Comfort Woman (12 page)

The missionaries saved several girls by pretending to hire them as employees of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company. Used as a shield from the Japanese, who, not trusting foreign influences, discouraged Christianity but encouraged businesses for the revenue that could be sent back to the Emperor, the Mentholatum and Matches building had been erected at the start of the Japanese occupation and now appeared generations old.

Roughly my age, the girls who were rescued were round-faced and pretty in their innocence, as I once had been. They braided their hair with bright-colored ribbons that flashed against their black hair and uniforms when they marched out of their common sleeping quarters and into the kitchen. Like children, they squirmed in their seats, stifling giggles and gossip when I swept past them.

Later, when I could once again hear what others heard, I caught their whispers flying against me: Why does the minister always save the sweetest pastry for the devil girl? And see how he always touches her head, gives her the prettiest ribbons for her braid?

Even the missionaries gossiped. I heard Sister Red Nose say, The wild child is possessed, a false light luring away the faithful. Sister Milk Breath, giving me the name that Manshin Ahjima predicted would be mine at the mission, muttered,
Mary Magdalene,
a curse, whenever I passed her way.

Once, when questioned to his face about his treatment of me, the minister smiled, a fleeting quirk of the lips, and said, What man of you, having a hundred sheep, doth not leave the ninety and nine to go after that one which is lost, until he finds it?

Putting his hand on my head, he looked at his sheep until they dropped their eyes. Rejoice, he said to them, for I have found a lamb that once was lost.

Later the young girls fluttered around me. Will the handsome minister save you? they giggled.

I wish he would save
me,
one said.

As long as he saves me some ribbon, another grumbled. Akiko must get more than her fair share, don't you, Akiko?

Oh, it's not fair, the girls cried. Akiko always gets more of everything because they say she's touched. I think you are just acting. You wait till the war is over, Akiko. Our families will find us and we'll marry rich men and have everything. What will you have, crazy Akiko, with no family and no mind?

Because they were still young, they had faith that the war would end and the Japanese would be defeated. That their lives would resume their prewar scripts, as if the war and their abandonment caused only a brief stutter in the opera they envisioned for themselves.

Because they were still babies, really, I did not tell them what I knew was true: The war would never end, because the Japanese, like all that was evil, would wait in the shadows, shape-shifting and patient, hoping for a chance to swallow you whole.

I could not seem to differentiate among the missionaries, with their pink skin, mud-and-straw-colored hair, and large noses that blocked the space between their pale, watery eyes. If not for the clothes, I would have had trouble distinguishing the men from the women, for even the women were tall, with big hands and knuckles.

Their actions, too, made it difficult to label them as men and women, for they did not behave as proper men and women. In the world before the camps, the unmarried women and men I knew lived separately. From the age of six, I was taken away from the babies of both sexes and taught the ways of women. Though we would play on the swing, standing tall as we were pushed high enough to see into the boys' courtyard, girls were not supposed to talk or look at boys. In our family's home, my sisters and I rarely saw my father. When he was home, we prepared his meals and served him first. After he finished eating and went into the back room to smoke or sleep, we would eat our meal. That was what was respectful.

Even in the camps, where the soldiers banged in and out of the comfort cubicles, in and out of our women's bodies, what was left of our minds we guarded, kept private and separate.

At the mission house, I was embarrassed by the disrespect between the men and the women. Lives overlapping, men and women ate and worked together. They looked into each other's faces as they spoke, laughing with mouths open. Even while worshiping, they sat side by side, unseparated by a curtain or sheet, on the same bench, thighs and shoulders almost touching.

I began to recognize the minister because of the way the girls, forgetting or ignoring proper behavior, gathered around him. Like puppies, the girls would fall about his feet and legs, panting for a length of ribbon, a piece of candy, a box of chalk; for writing paper, toothpaste, a kind word. Thank you, Sonsaeng-nim, the girls would sing out, and as if they were pets, the minister would reach out, touching a nose, stroking the hair of those around him.

Stop, he would say. I am not an honored teacher. I am just a child, like you all, in God's eyes.

But the girls would cry out: No, no, not true! Look at your body, thin and long—an aristocrat's body! And your hands, so graceful—a scholar's hands! And your voice, they said, like God‘s!

The minister would laugh, saying, Stop! But his eyes would shine like blue glass.

Because I had begun to recognize him as an individual, I watched him carefully, intensely, as if memorizing his features, his gestures, were one of my chores. Often, as he gave away his gifts, he closed his eyes and lifted his chin. Pushing his chest forward, he would open and shut his mouth quickly, pursing his lips, blowing quick puffs of air. After a few days, I realized he was singing.

Now, years later, I recognize those same body movements and hear the words to the songs he sings to our baby. When she is fretful, crying so loud that the only thing she hears is the pain within her, only he can quiet her. He holds her tight against his chest, pinning her arms within her blanket, and sings. Soon she stops struggling, and as her screams fade into hiccups, she lifts her head toward the sound of his voice singing about whales of Jo-jo-jonah. Noah's art-y art-y made out of go-phers barking barking. Jesus loving children.

They are silly songs that my husband sings to comfort our child, but I hate them and I hate him.

I hate that he can quiet her with his voice, the same voice that lulled and lured the girls from the Pyongyang mission. The same voice, sounding so honest and joyful that you want to believe, even when you know the truth. The same voice that fools everyone but me. I hate that voice because my daughter loves it.

I cannot sing to my daughter like that, in a voice full of laughter, for I never learned funny songs, songs that make you laugh and laugh. I remember only bits and pieces from those my mother sang when she was working. And they were songs that filled you with sadness, that made you want to cry until your throat swelled with salt.

After one of the missionaries' communal dinners, the person who came to take the chopsticks from my hand was the minister the girls always followed. By then most of the people there had stopped speaking to or looking at me, unnerved by the silence by which I was surrounded. But when this man took the chotkarak away from me, he held my chin and looked into my eyes. He looked until I was forced to stop listening to the women crying in the comfort camps, until I looked back and saw him. And then he smiled, rubbed a napkin over my lips, and helped me stand. He took my hand and led me down the basement stairs, where the world turned on its side once again.

In the basement meeting room, he placed me on a bench between two other missionaries. I concentrated on watching him walk down the aisle to the pulpit, but my vision narrowed and buckled under the increasing intensity of camp sounds. During his speech, each time I saw him slap the pulpit for emphasis, I heard the sounds of women's naked buttocks being slapped as they were paraded in front of a new arrival of troops.

When the congregation stood, opening and riffling through their black books, I heard the shrieking of bullets ricocheting at the feet of women the soldiers were momentarily bored with.