Comfort Woman (33 page)

Wanting to hear her voice once more, I unpacked the “Beccah” tape—my mother's last message, last gift to me—I had carried back from the Manoa house. But just as when I was a child listening in on my mother's sessions with her clients, just as when I listened to that one tape many years ago, I heard, when I first began playing my mother's tape in the apartment I had chosen for myself, only senseless wails, a high-pitched keening relieved by the occasional gunshot of drums. Still, I listened, but only when I stopped concentrating did I realize my mother was singing words, calling out names, telling a story. I turned the volume knob on the stereo until my mother's voice shivered up the walls, as if the louder the words, the easier I would be able to understand the story.

As the tape wound on, I rummaged through the kitchen cabinets for paper and pen, wanting to write down my mother's song. I scribbled words I recognized—
kok, han, chesa, chudang,
Saja,
poji
—words connected to blood and death. After filling several notebook pages with black scrawl, I stopped the recorder. The scraps of paper seemed inadequate, small and disjointed. Needing a bigger canvas, I stripped the sheet from my bed, laid-it on the living room floor in front of the speakers, pressed Play on the recorder, and caught my mother's words.

So many true names unknown, dead in the heart. So many
bodies
left unprepared, lost in the river.

Not once did my mother sing my name. And though primarily in English, this tape was not for me, was addressed not to me but to her mother, a final description of her mother's death and feast. Faithful in performing the death anniversary
chesa,
my mother proved to be dutiful and dependable as a daughter in a way she never was as a mother.

When the first side of the tape hissed to a stop, I realized that what I had thought were drums accenting my mother's lament was actually a dismal rapping at my door, incessant but faint. Flipping the tape over, I pressed Play and, with my mother's words wrapped around me, drifted to the door. Through the eye of the peephole, I saw the apartment manager leaning against the door, thumping listlessly with flattened hand, his bowed head a balloon on the string of his body.

“What?” I yelled through the closed door.

Hiram Hirano jumped away from the door, blinking his pink, watery eyes. “Sorry to bother you,” he squeaked. “But there've been complaints about your, ah, music.”

I watched him fiddle with his balding head, stick a finger into his ear. He snuffled at the door, trying to look into the peephole. “Hallo?” he stammered. “Did you hear me? Hallo? Could you turn it down?”

“My mother is dead,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, scuttling away from the door as if it were diseased.

Wishing I could turn up the volume even more, I added my own voice, an echo until I stumbled over a term I did not recognize:
Chongshindae.
I fit the words into my mouth, syllable by syllable, and flipped through my Korean-English dictionary, sounding out a rough, possible translation: Battalion slave.

Chongshindae: Our brothers and fathers conscripted. The women left to be picked over like fruit to be tasted, consumed, the pits spit out
as
Chongshindae, where we rotted under the body of orders from the Emperor of Japan. Under the Emperor's orders, we were beaten and starved. Under Emperor's orders, the holes of our bodies were used to bury their excrement. Under Emperor's orders, we were bled again and again until we were thrown into a pit and burned, the ash from our thrashing arms dusting the surface of the river in which we had sometimes been allowed to bathe. Under Emperor's orders, we could not prepare those in the river for the journey out of hell.

The Japanese believe they have destroyed an entire generation of Koreans. That we are all dead and have taken the horrible truth
with
us,
but
I
am alive.
I feel you, knowing you
wait
by my
side until
the time comes for me to join you across the river. I offer you this one small gesture each year, worth more than the guilt money the Japanese now offer to silence me: a bit of rice burned in your memories, and your names called over and over again, a feast of crumbs for the starving.

I rewound the tape where my mother spoke of the
Chongshindae,
listening to her accounts of crimes made against each woman she could remember, so many crimes and so many names that my stomach cramped. Without reference, unable to recognize any of the names, I did not know how to place my mother, who sounded like an avenging angel recounting the crimes of men.

“Mommy—Omoni—is this you?” I cried, but my mother did not pause in her grief, her song for the dead.

I could not view my mother, whom I had always seen as weak and vulnerable, as one of the “comfort women” she described. Even though I heard her call out “Akiko,” the name she had answered to all my life, I could not imagine her surviving what she described, for I cannot imagine myself surviving. How could my mother have married, had a child, if she had been forced into the camps? And then, given new context, came the half-forgotten memory of the night my father was taken to the hospital.

From the little consistencies I could gather from her stories, we were living in Florida, in a bungalow adjacent to the chapel on the campus of the Miami Mission House for Boys. What I remember is a small yard in which I played and a small room where I slept by myself. That particular morning, a Saturday that I had been allowed to watch television, I saw
Curse of the Mummy.
Although, remembering its time slot, the movie I saw was more likely to have been
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy,
or even
Scooby-Doo and the Haunted House.
But whatever the movie, images of the resurrected dead chased me into the night, into my dreams. I remember the wrapped mummy shuffling toward me—strips of rotting, stinking cloth hanging from outstretched arms—stalking me even as I ran from sleep into the reality of my room. Screaming, feeling the mummy's breath rustle the hair on the back of my head, I jumped from my bed and stormed into my parents' bedroom.

Halfway across their room, I realized it was empty, that there was no one to save me. I waited for the mummy to devour me, but when she reached me, she merely turned my head toward the open window. I opened my eyes and, as if caught in another dream in which I had no control, saw my mother dancing in the alley of our yard and my father on his knees before her, begging her to come inside, come inside before someone saw them.

“Bow down before God, for He alone can heal your wounds,” my father told my mother. “Remember the woman of Luke, chapter thirteen. She had been inflicted by evil spirits, suffering for eighteen years, before Jesus put His hands on her, saying ‘Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.' Bow down, Akiko, just as that woman did, and you shall be free.”

But my mother laughed and spat at my father. “I will never, never again lay down for any man,” she said. And she swung around, spinning in circles about him.

My father stood and clasped his hands to his chest. “Forgive her, Father. She knows not what she speaks.”

“I know what I speak, for that is my given name. Soon Hyo, the true voice, the pure tongue. I speak of laying down for a hundred men—and each one of them Saja, Death's Demon Soldier—over and over, until I died. I speak of bodies being bought and sold, of bodies—”

“ ‘Put away perversity from your mouth; keep corrupt talk from your lips, or—,' ” my father yelled.

“Of bodies that were burned and cut and thrown like garbage to wild dogs by the river—”

“ ‘Or ye shall be struck down!' ” My father grabbed my mother's shoulders and shook her.

“I'm the one! I'm the one to strike you down, and God down too!” my mother screamed, charging my father, scratching at his face.

But my father was the one to strike her down, pushing her into the damp ground in an attempt to cover her mouth. “Quiet! What if someone hears you speaking like this? The boys, the brothers? What if Beccah hears you? Think of how she would feel, knowing her mother was a prostitute.”

My father held my mother in his arms, cradling her as she moaned and pounded against him. “Shush,” he murmured. “It is not for me to judge. But know that ‘The sins of the parent shall fall upon their children and their grandchildren.' I ask you to protect our daughter, with your silence, from that shame.”

I fell asleep in my parents' bed that night, listening to the sound of my mother crying, and when I woke, I was in the hospital. I spent most of the next few weeks in the hospital, roaming its corridors, dreaming in front of the candy machines, sliding on the slick white floors, waiting for my mother to emerge from my father's room. When I asked to see him, my mother said, “Wait, wait until he is better,” but I never saw him again. On our final visit to the hospital, I remember hearing the words “heart failure,” “complications,” “pneumonia,” “I'm sorry.” And as the doctor bent toward my mother and me, offering his condolences, I asked not about my daddy, but about the candy in the vending machine.

I clawed through memory and story, denying what I heard and thought I remembered, and tried to pinpoint my mother's birth date, her age during World War II. Flooding my mind with dates and numbers, I wanted to drown my mother's voice, wanted to reassure myself that these atrocities could not have been inflicted on her, that she was just a child when she claimed to be a comfort woman. I began to scratch dates on the bedsheet—
1995, 1965, 1945, 1931-2-3—
when the manager came back. I recognized his feeble knocking, but the voice that called my name from outside the door was Sanford‘s, whom I had listed on the rental agreement as the person to contact in case of emergency.

I did not need to get off the floor in front of the speakers to know what was happening behind the door. Hiram, bug-eyed and sweating, would be backing away after having performed his obligatory knocking. Sanford would be waving the timid manager down the hallway while fretting with his hair and expression, concerned with looking supportive yet boyishly handsome.

I didn't rush to open the door upon hearing his voice, and I knew Sanford's mask must have slipped. “Beccah!” he roared, pounding the door. “It's me.”

I turned the knob of the volume down. “Who?” I said, then twisted the knob back toward high.

Sanford stopped pounding for a moment, then yelled out his name as if it were a question.

About to take pity on him and open the door, I heard my mother call me, weaving my name into her chants, her prayers for justice.

I remembered watching my mother lay out the offerings for the dead before she would feed me, remembered her dancing over me with strips of cloth torn from the sheets of my bed. And while I had felt invisible, unimportant, while my mother consorted with her spirits, I now understood that she knew I watched her. That in her way, she had always carried me with her.

Feeling my mother's arms around my waist, I walked to the door. “I'm speaking to my mother,” I told Sanford through the cracks.

“Your mother is dead,” Sanford said, speaking to me as I had spoken to my mother, as if she were unstable. Dangerous.

I looked at Sanford, made small through the tunnel of the peephole. When I was in high school, the art teacher taught us to look through a square made by our fingers, in order to focus on what we wanted to paint. I often looked at my mother through the finger frame, trying to put her in perspective. I liked the way my fingers captured her, making her manageable. Squinting my eye through my lens, I could make her any size I wanted. I could make her shrink, smaller and smaller, until she disappeared with a blink.