Sad Peninsula (2 page)

Because there are far more women at our table than men, we soon attract some unwanted guests: a handful of GIs, toting large mugs of beer, have suddenly invaded our space. These young guys are gruffly sociable in their crewcuts and muscles, but their intentions are obvious. “Do you mind if we join you?” the leader of the pack hollers. Without waiting for an answer, they pull up chairs seemingly out of nowhere and surround our booth. Conversations recalibrate yet again. The shivering sticks ask where the boys are from. The soldiers mention American-sounding towns in American states. Rob, Justin, and I — all from the Maritimes in Canada — grow uneasy. One of us will need to pick a minor fight.

“So tell me something,” Justin wades in, “is it true what they say about American soldiers in Korea?”

“What's that?” asks one of the marines.

“That the only reason you're here is because you've had disciplinary problems in other postings? That it's a punishment to be here.”

The leader just beams. “Hey man, we love Korea. We love the
women
.” The miniskirted girls cover their mouths as they laugh. I catch Jin rolling her eyes and I feel a tingle beneath my skin.

Jon Hung pipes up next, mentioning that he's the only American in our group — born in Hawaii, raised in Seattle. “So tell me,” he asks, “are we really going to war or what?”

The marines laugh again. It's true — their subliterate commander-in-chief will be launching an unprovoked invasion in another month or so. These boys contradict themselves by saying they'd love to get reassigned off this peninsula that hasn't seen real conflict in fifty years. The war would be their ticket to adventure.

“But it'll only be a three-month gig, man,” one of them says. “Get rid of Saddam, root out al-Qaeda, then back home by summer.”

“There's no al-Qaeda in Iraq,” I point out, but assume my mumbles are smothered under the dance music.

“Yeah, man,” another marine goes on, “we'll get in there and finish the job we started.”

Rob Cruise, conspicuously quiet for several minutes, takes a long pull on his drink and says: “I served in the first Gulf War.”

The table turns to face him. He takes another drink.

“Did you really?” Jon Hung asks.

“I did. Company C of the RCR, 1991. I took a break from university the year before and signed up. I was barely twenty.” He says this directly at the lead marine, who looks like he would've still been in elementary school in 1991.

Jin tilts her head at Rob. “You never told me that.” The way she says it — the gentle, almost caring tone, the slight hurt that he would keep such a thing from her — floods me with a knowledge that should've been obvious from the start.
Oh my God
, I think,
she was one of the one hundred
.

“So you've been over there?” the lead marine asks.

“Yep.”

“So what do you think? We up for a good fight?”

Rob spits laughter at him. “What do I think? I think your D.O.D. has lost its fucking mind. First of all, Michael over here is right — al-Qaeda doesn't have any connections to Iraq. Second of all, you guys have no idea what kind of hornets' nest you're about to stir up.”

The marine shrugs. “That's all part of the job, man. Army life's full of excitement and danger — you'd know that.” He sips his own drink. “Of course, teaching ABCs to Korean kids must have its challenges, too.”

Jin's laughter bounces off the table. Rob and the other guys need to say something to keep the balance in check, but they're struggling. I search for words that would get Jin's attention back, to return the ball to our court, or at least relieve this sudden tension.

I give up hope once the conversation becomes blatantly about sex. How could it not, with this kind of dynamic? The youngest-looking marine — maybe eighteen — kicks things off by lobbing a stereotype about Korean girls in bed, something about their aversion to oral sex. He meant for it to sound flirty and hilarious, but his joke sinks like a stone. It does, however, lead us to discuss other stereotypes — French lovers, American lovers, Canadian lovers. Jin, still in her coat, takes up the charge when we start imagining what kind of lovers certain people around the table would be. She deliberately skips over Rob as she does the rounds, but has a blast taking the piss out of Jon Hung (“You'd be such a businessman — you probably use a spreadsheet to keep track of your conquests”) and Justin (“You would have silent orgasms”) and one of the beefier marines (“Selfish brute — you have ‘closet rapist' written all over you!”) Then her gaze, for the first time, falls on me.

“And you?” she says, eyeing me up. It's only then that I become painfully aware that I had put on a cardigan before leaving the apartment. “You'd probably make love like an intellectual.”

I catch the reference right away but allow the boys their laugh — after all, I do look like someone who'd make love like an intellectual.

“Kundera,” I say as she attempts to move on.

She snaps back to look at me, her face sharp with surprise. “Excuse me?”

“Milan Kundera,” I yell over the music. “That line about making love like an intellectual — you stole it from his novel
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
.”

She blinks at me. “You've read Kundera?” It doesn't come out as a question so much as a statement of intrigue.

“What the
hell
are they talking about?” asks one of the marines.

“Milan Kundera,” I say simply.

“Who is she?” Rob Cruise asks.

“It's a he, idiot,” Jin snips without looking at him. “He's only one of my favourite writers.” She holds my gaze as if goading me to go on.

“I haven't read everything of his,” I continue with a sigh. “
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, of course.”

“Of
course
.”

“And
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
. Oh, and his new one,
Ignorance
, was one of the books I read on the flight over here. I didn't like it.”

For the first time tonight, she stammers. “Well — well I've read Kundera in English, French, Chinese,
and
Korean.”

Deliberately, I shrug with indifference. I turn to the lead marine and say: “Kundera knows a thing or two about unprovoked invasions. You should read him.”

Rob Cruise is glowing at me; this is where I hold up my end of the mutual envy. It's as if he's passing me a torch, giving me permission to fan the flames of my sudden stardom. He also seems mildly stunned that I've trumped him and the other men at the table, that I've touched Jin in a way that they couldn't. “This is all too heady for me,” he yells at everyone, giving me a wink. “What do you say we dance?” He gets up from the bench, anxious to lead us like Moses down to the dance floor. The soldiers don't hesitate; in the spirit of sexual rivalry, they rise en masse in time with Rob's movements, each trying to claim one of the shivering sticks as they too stand, adjusting miniskirts and straightening tube tops. Jin gets up, as well, trying very hard not to look at me. She finally,
finally
takes off her coat and tosses it onto the bench.

Oh my God.

She notices that I'm staring but haven't moved. “Are you coming?” she asks.

“I don't dance.”

Her face flattens with disbelief.
What, you think this is about dancing?
The others can't quite believe that I'm holding my ground, that I'm about to squander what I've earned. Jin waits, maybe thinking that if she stares at me long enough with that face, I'll change my mind.

Rob Cruise stands watching at the top of the stairwell, growing impatient. “Jin, baby, let's go!”

She's waffling now — to leave and dance, or stay and talk? I refuse to give her an inch, and so she clucks her teeth at the air and races lithely to the stairs, her legs a rush of tendons and confidence. Rob has already begun descending, certain now that she'll follow him. Meanwhile, Jon Hung's girlfriend is pulling him to his feet. “Go on, baby, I'll be right there,” he orders her. When she's gone, he comes over to me.

“What are you,
lost
?”

“I don't dance,” I repeat.

He drains his drink and sets it noisily on the table. “Milan Kundera,” he shakes his head in mock disgust. “You are in the wrong fucking place, my friend.” He then motions to Justin, who is also still sitting. “Are you coming down?”

“No, I'll stay behind. Keep Captain Hopeless over here company.”

Jon shakes his head at me again and then is gone. I slide over to the rail to watch them all on the dance floor. I find Jin right away. She stands out in the crowd not because of her cashmere and jeans but because her body in dance is an alluring twist and spiral to the mindless thump of music. GIs comes on to her, but she makes shoving them away look like just another of her moves. She looks up at me over the rail and holds my stare for a moment. At the end of a song, she hurries off the floor, trots up the stairs, and returns to the table to search for something in her coat. When she doesn't find it, she races back down again, without so much as a glance at me, to join Rob and Jon under the spinning lights. I look at Justin, who is also watching them, also drinking his drink, also keeping his sad mysteries below the surface. On the dance floor, Rob Cruise has abandoned Jin like a crossword puzzle he will never solve and has begun grinding into another girl. For an instant, we make eye contact. It's as if he holds my conscience in the same grip that he holds the girl. A stare that wants to liberate me from my principles. On a night other than this, he promises to seize my reticence and toss it with delight into Seoul's great fevered flow. He will teach me to take what I want here. And we will better friends for it, sharing the sort of bond that two men can have only after they've been intimate with the same woman.

T
hrough
years that fell like rain to join the flow of the Han River, she would learn that the only thing that kept her alive was the value her mother had instilled in her, the value of knowledge. Her
umma
had taught her, as early as the girl was old enough to absorb it, that it was better to know things than to not know them.
Even
girls
need to know things
, her mother would say when tucking her in at night, whispering it so that the girl's father wouldn't hear.
Learn everything you can, my little crane. Even the hard things. Never be afraid of wisdom.
And whenever she uttered these words, her mother called the girl by her true name and never the one her Japanese teachers had given her.

In the years that fell like rain, the girl would learn just how much her mother had known about what was happening to their country, the fate that awaited the young girls in it, and learn that it was this knowledge that eventually pierced her mother's heart and killed her. These thoughts always brought the girl back to the Han River, its churning acceptance of the rain that fell like years. She would ponder that Korean word that shared the river's name, shared the name of their people, their language.
Han
. Which meant, among many other things, the long, constricting accumulation of a lifetime of sorrow.

Despite her father's fussing, the girl was allowed to go to school. This was not what he wanted when he brought his family of six from their ancestral farm to the growing capital of Seoul. That was in 1934, a year after the girl's baby sister had been born. In the city, her father expected the boys, the two oldest, to study briefly before becoming labourers, and the girls, the two youngest, to stay home and help their mother in the small house that the Imperial government had allowed them. His plans were precarious at best, and the girl watched as her mother toppled them with a kind of quiet sedition, a restrained glee.

“She
is
going to study,” her mother said one day in their dark kitchen, chopping vegetables for a stew.

“The hell she is,” her father retaliated from the washtub, where he stood scrubbing the day's grease off his hands from his new job in a munitions factory. The girl watched them argue while spooning mashed rice into her baby's sister's mouth. “No daughter of mine will be caught in a school,” she heard her father say.

“There's a small academy for girls near the police station. I found it on my way to market. I've already paid the tuition. I've already arranged it. She
is
going to study. Next year.”

“
Aigo!
To what end?” her father snarled. “How will this help us? To have our daughter at a desk all day, learning to read and speak Japanese? How will this help
you
? You can barely keep up with your housework as it is.
Aigo!
”

“You don't know what the future will hold, my friend,” the girl's mother said, dropping radishes into a dented pot of boiling water. “You can't say how it might help us to have at least one of our children properly educated.”

“Must everything change?” her father sighed as he dried his hands and then collapsed into his flimsy wicker chair near the door. To the little girl's eyes, his now-clean hands looked weak and shrivelled as they fell limp in his lap, like two dead birds. He spoke almost to himself. “They have taken my fields, forced us to live in this city with less land than a dog. And now girls —
girls
— going to school. Must everything change?”

“Yes, it must,” her mother replied, putting the lid on the pot and wiping radish juice off the knife with a rag. “I cannot watch her twenty-four hours a day. And I will not bear the thought of her wandering these streets unsupervised. I will not bear it.” The girl watched as worry fell over her mother's face then, a shifting in the
han
that flowed through her. “She is going to school. She'll be safer there.”

And the little girl felt that tickle in her mind, the ache for wisdom. “Safer from what?” she asked from the table. But to her surprise, her mother would not answer.

So here was the little girl in school, grappling with that ache, these questions, this sense of entitlement instilled deep within her. She perhaps learned more slowly than the other girls that some questions were okay to ask, questions like
when?
and
where?
and
how much?
— but others, like
why?
, were not. “Why” seemed off limits; “why” was a waste of time and reached for answers that existed beyond the outskirts of the teachers' patience. Questions like: Why can't I eat rice while sitting at my desk? Why must I ask before I can go to the bathroom? But also: Why do we stand each day at the beginning of class to sing the
Kimigayo
, the Japanese national anthem? Why is there a picture of Emperor Hirohito on the wall above the blackboard? Why must we bow to it several times when we finish singing? And why have you given me a Japanese name —
Meiko
? I hate this name. It sounds so babyish. This is not the name my mother calls me. It alarmed the girl how forcefully her teachers could quash those plaintive whys, cut them off before they were even all the way out of her mouth.

Despite these mysterious dead ends, the little girl did enjoy studying. Her first year was her favourite because they got to learn how to read and write
Hangul
— the Korean language that her family spoke in the privacy of their home. It enraptured Meiko to watch her tiny hand convert words and phrases into script, a multitude of tiny circles and tents and perpendicular dashes. Doing it correctly, getting full marks on her workbook, filled Meiko with greedy pride. And yet, in Grade Two, things inexplicably changed. All of a sudden, the girls were not
allowed
to write or even speak Korean. If one of them was caught doing so, the teacher would make her stand in the corner under the picture of Hirohito and hold a metal pail heavy with pebbles over her head. “You're not babies anymore,” the teacher would tell the rest of the class while the offending girl, head down, struggled in the corner to keep the pail upright. “It's time to leave your childish habits behind.”

So every class became in some way about Japan. The girls learned to read and write its language. In geography class, they memorized Japan's islands and major cities. They learned about the bodies of water surrounding the nation, including the one that led to its colony of Korea, the very colony they lived on, but the geography for which they were taught nothing. By Grade Four, the girls began learning Japanese history. They were told of how Japan had generously taken over the “administration” of the Korean peninsula in 1910 with the idea of leading its illiterate peasants toward an overdue modernization. This, they were taught, was part of an even grander initiative that Japan, in its infinite graciousness, had taken upon itself throughout the wider region, a program called “the Co-prosperity Sphere in Asia.” This involved Japan overseeing the administration of less-evolved nations all around the Pacific Rim (the teacher pointed to these countries on her map), to insulate and expand the Oriental way of life in the face of growing influences from the West. The teacher spoke as if this were her nation's greatest accomplishment, its gift to the world. Meiko raised a hand. If the Co-prosperity Sphere was so great, then why had all-out war erupted between Japan and China the previous year? (Meiko had, after all, overheard her parents arguing about it: the conflict had increased her father's hours at the munitions plant and also threw into doubt the future of Meiko's two older brothers.) The young teacher, usually a tight drum of calm, grew instantly enraged by these questions. She stomped over and began screaming into Meiko's face in a flurry of Japanese that came too fast to follow. She then struck Meiko around the head with her pointing stick, dragged her by the collar of her dress to the corner, filled the pail with a double helping of pebbles and made her hold it over her shoulders for the remainder of the class.

Despite these cruelties, Meiko could not deny how much she enjoyed being smart. She loved to pore over a text, to memorize fascinating facts and fill out answers in her workbook, even if they were all in Japanese. The knowledge she gained gave her an advantage over the children in her neighbourhood who did not get to go to school: she could read the growing number of Japanese street signs and understand the stories that appeared in the free newspapers on every corner. If she and her friends were playing outside and were approached by the
Kempeitai
, the Japanese military police, Meiko could speak to the officers in stilted but serviceable Japanese. The police often accused them of being spies, which struck Meiko as silly. “No,” she would tell them, “we're just little kids playing innocent games. No spies here.”

But the more Meiko studied, the more it infuriated her father. Sometimes he came home at night to find her on the floor, her papers spread in a halo around her textbook. He'd march over to grab a fistful of them at random and head toward the kitchen stove. Meiko would chase after him in tears, upset that he had disrupted the careful system of memorization that she had set up for herself. He would fend her off with one hand while stuffing her papers into the stove with the other. When finished, he'd turn to her and yell, “Girls who study become foxes! Why don't you get a job, you slut?”

Getting jobs was exactly what had happened with her two older brothers that year, 1938, when they were fifteen and thirteen respectively. As planned, the boys dropped out of school after acquiring a bare minimum of education. They took jobs as delivery boys for a local Japanese restaurant. Their total combined income was less than half of what their father made at the plant, but the family was desperate for money and the boys were forced to work every day. It was also that year that the plant announced a pay cut for all Korean workers despite the growing war in China. This left Meiko's father in a constant state of fury. He would explode at the children over the simplest of trifles, like if they raised their rice bowls a fraction of an inch off the table while eating. Whenever these outbursts happened, Meiko and the boys would mutter at each other in Japanese about their father's bizarre behaviour. This would send him into another long rant about how the Japanese had infiltrated every aspect of their household, to the point where children could mock a father in a language he did not understand.

Meanwhile at school, Meiko's teachers had begun grooming the girls to join a new organization that Japan had introduced, called the
Jungshindae
— Voluntarily Committing Body Corp for Labor. The teachers said that this was the highest calling for every girl in the Empire, to give her body and spirit over to Emperor Hirohito and his many worthy causes. In a few years, they would be called up into good-paying jobs as teachers and nurses and entertainers, contributing whatever they could to Japan's military success in the region. Meiko rushed home to explain the
Jungshindae
to her mother, expecting her to share in Meiko's excitement. Instead, her mother exploded into anger and broke a rice bowl on the lip of her washing tub. “Don't listen to them!” she shouted. “They will not
have
you. Do you hear me? I will pull you out of that school and lock you in the cellar before I let them own you!”

But every day Meiko would come home praising some new aspect of the
Jungshindae
. When her baby sister, who was now six years old, heard these things she began wanting to go to school herself, but her mother would not allow it. “Why does
she
get study and I don't?” the youngest daughter asked. “I wish to learn things, too.”

“Girls who read books become sluts!” their father belched by rote from his wicker chair.

Her mother squatted down to be eye level with the girl. “You will stay home with me, little one. We can't afford to have two girls in school. I will teach you things here.”

Meiko watched this with a shake of her head. “Umma, you should let her study. Our teachers have promised us good-paying jobs with the
Jungshindae
. In a few years, we'll be able to support both you and father.”

Her mother's eyes filled with an emotion Meiko could not understand. “Don't listen to them,” she wept. “My wise little crane, do
not
listen to them. And you are to come straight home after school — every day. Do not linger on the streets with your friends. Do you hear me?”

The girls could not know what their mother knew, nor could their father. It took being a housewife, going to markets every day, talking to other women, to learn what she had come to know: that young girls in their teens had begun disappearing from the neighbourhood. It became a common sight to see a mother, not much older than Meiko's, splayed out on the curb outside her house in anguish, her fists pounding her face as she screamed incoherently at the sky. The only words that Meiko's mother could make out were, “My daughter! My daughter! Mydaughtermydaughtermydaughter! Theyhavetakenmydaughterawayfromme!”

In early 1941, the boys both received draft notices from the
Teishintai
— the Japanese Volunteer Corps for Men. The government was mobilizing the entire country for war and this included conscripting Korean boys as young as fifteen into the Imperial army. When the draft notices arrived, Meiko's mother burst into wails and collapsed onto the floor in front of her washtub. Within a couple of weeks, the boys were sent to the city of Daegu for six weeks of basic training before getting shipped off to the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Meiko's mother was inconsolable. Her husband lamely brought up the boys' lost income in his first attempt to comfort her, as if this were partly the source of her grief. “Are you insane!” she wept as she shoved his arms away. “Don't you realize that your sons are as good as dead?
As good as dead!
Their lives mean nothing to the Japanese. They will put them right up … up on … on the front lines …” Meiko and her baby sister watched as their mother choked on this knowledge as if it were poison. Over days and weeks, Meiko's father would try different ways to comfort his wife, and grew frustrated at his inability to do so. This precipitated even more arguments between them. Their fights raged for hours in the evenings, growing so intense that Meiko and her sister had to hide away from them in the small bedroom they shared.