Comfort Woman (3 page)

When I frowned, inching away from her, Reno scowled back. “You dense or what? Don't you get it—dat's dah teet' stay biting at her head.” She crossed her legs, leaned forward to prop her chin in the cup of her hands, and studied my mother. When my mother's eyes drifted shut and her breathing settled into a rumbling rhythm, Auntie Reno spoke: “All my life, I heard about people like dis. You know, my maddah said dis kinda thing supposed to run in our family, but I nevah seen anyone wit dah gift dis strong.” She touched the tip of her finger to my mother's forehead. “Some people—not many, but some—get dah gift of talking to the dead, of walking true worlds and seeing things one regulah person like you or me don't even know about. Dah spirits love these people, tellin' em for ‘do this, do that.' But they hate em, too, jealous of dah living.”

Auntie Reno likes to say she saved my mother and me from life in the streets, and I suppose she did. “Out of dah goodness of my heart, I'm telling you,” the story goes, “I became your maddah's manager. I saw how she could help those in need, and I saw how those in need could help your maddah and you.” Which is true, I guess, but Auntie Reno also saw a way that she could help herself.

Whenever the spirits called my mother to them, Auntie Reno insisted I dial her beeper, punching in 911 to let her know my mother had entered a trance. After the lunch crowd and before the dinner rush, Auntie Reno would phone the people who waited sometimes for months for my mother to deliver messages to and from the city of the dead. Then Reno closed the store and rushed over to our place.

While my mother wandered through the rooms talking to ghosts, Auntie Reno would place the large ceramic Wishing Bowl and a stack of red money envelopes on the coffee table, and I would stack oranges and light incense sticks in the corners of the apartment. Auntie Reno, who asserted that atmosphere was just as important as ability, hung bells and chimes and long banners of
kanji
on our walls. When I asked her what the characters meant, she shrugged. “Good luck, double happiness, someting like that.”

Then we'd catch my mother, dress her in a long white or blue or yellow robe—whichever one we could throw over her body without protest from the spirits—and turn on the music that would start my mother dancing. She liked heavy drumbeats, and once she got going, my mother could tell all about a person and the wishes of the dead that circled around her.

It got to be that whenever my mother slipped into her spells, we'd have people camping in our kitchen and living room and out in the apartment hallway, all waiting for my mother to tell them about the death and unfulfilled desire in their lives. “Your father's mother's sister died in childbirth, crying out the name of the baby who died inside her,” she'd tell one elderly customer with a growth in her uterus, “and she hangs around you, causing sickness and trouble, because she is jealous of all your children and grandchildren.” Or she'd tell someone else that her husband was cheating on her because of her bad breath, caused by the vindictive first-wife ghost who died craving a final bite of
mu kimchee.

For each of the seekers, my mother would pray and advise. And before they left, she would fold purified rock salt, ashes from the shrine, and the whispers of their deepest wish into a square of silk as a talisman against the evil or mischievous or unhappy spirits inhabiting their homes. In return, to ensure the fulfillment of their wishes, they folded money into a red envelope and dropped it into the Wishing Bowl.

And milling through all the mourners-in-waiting-the old ladies with their aching joints and deviant children, the fresh-off the-boat immigrants with cheating husbands and tax problems, and, later on, the rich middle-aged haoles looking for a new direction in life—was Reno, who served tea or soda and collected the fee between her shifrs at the restaurant.

Everyone seemed so respectful of my mother, so in awe of her, and Auntie Reno played it up, telling people my mother was a renowned fortune-teller and spirit medium in Japan and Korea. “Akiko Sonsaeng-nim,” she'd say, attaching the Korean honorific to my mother's name—something she would never do when my mother was conscious—“stay famous in dah old country.”

Auntie Reno's words impressed so many people that customers would wait for hours in the dank hallways and decrepit stairwells. Finally the apartment manager, fearful of the potential liabilities and lawsuits related to substandard housing and building codes, evicted us. And Auntie Reno saved us from the streets once again, informing us that my mother's share of the money enabled us to put a down payment on a small house in Waipahu, Kaimuki, Nu‘uanu, or—if we weren't too choosy—Manoa Valley.

As long as my mother's trance lasted, Auntie Reno would show up at our door every morning before I went to school, leading a new gathering of people. After she organized the customers, packing them tight against the railing and down the stairs so that the line coiled from our second-story apartment into the alley below, she'd pull me aside and hand me a pastry and a small bag of money collected from the Wishing Bowl.

Always, when I went to hide the money in my room, I'd slip out a dollar bill, roll it tight as an incense stick, and lay it in an ashtray on the dresser. Careful to hide from Reno's eyes, I'd strike a match and burn the money for the spirits. Then, pulling out my father's picture, I would begin to pray to my only connection in the spirit world. “Please please please, Daddy. I'll give you everything if you give my mother back.” I begged, reasoning that as a dead preacher, my father would be able to get God to intercede on my mother's behalf, or—as a spirit himself and in collusion with the other vengeful ghosts holding my mother captive—he might be persuaded by my own burnt offerings and bribes to free her.

When my mother began talking about how she killed my father, I thought that the spirits were coming to claim her again. “Stop, Mommy,” I said, rubbing the shrimp juice from her fingers. “You don't know what you're saying.” At ten, despite all the people coming to hear her talk this way, I was still afraid that someone would hear my mother's craziness and lock her up. It wasn't until I reached high school that I actually started hoping that that would happen. “You're not yourself,” I said loudly.

“Quiet!” My mother smacked my hand, just as she did when I couldn't memorize the times table. “Who else would I be? Pay attention!” She took the dishcloth, folded it into a rectangle, then a square, smoothing the wrinkles. “I wished him to death,” she said. “Every day I think, every day I pray, ‘Die, die,' sending him death-wish arrows, until one day my prayers were answered.”

“Oh God,” I groaned, my eyes rolling toward the back of my head. “So you didn't actually, physically kill him. Like with a knife or something.”

She whacked my hand again. “I'm teaching you something very important about life. Listen: Sickness, bad luck, death, these things are not accidents. This kind stuff, people wish on you. Believe me, I know! And if you cannot block these wishes, all the death thoughts people send you collect, become arrows in your back. This is what causes wrinkles and make your shoulders fold inward.”

She looked at me slouching into my chair, shoulders hunched into my body. I straightened up.

“Death thoughts turn your hair white, make you weak and break you, sucking out your life. I tell you these things,” she said, touching my hair with her blistering hands, “to protect you.”

She leaned toward me, and as she bent forward to kiss or hug me, I could see veins of white hair running through her black braid. Before she could touch me, I pushed away from the table, turning toward the sink to prepare the shrimp for the annual meal that made my mother's hands crack open and bleed.

I look at myself in the mirror now and see the same strands of white streaking across my dark head. I squint, and the lines in the corners of my eyes deepen, etching my face in the pattern that was my mother's. And I think: It has taken me nearly thirty years, almost all of my life, but finally the wishes I flung out in childhood have come true.

My mother is dead.

The baby I could keep came when I was already dead.

I was twelve when I was murdered, fourteen when I looked into the Yalu River and, finding no face looking back at me, knew that I was dead. I wanted to let the Yalu's currents carry my body to where it might find my spirit again, but the Japanese soldiers hurried me across the bridge before I could jump.

I did not let them get too close. I knew they would see the name and number stenciled across my jacket and send me back to the camps, where they think nothing of using a dead girl's body. When the guards started to step toward me, I knew enough to walk on, to wave them back to their post, where they would watch for other Koreans with that “special look” in their eyes. Before the Japanese government posted the soldiers—“for the good of the Koreans”—the bridge over the Yalu had been a popular suicide spot.

My body moved on.

That is why, twenty years after it left my spirit behind at the recreation camp, my body was able to have this baby. Even the doctors here say it is almost a miracle. The camp doctor said I would never have a living child after he took my first one out, my insides too bruised and battered, impossible to properly heal.

So this little one is a surprise. This half-white and half-Korean child. She would be called tweggi in the village where I was born, but here she will be American.

When the missionaries found me, they thought I was Japanese because of the name, Akiko, sewn onto the sack that was my dress. The number, 41, they weren't sure about, and thought, Perhaps an orphanage? They asked me—in Korean, Japanese, Chinese—where I came from, who my family was, but by then I had no voice and could only stand dumbly in front of their moving mouths as they lifted my arms, poked at my teeth and into my ears, wiped the dirt from my face.