Sad Peninsula (15 page)

“Where is he?”

“He worked the night shift at the factory. I expect him home any minute.”

A silence fell between them. Eun-young felt a tightness grip her shoulders.

“He said
you
were taken to a munitions factory, in China,” Ji-young went on. “Is that true? Very dangerous work, I assume. Is that how you got that scar over your lip?”

Eun-young turned her face away.

“Hey, don't be ashamed of it,” Ji-young said. There was an innocence to her tone, to the way she touched Eun-young's hand. “I'm sure however it happened, it wasn't your fault.”

“Did the Japanese not come for you?” Eun-young asked.

“They
did
come for me,” Ji-young replied. Her face grew stern. “The
Jungshindae
came by every week. But mother and father hid me in the cellar each time they did. I haven't seen anything beyond our front door since you left. They weren't going to lose
another
child to those bastards. But they're gone now. And I'll be starting
school
soon. Father said it was okay, now that the Japanese are gone.”

Lose another child. I am a lost child.
Eun-young let her gaze fall to the table.

Ji-young squeezed her hand. “Don't think about it. You're home now. It's over. The Japanese are gone. Our country is going to belong to
us
again. We can start everything anew.” She tried to smile at her older sister. “You're seventeen now. We'll have to talk to the matchmaker and find you a
chungmae.
It's time.”

Eun-young found her head shaking involuntarily, her face cresting into a frown.

“Oh, Eun-young, please don't tell me you're still holding out for a
yonae
. You know that you —” Fresh tears spilled out of Eun-young's eyes. Ji-young startled. “Eun-young, I didn't mean … I'm sorry. I didn't mean …” The rest was written on her face:
I didn't mean you're too ugly now, with that scar, to find a yonae.

“I'll get the rice,” Ji-young said meekly, getting up from the table.

They ate in silence, rice and kimchi. The kimchi hadn't been left long enough to ferment; Ji-young was still learning. They had just cleaned their plates when they heard a rustle outside the door. The girls stood. The latch lifted and their father stepped in, his head down.

“Ji-young? Ji-young?” he called out, his voice heavy with exhaustion. “Why did you leave the basket of laundry in the street? Are you mad? Did you —”

He stopped when he saw two girls, not one, standing in his home. His whole body went slack when his eyes met Eun-young's. It was like he was staring at a ghost. Eun-young moved her arms over her chest, as if pulling closed an invisible coat. Certain he could read every shame written upon her. She looked into his face and for a moment thought she saw the slightest hint of kindness there.

But then his mouth turned down. He marched up to Eun-young and paused. Then he struck her as hard as he could.

Eun-young crashed to the floor, nearly hitting her head on the table. As she fumbled around, her dress hiked up around her hips, revealing the graffiti of scars on her legs.

Ji-young screamed. Went to their father. But he shoved her away, ignoring her wordless pleas. “Stand over there, Ji-young. And don't say a word. Not one word — or your fate will be hers.” He hovered over the prostrate Eun-young, looking down at the legs spread into a crawl in front of him before she could pull her dress back down. The sight seemed to confirm everything. He grabbed her from behind and tossed her to her feet. She stood before him, not daring to touch the syrupy blood that tickled under her nose.

“You are a
whore
!” he bellowed. Wiped his mouth, moist with anger. “Do you even understand the
disgrace
you have brought to this family? Do you even
know
?”

“Father please …” Ji-young wept from the corner.

His eyes would not leave Eun-young. “Slut! Fox! Diseased vixen!” He shook all over. “You had to be out there in the
world
, didn't you? You had to ignore me. And now look at what has come to pass. Look at
you
!”

He took a step closer to her and she recoiled into herself. “You killed her, do you know that? You killed your mother, Eun-young.”

“Father, no!”

“She waited outside that door for you, staring up that hill for you. Every day. Thinking that you would one day come back down it. But you never did, Eun-young. You never came back, and it
shattered
her heart.”

He was trembling now. Looked like he had finally finished. But then he struck her again, harder than before.

Eun-young crumbled to her father's feet. He floated over her before grabbing a handful of her hair. Pulled her back up. Placed his face near hers, as if he were about to kiss her.

“I cast you out,” he moaned. “I cast you out of my house like the
ghost
you are.”

He dragged her to the door by the hair, with Ji-young screaming and following behind them. He raised the latch, threw open the door and tossed Eun-young to the street.

“You wanted to be part of the world?” he barked as she got to her feet and began walking away. “Well there you go, slut. You belong to the
world
now.” He kept yelling even as she hiked back up the hill and out of earshot, even as he held a screaming Ji-young back with one arm. “You belong to the world now!”

I
may belong to the world
, she thought in those first hours, those first days on the streets of Seoul,
but who does this
country
belong to
? As she searched for a way to survive, Eun-young could not ignore that foreigners were once again deciding the fate of her homeland. A line had been drawn, she found out, just north of Seoul —
temporary
, people were saying — until the Americans and the Soviets could decide what to do with this strange, crucial peninsula.

The Americans were everywhere in Seoul, she noticed. They were running things, along with Koreans who had obviously been Japanese collaborators during the occupation. Still, Eun-young was grateful to this new administration: it offered her a job right off the street, cleaning government buildings and the homes of rich diplomats. She couldn't believe it. The work paid poorly and forced her to live in a squalid rooming house full of prostitutes and paupers, but still. She had her own room. She had food to eat. She
would
survive.

Her new neighbourhood was soon littered with all manner of competing pamphlets. Rife with garish slogans and propaganda, they choked the gutters and hung like leafy scales on trees and power-line poles. Both sides had an explanation for recent terrorist attacks — blamed on Marxists — that rocked various sections of Seoul; both sides had their definitions of what
Korea for Koreans
meant. Eun-young began collecting these pamphlets, taking them back to her room to read at night. She used the blank spaces on the back to write letters to Ji-young, explaining where she was now, describing her long, anonymous days in the government buildings cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors. She also saved a paragraph to comment on whatever absurd propaganda blared across the reverse side of the page.
Are these idiots really advocating civil war?
she asked.

At first Eun-young mailed these to Ji-young through the regular post, but months passed and she never received a response. She imagined her father intercepting the letters, ripping them up before Ji-young could see them. Eun-young eventually got the idea to walk to the family house in the middle of the night and slip her letters under the door. Their father would either be asleep or working at the factory. The plan succeeded: within days, Ji-young's first letter arrived at the rooming house. It was not written on the back of pamphlets and made no reference to Eun-young's commentary on the propaganda. It was written on plain rice paper and, much to Eun-young's surprise, talked about
boys
that Ji-young was discovering at school. About how she was beginning to think that a
yonae
would “actually be not such a bad thing.”

O
ne day, Eun-young was emptying garbage cans in a civil servant's office when waves of pain suddenly overtook her. They clenched her guts, nearly doubling her over. By the time she finished her shift, she could barely walk back to her room. She had been sick like this before, mostly at night. The fevers, the heavy, crawling itch between her legs, the painful swelling of her private places. The next morning she forced herself out of bed, desperate not to be late for work, and left a stain of discharge on the sheet below her. She arrived late anyway and was threatened with dismissal. Worked her way through the pain, all day long, practically weeping as she scrubbed and cleaned.

For months she tried to ignore these days. Her body was fighting with itself, waging a war between health and sickness. Eun-young kept believing that time alone would heal her and that the periods of health would soon outlast the periods of illness.
How long since my last rape?
she often thought.
Surely one day there will be no trace of the Japanese and their diseases in my blood.
But that day never came. And soon she was late for other shifts. The threat of termination hung over her constantly. Eun-young could not bring herself to visit the clinic set up by the U.S. army near the government building. She didn't want American doctors probing her down there and discovering her shame. So she instead turned to a Korean folk healer, an old woman who kept a ginseng shop in a back alley near the rooming house. After Eun-young gave her a vague description of her symptoms, the
a'jumah
prescribed foul-smelling ointments, bitter-tasting teas, and a nightly ritual of standing on her head with her legs spread out like airplane wings. For a few weeks the treatment seemed to work. But then the symptoms returned, and worse than before. Eun-young ignored them for as long as she could, the randomness of them. On a particularly bad day, one of the prostitutes in the rooming house gave her a small sample of penicillin.
The Americans are giving them out like treats!
she exclaimed.
You should go see them about your problem.
And could not understand why Eun-young wouldn't.
I am not like you
, she wanted to say.
I don't want an American doctor thinking that I am, or ever was, one of your ilk. Because I wasn't.
But she had to admit, the penicillin helped for a while. But then the flush and aches and night sweats returned.

B
y the late summer of '48, it was official: There were two Koreas now. The demarcation at the 38th parallel had become a heavily armed border. Strangely, the American presence in Seoul was receding in the face of this mounting tension, the rumours of war, impromptu terrorist attacks, and news of guerillas hiding in the mountains beyond the city, ready to strike. Eun-young wrote letters to her sister about what she was seeing.
What can come of this? The Americans have put thugs and Japanese collaborators in control and expect us to support them. Meanwhile, the Soviets have Kim to impose their version of communism on the North. This cannot end well.
Ji-young, fifteen now, had no interest in politics. She wrote back with long, flowery descriptions of her days at school and the boys she was discovering. Working hard, she was, to secure a love match for herself before all the good boys disappeared into a life in the army. Eun-young wept over the stupid innocence of these letters. She was so jealous. She walked to work one day trying to shake off these resentful thoughts, images of her little sister maturing into a life — marriage and children, family and a home — that Eun-young herself never would. It was unbearable to think about for too long.

But when Eun-young arrived at the office, she discovered that the windows of the first floor had been blown out by a terrorist's bomb, and there were dead bodies on the ground.

T
he prostitute kept leaving fresh samples of penicillin in her mailbox.
Stop being so stubborn and go ask for help
, her notes invariably read. There was no doubt: this penicillin was a miracle drug. Eun-young couldn't help but remember its predecessor, the dreaded 606 injections in the camps, and how sick it always made her, poisoning the diseases out of her blood. This penicillin was infinitely better. But Eun-young couldn't help it; still couldn't bear to drag herself to the clinic. Couldn't bear to let the diseases inflicted by one group of foreigners be cured with the solutions of another. Even if those solutions were ultimately for the best.

S
kirmishes
, the newspapers called them. The word sounded like a game, a kind of child-like horseplay. It was not. These fights were legitimized now — a genuine clash between rival nations. The streets were choking on ideology. Kim and Rhee. Communism and whatever you called the system that the Americans were leaving behind. Talk of war and reunification. The history of Japanese aggression hung in the air, leaving the entire peninsula sick and splintered.

The eyes of the world are watching us now
, Eun-young wrote to her sister.
Our little peninsula is in the crosshairs of history.

She was not surprised when Ji-young wrote back and compared the conflict to some rivalry that she had drummed up with one of the girls at her school.

T
he worst day came, and Eun-young could no longer bear it. A fever that left her limp and sweating on her bed. Her genitals and anus had swollen almost completely shut, making trips to the bathroom an exercise in agony. Welts appeared around her groin and her joints ached as if she were a decrepit old hag instead of a young woman of twenty-one. Eun-young gave up on her fears, and dragged herself to the army clinic near the government building. There, she was surprised to see that it was a Korean doctor, not an American one, who treated her. He gave her a thorough, silent examination. There was a coldness to his touch, and she wondered if he was secretly judging her. When he finished, he prescribed a regimen of penicillin and other pills that she had never heard of before. “Compliments of the Americans,” he said when he saw the wad of bills that she had saved up to pay for the drugs. “Put your money away.”