Comfort Woman (5 page)

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 too 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.

I record the lives of the dead:

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!