. “And,” Hisashi said, “they threatened me with you.”

  “Me?” I said, surprised.

  Hisashi nodded. “The entire thing about our son being the chauffeur’s son and not mine was a ploy by Haru and the Kempei tai. They wanted to destroy my father. They thought he was weak. That’s why they gave me the job with Doctor Ishii. That’s why they accused you of infidelity. They planned to use you against me and me against my father.”

  “I thought it was your mother who wanted me arrested,” I said.

  “Haru tricked her. It was him and the Kempei tai all along.”

  “They tried to arrest me anyway,” I said. “That’s why I had to run away.”

  “Yes, my father wrote to me about that. I wrote and told him it wasn’t true about you and Byong-woo. Not long after that incident, Father became disillusioned with Japan and his career was over. As for me, I’d already worked for Doctor Ishii for nearly two years and couldn’t get out. It was horrible. If you only knew.” Hisashi shook his head.

  I knew. I just couldn’t imagine how someone as sensitive as Hisashi could be a part of it.

  “What will you do now?” I asked.

  Hisashi sniffed. “Tonight, I will try to sleep, although most nights I cannot. I will stay here in Koreatown, even though they hate Japanese. It is my punishment for what I did to your people. Tomorrow, I will go to work as a dishwasher at the restaurant.”

  “Let me help you,” I said.

  “No,” Hisashi replied. “It is my burden and mine alone.”

  He pushed himself off the bench and headed to the boardinghouse. And in silence, I walked with him.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Los Angeles, 1993

  A picture of Mr. Weinberg in his three-piece suit and bow tie, shaking hands with President Bill Clinton, made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Weinberg wore a medal that the president had just given him. The caption read, Mr. Fredrik Weinberg of Los Angeles receiving the Presidential Citizens Medal for his forty-five years fighting for human rights.

  The article said Mr. Weinberg thanked the hardworking people at the Worldwide Alliance for Human Rights. He explicitly mentioned me. “In particular I want to thank Suk-bo Yi for her tireless work on human rights in Asia,” the article quoted him as saying.

  Over the years, Mr. Weinberg had built the alliance into one of the world’s leading human rights organizations. He regularly met with world leaders and testified before US Congress and the United Nations. With all the money he’d raised, he was able to move the alliance to a new headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. Sixty employees occupied the entire fifth floor of a new building only a few blocks from our old building.

  Upon his return from Washington, Mr. Weinberg, now in his mideighties, announced that he would retire soon. Before he left, he’d asked me when I planned to retire. I was in my seventies now, and I still enjoyed working. I’d become an expert on Asian human rights. I’d read the great literature on human rights—my favorite was Les Misérables, which I was finally able to read in English. For the previous fifteen years, I’d been in charge of the Asian sector and now had twenty people in my group. The press quoted me often and I was invited to speak at conferences. I’d had a rewarding career—more so than I ever imagined I would as a young woman in Korea. And though my career never paid much, I didn’t need the money.

  Ten years earlier, I’d received a letter and a check from Yoshiko. The letter said that Mr. Saito had died. He’d been a successful businessman during his life and had accumulated a large fortune. The letter said that Mr. Saito was proud of me for the work I’d done with the alliance. As a reward, in his will he left some money to me. He asked that I use it for myself and to take care of Hisashi.

  I had to sit down when I looked at the check. It was more than I could imagine I’d ever have. I could buy a nice house and move Hisashi into it. I could hire someone full-time to take care of him. But I’d tried for years to get him to accept my help. He never did.

  Hisashi was an old man now. The restaurant had fired him twenty years earlier. He roamed the streets of East Los Angeles, homeless and destitute. Every night when I could, I’d buy takeout and search for him to give him something to eat. Sometimes, he took the food. Sometimes, he didn’t. I tried to move him into a homeless shelter, but he refused to go. I talked to him, telling him that he had to forgive himself for what he’d done at Unit 731, and that I forgave him for leaving me. It didn’t help. He never bathed, and he was rail thin. He slept on park benches or on sidewalks. Korean kids taunted him. His shoes and clothes were tattered, and he refused to take new ones. He didn’t talk much, but I never got the sense that he’d lost his mind. He was broken and sad and crippled with guilt.

  With Mr. Weinberg retiring, it would have been a good time for me to retire, too. But I had one more thing I wanted to do. In Asia, women were coming forward with stories about how the Imperial Army forced them into brothels during World War II. The Japanese called them comfort women, but in truth, they were sex slaves. Many had died in the brothels—some committed suicide, and many were shot at the end of the war.

  The women and some scholars said there had been hundreds of thousands of them. They were Korean, Chinese, Filipino, and even Dutch. The soldiers raped them nearly every day—some for as long as seven years. The Japanese government denied the reports, but I believed them. I remembered the last time I saw my aunt in front of her house outside my village when she told me that my cousins had been forced to work in the boot factory, code for a military brothel. The new information was consistent with her story. I had to contact my cousins to learn more.

  In my job, I had access to a lot of information. Although I couldn’t locate Soo-hee, it wasn’t difficult to find her younger sister, Jae-hee. She lived in Seoul at an address south of the Han River. I wrote a long letter telling her about my work and asking if it was true that she’d been a comfort woman. If so, I asked if she’d be willing to tell me about it. She wrote back and said yes, the Japanese had forced her to work in what they called a “comfort station” and that she was willing to share her story with me. I sent her a letter telling her I was coming to see her, and I scheduled a flight to Seoul.

  I’d been back to Seoul several times since I’d moved to America. It always surprised me how much it’d changed since I lived there. They called it “The Miracle on the Han River,” and it was. In just a few short decades, Seoul had grown from a poor, backward city nearly destroyed by the Korean War, to a modern metropolis. It seemed like they’d built dozens of new high-rises every time I visited. They were building a modern subway, and new highways crisscrossed the city. I was proud of what my country had accomplished in such a short time. I often wondered what my life would have been like if
I’d stayed.

  It was a short taxi drive from Gimpo Airport to Jae-hee’s apartment in a section of the city that looked like it had been built early in Seoul’s rebirth and was starting to decline. Jae-hee lived on the sixth floor of an eight-story building. I took the elevator to the sixth floor and knocked on apartment 627.

  Jae-hee opened the door and bowed. Although she was several years younger than me, she looked much older. She was petite, and her hair was nearly all gray. She had a scar on her lip and another above her eyebrow. The lines around her eyes had stories in them.

  “You are my sachon, Suk-bo?” she asked.

  “I am,” I answered. “I am so glad to see you.”

  She gave me a smile, and I saw she was happy to see me, too. She invited me inside a small apartment with a single window overlooking the street. In front of the window was a table with a hibiscus blossom in a bowl. She invited me to sit and said, “Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I answered.

  “I drink bori cha,” Jae-hee said. “I do not drink coffee. Today young people drink coffee to pretend to be American. I think we should drink bori cha instead.”

  “I feel the same,” I said.

  She put a pot of tea on the stove and came to the table. I couldn’t believe this woman was the same girl I’d last seen in her home outside my village. She carried herself with dignity and looked intelligent. I sensed she’d had an interesting life. I immediately felt a bond with her.

  For the next hour, we reminisced about when we were children and played together. We remembered the holiday festivals we’d had at her house. We talked about our parents and our siblings. We laughed and we cried.

  Then, I asked her to tell me about being a comfort woman. “Not many people know about it,” she said.

  “The world seems to look the other way at what happened in Asia during the war,” I said, thinking about Unit 731.

  “I have tried to come forward about my experience many times,” Jae-hee said, “but people do not want to listen, not even Koreans. I understand. The Japanese deny it because it was a horrible war crime. Koreans are embarrassed about it. Perhaps your work can make it known so it will not happen again.”

  “That’s my job,” I replied. “I’ll do my best.”

  For two hours she told me about the comfort station, how the Imperial Army tricked her into going by telling her she was going to work in a boot factory. She told me how they beat and raped her for two years. “Some days it was over thirty times,” she said, shaking her head as if she was surprised she survived. “I would have killed myself if not for my onni, my sister, Soo-hee. She saved my life.”

  She told me how Soo-hee had almost died and how they’d been separated at the end of the war. She said Soo-hee was living in North Korea and they hadn’t seen each other for fifty years. She told me how she’d fallen in love and had a daughter with a man in North Korea who the communists killed. She escaped to the South and her own people shunned her for being a comfort woman. Although I hadn’t suffered the pain and humiliation of rape, our stories were remarkably similar.

  “What happened to your daughter?” I asked.

  “She died giving birth to my granddaughter.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know the pain of losing a child.”

  “I am sorry for you, too,” she said.

  I did a quick calculation in my head. Her granddaughter had to be young—still a child. Yet, I saw that Jae-hee lived alone. “What happened to your granddaughter?” I asked.

  Pain crossed over Jae-hee’s face. She tried to put on a brave smile. “I am a poor woman,” she said. “I have no means to raise a child. I decided to have her adopted. She lives in America. Her name is Anna Carlson.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say, so I said nothing. We sat in silence for a while. Then I said, “Your mother had a comb. She showed it to me once. It had a two-headed dragon. She said she gave it to you and your sister.”

  Jae-hee grinned. She reached over the table and lifted the windowsill. Underneath was a hidden compartment. She took out a package of brown cloth tied closed with a string. She opened it, and there was the comb with the two-headed dragon.

  It was exactly as I remembered—a gold spine on the back and an ivory inlay of a two-headed dragon.

  “May I?” I asked, nodding at the comb.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  I picked up the comb and held it. It was heavy and sturdy in my hand. The gold spine was cool to the touch. I brought it to my face and examined the two-headed dragon. It was truly a work of art how the tiny pieces of ivory made the dragon come alive.

  I said, “When your mother showed me this comb, she said the dragon would curse me if I married Hisashi. I married him anyway and there were many times I thought your mother was right and the dragon had cursed me. But I loved my husband. I still do. I believe that loving him has defeated the curse.”

  I gave the comb to Jae-hee. “My mother told me that the dragon would protect me,” she said. “There were times I thought the dragon had abandoned me. But I believe in the two-headed dragon. I must pass it on to Anna someday. I’m not sure how or when, I only know that I will.”

  “What do you think it stands for, the two-headed dragon?”

  “I’ve thought a lot about that,” Jae-hee said. “See how the heads face opposite directions? I used to think one head protected Korea from Japan in the east and the other from China in the west. But notice this.” She showed me the comb. “See how the heads are different? One is round, the other is square. One has whiskers and the other does not. I often wondered why they made it that way. Since the heads come together in one body, I think it’s saying that while we look different, we are all the same.”

  “Yes, I see,” I said. “And if that is true, then the dragon would not curse me for marrying a Japanese man.”

  “No, I do not believe it would,” Jae-hee said.

  She wrapped the comb inside the cloth and returned it to the compartment under the windowsill. I glanced at my watch. It was late. “I have to go,” I said.

  “I am pleased that you came,” she replied.

  We stood and bowed to each other. We promised we’d write often and that I’d visit her when I came back to Korea. “I would like that very much,” she said.

  I left the apartment and caught a cab to a hotel near the airport.

  I would have liked to stay in Seoul for several days to spend more time with my cousin. It would have been interesting to see the new buildings in Seoul, to shop in the Itaewon market, to visit Gyeongbok Palace, Korea’s most sacred place. But I was concerned about Hisashi, and I wanted to get back to him.

  I took the first flight to LA in the morning. It was a direct flight on a 747 jumbo jet. It would take eleven hours. I remembered the first flight I’d taken to Los Angeles that took almost two days. I smiled to myself at how much the world had changed during my life. I’d gone from a poor country girl picking strawberries in the forest behind my house to flying in jumbo jets halfway around the world.

  We were scheduled to land at one o’clock in the morning, so I spent my time writing out what Jae-hee had told me. I made a plan for how I would use the information in my job. Jae-hee was right—people should know what the Japanese had done. I was determined to get the word out. I also wrote down the name of Jae-hee’s granddaughter, Anna Carlson.

  We landed at LAX, and I took a cab to my new home—a large apartment just west of Koreatown that I paid for with the money Mr. Saito had given me. After the cab dropped me off, I thought about finding Hisashi to see if he was all right. But it was two in the morning and I was tired from my trip, so I went to bed.

  I worked all the next day on a paper outlining the alliance’s position on the comfort women atrocity. It was brief and to the point. It stated that Japan should accept the responsibility for its military sexual slavery of hundreds of thousands of women and that it should make reparations to the survivors. As support, I included th
e notes I’d written from Jae-hee’s story. I put the position paper in my outbox with a note to Mr. Weinberg asking him to approve it before his last day.

  I left work early to look for Hisashi. He was one of a handful of homeless people who’d endured decades of life on the streets of LA. He’d become famous in Koreatown. Everyone knew of him. They called him the crazy Jap-bastard who begged for absolution for his country’s crimes.

  Usually, I found him in one of three places—Chapman Plaza, where he begged for food; Seoul International Park, where he watched the children play; or in MacArthur Park, where he slept. He wasn’t in any of his usual places.

  In Chapman Plaza, I asked a street vendor selling pho if he’d seen Hisashi.

  “I saw the police arrest him yesterday,” the vendor said.

  It wasn’t the first time they’d arrested Hisashi. A few months earlier, there’d been a call to clean up Los Angeles, and arresting the homeless was an easy way for the police to get the politicians off their backs. After a day or two in the county jail, they’d put Hisashi in a homeless shelter where he’d stay for a few days before going back out on the street.

  I caught a cab and went to the Los Angeles County men’s central jail. It was an imposing three-story concrete building not far from Chinatown. I went inside to the front desk and asked about Hisashi. The clerk—a large African American woman who never looked up from her monitor—said that they were processing him for a homeless shelter but if I paid a $325 fine and signed some papers, they’d release Hisashi to me. I wrote a check and signed the papers. Forty-five minutes later, I picked up Hisashi at a gate outside.

  He had his black plastic bag that he always carried around with his brown blanket and some old clothes inside. His hair was long, tangled, and completely gray. Deep lines streaked his face, permanently darkened from decades in the Southern California sun.