Chinese Comfort Women (17 page)

Before she was taken away, my mother entrusted me to an old woman who lived in the same village. She gave the old lady some money, hoping she would provide for me. However, the old woman said to me after my mother left: “Girl, I have many children in my house so everyone must fight for food. I don’t think you can win the battle to survive here. I will have to send you to another family to be a “child-daughter-in-law.”
¹
I didn’t understand what “child-daughter-in-law” meant when I was given away. I was sent to Wang-jiabian Village near Tuqiao Town, and my husband-to-be was much older than I.

When the Japanese army came in 1937, I was about nine years old. I remember that it was the season when the weather was getting cold. Villagers were cleaning up the sweet potato fields and the pond in the village had already frozen over.
²
That day my mother-in-law gave me a hoe and told me to dig out sweet potatoes. As I finished digging and was on my way home, I saw a huge crowd of people running southward. The Japanese troops attacked my hometown. People ran southward because there was a big pond, which they hoped might stop the Japanese from chasing them. The villagers hid themselves in holes deep in the ground. My mother-in-law had two daughters. One was over twenty and the other was turning nineteen. Both of them had bound feet so they could not move quickly.
³
My feet had been bound for a while and then released, so I didn’t have their problems. My family members dug two holes that were connected, a smaller one above a larger one. My sisters-in-laws hid in the large hole on the lower level. My mother-in-law hid in the small one above them. They brought a big pot of rice to eat in the holes. My mother-in-law didn’t allow me to hide in the holes with them. She said if the Japanese soldiers saw me, the whole family would be killed and I would die too. She gave me some roasted sunflower seeds and soybeans as my food.

Hidden at home I frequently saw the Japanese troops come into the village, where they did a lot of shooting. They shot chickens to eat, but they would not eat the wings, heads, or claws. They also shot cattle. They would keep shooting at an ox until it collapsed on the ground. They only ate the meat on the legs of oxen and threw the other parts away. When they saw us children, some Japanese soldiers took out candies and threw them on the ground. One bold child picked up a candy and ate it. Seeing that, we all followed his example. The Japanese soldiers then grabbed the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girls. Those who didn’t have time to run became their victims. The Japanese soldiers took the girls to those abandoned houses to “sleep.”

Tuqiao Town was only five
li
[one
li
is five hundred metres] away from Wangjiabian Village. There used to be many shops and buildings, but they were mostly vacated after the war broke out. My mother-in-law told me to go to the town with some other girls to get goods from the abandoned shops. I was very scared. The goods were quite heavy and I had to climb up high to reach them. I was afraid that I might break my legs in a fall. However, my mother-in-law would have beaten me if I had refused to go. I went to Tuqiao Town quite a few times with other children where I saw that the Japanese troops occupied the good houses in that abandoned town. Several times we ran into the Japanese troops riding on their horses, which scared us to death. The teenage girls would flee desperately. The girls with whom I went to Tuqiao Town were of different ages. The Japanese soldiers would pat our heads and ask how old we were. I was only nine then, but some other girls were around fifteen. The Japanese soldiers would take those fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girls away. This happened several times, but I was very young and at the beginning I didn’t know where they were taken or what happened to them, until I saw one of the girls dead. She had been sexually tortured to death by the Japanese soldiers! That day we had gone to an abandoned shop to search for goods. In that abandoned shop we saw many abducted girls, some of whom were already dead. I was extremely frightened. The girls who were still alive were too weak to walk. They were not the girls who had been going to the town with me and I didn’t know where they were from. One time I also saw a girl whose belly was bloated. Her father, who wore a pair of straw sandals, was massaging her stomach. Her lower body was covered with blood and bloody pus was dripping onto the floor. We did not dare to go to the town again after seeing these girls.

Three years after I was sent to Wangjiabian as a child-daughter-in-law, my husband-to-be died. At that time I was only ten years old and it was not clear to me whether he was killed by the Japanese or died of illness. I only remember his name – Chen Yu. My mother-in-law was very mean to me and often beat
me. My mother-in-law grew silkworms. The silkworms looked like huge caterpillars. When I fed them mulberry leaves they would crawl onto my hands and I would flick them away in fear. When my mother-in-law saw that she would beat me.

One day my mother came to see me. She brought me a pair of flowered shoes made of a quilt cover. I begged my mother to take me with her, but she said: “I cannot. You are a child-daughter-in-law in your husband’s family. Besides, I’ve had a new baby with my current husband.” I had no choice but to stay. I fell ill. My mother-in-law told me to spread some straw on the ground outside of the house and lie out there under the sun. A nice grandpa who had relatives in Ligangtou Village was sympathetic when he saw me unable to eat or drink. [This old man was not Lei Guiying’s grandfather. It is a Chinese custom to use a kinship term to refer to an older person in order to show one’s respect, even though the person is not a blood relative.] He made soup to feed me and persuaded my father-in-law to obtain treatment for my illness. Thanks to this nice old man, I was taken to a doctor and given medicine. I recovered gradually and then I begged that kind grandpa to bring me to my mother. He quietly led me out of the village to Ligangtou, where I was reunited with my mother. My mother had given birth to a little boy with her new husband. This little brother of mine was very cute. I carried him around and played with him, but he was a little too heavy for me to carry. One day when I was holding him up he fell over my shoulders. My mother’s mother-in-law grabbed my hair and beat me. My mother cried. She said to me: “Sorry, I cannot let you stay any longer. I will find you another home where you can be their child-daughter-in-law.” Thus, my reunion with my mother lasted for less than ten days and I became a child-daughter-in-law again. I was twelve that year [1941].

My father-in-law in this new family owned a dye house in Sihou Village not far from Ligangtou. My husband dyed cloth and I helped him heat the dye pot. Cloth was dyed in the pot and then taken out to dry. My husband went to collect cloth in the town. He also herded cattle and cut hay. I worked hard to help with various jobs, yet my mother-in-law often yelled at me and beat me.

Life in this household was unbearable, so I escaped not long after I was married into the family. With a bowl and a pair of chopsticks I begged, going from village to village. The weather was very cold. I came across a nice old couple, who asked me if I was hungry and gave me crispy rice crust. I heard the grandpa talking about going to Tangshan, so I asked him to take me with him.

Having neither job nor home, I wandered the streets of Tangshan begging. An old woman said to me: “Girl, I know a place where you can have meals to eat. You just have to do some work.” She told me the place was called Gaotaipo. It was owned by a Japanese couple named Shanben. [“Shanben” is the Chinese pronunciation of the two characters used to write the Japanese surname “Yamamoto.”] I didn’t know that place was, in fact, a military brothel until much later. I had no idea that it was a comfort station, nor did I know what a comfort station was at that time.

[Lei Guiying stopped recounting her story and told the interviewers that, besides the Gaotaipo comfort station, there was another comfort station in Tangshan. It was referred to as “Dai Li’s Mansion” (Dai Li lou) or “Big Mansion” (Da lou). The remains of the Gaotaipo comfort station have been removed and a new building has been constructed on the site.]

At Shanben’s house I worked as a nanny and maid. There were two children in the family. One was a boy named Hatsurō, who was about six years old; the other was a little girl named Nobu-chan. [The children’s names are recorded as Lei Guiying pronounced them.] Their mother appeared to be kind. She gave me money to take the children out to shows, which she called
katsudō
. I didn’t understand any Japanese at first. Once Mrs. Shanben wanted me to buy
nankin mame
, but I had no clue what she was talking about. She then went in and brought out a bag to show me. It turned out
nankin mame
were peanuts.

Mr. Shanben was a businessman. Mrs. Shanben was often not home, but I didn’t know exactly what she was doing. It seemed that she worked at a shop local people called “Tianfu Devil’s” selling groceries. Every now and then Mr. Shanben would take a military vehicle to Shanghai to buy goods like sugar or soy sauce and then sell them to the Japanese troops. Mr. Shanben had a card that enabled him to enter the military compound freely.

The Shanbens’ house, which I later figured out was a military brothel, was near a highway. There was a kitchen next to the entrance and a large storage room on the east side. Next to the kitchen was a small storage room where I slept. They put the things they bought from Shanghai in the small storage room. There was a centre hall with two side rooms. Next to them there was a huge room with a wide bed. Thirteen girls lived there. They were all Chinese but wore Japanese robes. The older girls at Gaotaipo were about seventeen or eighteen, and some of the younger ones fifteen or sixteen. I often saw Japanese men come and take one or two of the girls into the bedroom with them. The robes these girls wore had wide sleeves and a sash. They wore flowers in their hair. None of them could speak Japanese. When the Japanese
soldiers came, they called the girls
gu’niang
. [This is a Chinese word meaning “maiden.”]

I turned thirteen in 1942 and I began menstruating that year. Mrs. Shanben smiled at me. “Congratulations!” she said, “You are a grownup now.” I remember that it was a summer day and a lot of Japanese troops came to the Shanbens’ house. I saw them picking out good-looking girls and mumbling something. Mrs. Shanben told me to change into a Japanese robe that had a bumpy sash at the back and to go to that large room. Before I could figure out what was going on, I was pushed over to the Japanese soldiers. I was frightened. A Japanese soldier pulled me over, ripped off my clothes, and threw me on the wide bed. I resisted with all my strength. My wrist was injured during the fight and the wound left a scar that is still visible now. The Japanese soldier pressed my belly with both of his knees and hit my head with the hilt of his sword while crushing me under his body. He raped me.

On weekdays not many Japanese soldiers came to the comfort station, so I continued working as a nanny in the house. Many Japanese troops came on weekend evenings. Sometimes five or six came in a group. They also came during the day, but they didn’t spend the night there. When I first went to Gaotaipo, there were always many girls and a lot of Japanese soldiers; usually ten or more of them would come together. Later the number of Japanese troops decreased to five or six at a time. I could tell that some of them were officers because I saw the guard stand and salute. Each officer wore leather boots and a long sword and threw his weight about. The soldiers each carried a rifle with a bayonet.

The large room containing the wide bed was about twenty-five square metres and had a cement floor. The bed built against the walls was lower than my knees and covered with straw mats. The Japanese soldiers took off their shoes before getting on the bed rather than at the entrance of the room. The wide bed ran from wall to wall without any separators; when the Japanese troops came, curtains were hung on metal wires to divide it into a small space for each girl. A row of stands for bowls stood against the wall on the opposite side of the room. There was also a small dining table. Meals were brought into the room and the girls were not allowed to go out.

The Japanese soldiers used rubber condoms. I had seen condoms before when I was cleaning the house, but I didn’t know what they were then. We were told to wash our lower bodies after each time a Japanese soldier came. There was a greenish substance in the wash water. Mr. Shanben distributed towels, toilet paper, and Japanese robes to the girls. The robe had a bumpy sash at the back. We had nothing else besides these things.

At Gaotaipo Comfort Station the girls were given three meals a day – usually rice with soy sauce, and on some rare occations there was canned fish – but often not enough to eat. Because I worked as the nanny in the house, I was allowed to go to the kitchen. Sympathetic kitchen workers sometimes gave me food, which I shared secretly with the other girls. Unable to leave the room, the girls stayed on the wide bed every day and played cards. Occasionally the Japanese military men gave finery to the girls they liked, but I didn’t see any of the girls receive any monetary payment. I saw some of the older girls playing with the gifts, but I never received anything from the Japanese troops because I was too young.

Most of the girls learned to smoke cigarettes in the comfort station and some smoked opium. I had no idea where or how the girls obtained the opium. The girls smoked stealthily in the latrine. Later I picked up the bad habit, too, and it took me a long time to quit smoking opium.

When I was forced to move into that big room, there were only four girls, including me. Life there was hell. Once I saw a group of Japanese soldiers rape a girl continuously. When they left we saw that her belly had already swelled up. The older girls massaged her lower abdomen; then blood and fluid gushed all over the floor. One day I saw the Japanese soldiers burning a dead girl’s body on a pile of firewood; the girl had been tortured to death in the station. Many years later my husband told me that, when he had worked as a forest ranger, he had also seen Japanese troops burning the bodies of girls by pouring kerosene on them. The flames leapt up very high.