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Search inside (4 results) vagina
Page -37-
Men left her stall quickly, some crying, most angrily joining the line for the woman next door. All through the night she talked, reclaiming her Korean name, reciting her family genealogy, even chanting the recipes her mother had passed on to her. Just before daybreak, they took her out of her stall and into the woods, where we couldn't hear her anymore. They brought her back skewered from her vagina to her mouth, like a pig ready for roasting. A lesson, they told the rest of us, warning us into silence.
Page -51-
I was strapped down when my daughter was born too. My hands cuffed to the bed, flat on my back with my knees up, I heard the low keening of a wounded animal in the etherized darkness. Surrounded by doctors, unable to move, I felt my mind slip back into the camps. You're a doctor, I screamed, help me, help me get home. But he only laughed and pushed himself on top of me, using my body as the other soldiers had done. Afterward, as he wiped himself on my shift, he opened the screen partition and let others watch him examine me. This one is still good, he called over his shoulder. He pried the lips of my vagina open with his fingers. See? he said. Still firm and moist.
Page -161-
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She kneads my buttocks, shaping them to her hands, spreading them apart. Her fingers dip into and flirt with the cleft, from anus to the tip of my vagina, where my blood gathers and pulses until it aches. She combs my pubic hair with her long nails, pulling at the crinkling hairs as if to straighten them. I stifle a groan, try to keep my hips still. I cannot.
Page -161-
I felt his arousal probing the entrance to my vagina and tensed. He found it slick, made ready by Induk's endless caresses, and thrust into me.
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Search inside (5 results) poji
Page -37-
Although I might have imagined the frogs. That was my first night as the new Akiko. I was given her clothes, which were too big and made the soldiers laugh. The new P won't be wearing them much anyway, they jeered. Fresh poji.
Page -121-
Near Kaesong and Panmunjom, we passed roadblocks set up by the military. I thought of the soldiers at the Yalu River and tried to run away, but the minister husband pulled me alongside him. As we moved toward them, I could feel their eyes studying me—my face, breasts, hips, and poji—judging my worth as a niku-ichi P, and I knew they would pull me aside, question me, ask me how I had escaped, and then send me south to hell, to Japan. But when we moved past them, I saw that they were not even Japanese. Bored, the guards did not look at me at all, or at any of the faces moving past them, but stared instead at a point above the human river, toward the mountains in the north.
Page -150-
When Max took me home that night, I let myself into the house, my hair still dripping the water of the stream. My body smelled clean, electric like a rainstorm on the Ko'olaus. But when I walked through the door, my mother yelled, "Stink poji-cunt\" and charged forward with a knife. I backed into the door and cringed, flinging a hand across my face as she sliced the air above my head.
Page -202-
When I felt the knot of pain pulling in my abdomen, pinning me to my seat in Mrs. Abernacke's ninth-grade homeroom, I folded my hands over my belly, picturing a beam of light soaking up the blood. The visualization had worked to suppress menstruation for more than two years, the flash of light cauterizing the wound between my legs, but this time I felt the light merge with my blood, rushing true and deep, thickening as it pounded against my tailbone and poji with heavy fists.
Page -208-
As the tape wound on, I rummaged through the kitchen cabi- nets 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.
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Search inside (60 results) spirit
Page -13-
I led her to the kitchen table, clearing a place for her by pushing the stacks of offerings we planned to burn after I ate the remembrance feast my mother made to appease my father's spirit. My father died when I was five, and this yearly meal, with its persistent smell of the ocean, and the smoke and the ash that would penetrate our apartment for days after we burned the Monopoly money and paper-doll clothes, supplanted mv dim memories of an actual man. Even when I unearthed the picture I had of him from my underwear drawer, stealing a look, I saw him less and less clearly, the image fading in almost imperceptible gradations each time I exposed it to light and scrutiny.
Page -14-
What stays with me, though, is the color of his eyes. While his face, his body, sit in shadows behind the black of the Bible he always carried with him, the blue of his eyes sharpen on me. At night before I fell asleep, I would try to imagine my father as an angel coming to comfort me. I gave him the face and voice of Mr. Rogers and waited for him to wrap me in that cardigan sweater, which would smell of mothballs and mint and Daddy. He would spirit me away, to a home on the Mainland complete with plush carpet and a cocker spaniel pup. My daddy, I knew, would save my mother and me, burning with his blue eyes the Korean ghosts and demons that fed off our lives.
Page -16-
When the spirits called to her, my mother would leave me and slip inside herself, to somewhere I could not and did not want to follow. It was as if the mother I knew turned off, checked out, and someone else came to rent the space. During these times, the body of my mother would float through our one-bedroom apartment, slamming into walls and bookshelves and bumping into the corners of the coffee table and the television. If I could catch her, I would try to clean her cuts with Cambison ointment, dab the bruises with vinegar to stop the swelling. But most times I just left her food and water and hid in the bedroom, where I listened to long stretches of thumping accentuated by occasional shouts to a spirit named Induk.
Page -23-
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."
Page -24-
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.
Page -27-
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.
Page -27-
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, m\ Insides too bruised and battered, impossible to property heal.
Page -54-
And now, said Induk, there is only the dead to guide us. Here, she said, giving me the image of a woman. I saw a fox spirit who haunted the cemeteries of deserted villages, sucking at the mouths of the newly dead in order to taste their otherworld knowledge.
Page -62-
My picture of Saja was correct only in the fact that he was a glutton. And though he craved the human spirit above all other foods, he could be fooled or placated with offerings of chicken or pork, heapings of barley and rice, oranges and whiskey.
Page -65-
"Once on a time, many, many years ago . . . ," my mother began as soon as I had wriggled into a comfortable space. With my knees tucked close to my body, I sat with my back nestled into my mother's bosom. As she spoke, I could feel her words tickle the back of my head. "... A king and queen with no sons had yet another daughter, their seventh. Full of despair, not knowing what else to do to turn away their bad luck, the royal couple offered this girl to the Birth Grandmother spirit."
Page -65-
My mother spoke often of the Birth Grandmother, the spirit assigned to protect and nurture the children of the world. Every year on my birthday, my mother would place an offering of sweet rice cake on our shrine, thanking Birth Grandmother for the blessing of my birth. I was taught to pray to her, calling her by name— Induk—if ever I was in trouble or frightened.
Page -67-
The Saturday after my mother died, I watched the water of the canal lap at the trash under me and waited for something, some sign from my mother. I don't know what I was thinking, but I never caught a glimpse of a fish that might have carried her spirit.
Page -69-
The day after Induk called me out of the river, I went looking for the spirit I knew I could never find. Go to Manshin Ahjima, Induk said as she dipped her hand into my chest and pulled out my maum, the force of my heartbeat, and led me forward by a silver thread.
Page -70-
As my mother flipped through the book, I saw myself and my sisters as children, hanging on to our mother as she moved through our barley field and tended to our garden. And 1 saw us holding on to her body as we cried the death cries for her spirit. I saw myself underneath the pumping bodies of Japanese soldiers and, in the later pages, saw my oldest sister beneath the same soldiers. I saw myself sitting in the river, and I saw myself walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping, until I died.
Page -70-
At this point my mother closed the book. When I asked her why I could not see the rest of the book, the oldest spirit, whom I knew to be my great-grandmother, said, If you read the final chapters, you would know the universe. You would be dead.
Page -70-
My skin felt waxy, as Induk's had the day after the soldiers killed her, the day after she reclaimed her name and I became the new Akiko. When the other camp women and I went to the river to bathe, we found her skewered body, abandoned alongside the path. We wanted to take her to the river with us to prepare her body for the separation of its spirit. Someone she loved should have cleansed her skin with her favorite scented oil. Someone who loved her should have laid her body out, with her head to the south, and prepared a feast to feed her soul for its next and longest journey.
Page -72-
The woman shuffled closer, then knelt to peer into my face. You aren't a tiger spirit, are you? She held her hands out, palms down. If so, I am ready to go. I've tended the mounds, burned the incense for the spirits whose families have been lost or run away. I've seen and I've remembered which son was taken by the Japanese, which son was killed by bandits, and which went to Shanghai as a freedom fighter. I've . . .
Page -72-
The old woman stopped talking, blinked, then touched my hair. I've seen the tiger spirit haunt the graves before, she said, but only at night. You are just a little girl.
Page -72-
When she called me a little girl, I remember I wanted to cry. I wanted to curl into a ball, cover my head, and call, Mother! Mother! as I did when I was very young and feeling alone, as I did from the rooftop of our home the night my mother died and I tried to catch her fleeing spirit. But I didn't, because I knew no one would ever again hold me in tenderness. Instead I stood up and looked around.
Page -72-
Here, Manshin Ahjima said, handing me my clothes. I don't suppose a tiger spirit would need these rags to keep warm. And I don't suppose a tiger spirit would have such messy hair. Tiger spirits are really rather prissy, you know.
Page -73-
Olppajin-saram, the mouth suddenly said. And again, louder, as if breaking a spell or casting one: Olppajin-saram. You've lost your soul. That is why you came to the graveyard. You were trying to steal someone else's spirit, a wandering spirit, maybe, one that was confused about where it belonged.
Page -74-
To pass the days, Manshin Ahjima would tell me of the spirits who continued to talk with her. Sinjang-nim, the General, is the most powerful spirit, a giant-fighter, she said. And very sexy. He comes to me even now, waving his sword, demanding that I acknowledge him. It takes everything in my heart to call on Jesus Christ, Manshin Ahjima said, and even then, I can still hear the General whispering, whispering, planning his strategy.
Page -75-
Find the place of darkness within yourself, Manshin Ahjima explained, and imagine what you have lost. Then picture yourself in the last place you saw the object and spiral up and away, as if you were flying circles around that spot. Your spirit finds the object, so the better you can re-create the lost thing in your mind and in the spirit world, the more likely that you will find it in your hands again.
Page -94-
My mother said she forced the Birth Grandmother to call upon her sisters, the Seven Stars—each of them named Soon- something, which my mother said meant "pure"—to come protect me. "I didn't want to be rude," she said, "but really, if your spirit guardian can't protect you on her own, she should call for help, don't you think? I mean, I'm your mother, but I still ask her to help me watch you." My mother huffed as if disgusted and insulted by her spirit guardian's overbearing pride and lack of common sense. "Finally, I had to get rough with her.
Page -95-
" 'Induk,' I said, using her personal name to show how upset I was, 'this Red Death is too much for an old lady spirit like you!'
Page -95-
"When the Birth Grandmother did not answer, I knew I had been too blunt, but I could not waste time massaging the ego of a fickle spirit. 'Call on the Seven Stars, or I will find a new Birth Grandmother and you will be just another lost ghost,' I told her. 'My daughter is dying.' "
Page -96-
I took the jar from her, interested in something I could touch from the spirit world, something tangible from the place where my mother lived half her life. I looked into the jar, then shook the contents onto my palm.
Page -101-
I aimed the light into myself, feeling for the poisoned arrowheads implanted in my body in order to kill mv own pain. I fed the light with more spirit food, until it grew largo than myself [Tie biggertKelight within me became, the smaller my body got, until I_seemed to shrink into myself, becoming as elemental as the food offered to and consumed by the gods.
Page -118-
Leaving Pyongyang, we hiked to the Taedong River, which was full and rushing because of the early fall rains. I wore a thin white gown that one of the missionary ladies had given me, because, she said, I was going to be reborn in the Spirit and because I was to be married. Two of the greatest events in a Christian woman's life.
Page -127-
When we entered the mother's apartment, her ghost rushed out at us. She enveloped us with a heavy stickiness that sucked us into the room. A fat spirit, she demanded in death the space she had never had in her life as a thin, sickly woman. She pushed us up against each other, the furniture, the knickknacks and mementos that filled shelves and counters and floor spaces.
Page -128-
For a long while after that first day, I could not live with the dead woman and her possessions. I could not touch her things, even the carpet that I walked on, without feeling her spirit trying to squeeze me out.
Page -129-
Finally, perhaps by way of my dreams, Induk slipped into the mother's apartment. After she rolled me out of bed, she slid her hands over the mother's desk, over the pictures, over the wooden animals and ceramic figurines, until her fingers were coated with dust. With the dust of all the mother's possessions cupped in her hands, Induk lured the ghost mother into her palms, where she pressed and pushed until the fat spirit became as small as a speck of dust. Then, bringing her fingers to my mouth, Induk told me to suck, to taste, to make this—the apartment, the city, the state, and America—home my own.
Page -133-
I wonder if my own mother ever dreamed dreams so filled with yang that they could only mean sons, and I wonder whether she was happy or disappointed when yet another daughter emerged from between her legs. Did she feel betrayed by her night visions, by the signs, by Samshin Halmoni, the grandmother spirit who takes care of babies and mothers? I know my mother and father would have made the appropriate offerings in hopes of a male infant.
Page -141-
Later, after my mother tried to drown herself the second time, I realized that our roles had reversed. Even at ten, I knew that I had become the guardian of her life and she the tenuous sleeper. I trained myself to wake at abrupt snorts, unusual breathing patterns. Part of me was aware of each time she turned over in bed, dreaming dreams like mini-trances where she traveled into worlds and times I could not follow to protect her. The most I could do was wait, holding the thin blue thread of her life while her spirit tunneled into the darkness of the earth to swim the dark red river toward hell. Each night, I went to bed praying that I would not let go in my own sleep. And in the morning, before I even opened my eyes, I'd jerk my still clenched, aching hand to my chest, yanking my mother back to me.
Page -150-
My mother waved the knife and shaved strips of air away from my body. "It's me, it's me," she mimicked, and I knew then she could not really hear me. "You cannot use my daughter as your puppet, Saja! Evil spirit, the stink of pus and men's waste!" She jabbed at my head and then lowered her hand until the point of the knife touched my crotch.
Page -166-
I'd sit cross-legged on the floor and wait for my mother to lie down and slip her head into my lap. I'd stroke her forehead, the sides of her face, the top of her head where the spirit escapes at night. When she'd begin to tell her story, I'd part her hair into sections, using my nails to find and pluck the white strands. As she talked, I'd stick the oily roots onto a sheet of one of the underground newspapers— Daedong Kongbo or Haecho Shinmun—that found their way even into our village. And after the story, after my mother fell asleep, I'd crumple the paper into a ball and burn it in the underground flues that warmed our floorboards. As I drifted off to sleep, breathing in the scent of hair and smoke, I'd imagine that words wrapped in my mother's hair drifted into our dreams and spiraled up to heaven.
Page -173-
"Unless you forget about the Heavenly Toad," she said. "When I die, you must prepare my body and protect my spirit before the Heavenly Toad angel grabs me and jumps to heaven."
Page -178-
Everything that my mother had taught me about protecting the dead, preparing the body and spirit for the final transition, I forgot when I saw her body. "Remember the Heavenly Toad," she had said, and I did, but it only made me afraid without telling me how to save her. I knelt beside her bed and draped an arm around her waist. "I'm sorry," I said, half apologetic, half accusing. "You said you would remind me what to do when the time came, Mommy. But you didn't, and I don't know what to do."
Page -181-
My mother quickly stuffed my untied hair down the back of my shirt, then stepped between me and the Walker. "Go, Chudang Kaeguri" she said. "Stink Toad Spirit, go! You cannot claim us. Go!"
Page -185-
I performed the actions of my mother, caring for the spirits of the house, in order to feel my mother once again. I wanted to be able to feel her next to me, to sense her spirit—for if there really are such things, I knew she would come to me, feeling my need for her, in death as she rarely did in life.
Page -188-
We listened to my mother's cries and moans, to the heartbeat of the drum, until the tape wound down. I knew that as a fortuneteller and spirit medium, she was paid to console or cajole the dead. Sometimes customers, mostly the new immigrants from Korea, paid her to perform ceremonies for lost family members and the dead that had been left behind. They would record my mother's chants to send to relatives and neighbors back home.
Page -197-
My mother touched her hands to my lips, then sighed, a long, tired exhalation, as if to shush me, but I knew from the way her eyes closed, lashes sealed against her blue-tinged skin. I put a blanket over her, as if she were only asleep. In Korea, whenever someone died, the oldest son took the dead person's coat up to the roof and invited the spirit to return to the house to feast and prepare for the long journey to heaven. Instead of getting her coat, I, her youngest daughter, went to her special box and pulled out her red-and-blue wedding dress.
Page -197-
I climbed onto the roof, sliding across thatching made slick with ice, and stayed there most of the night, holding her dress open to the wind until my body ached from the weight of the silk and from the cold bite of the stars. I waited on the roof, holding my omoni's dress in the bitter night air, calling for her spirit to come back, calling, Come back, Mother, come back, until finally, after a sudden blast of wind almost knocked me from my perch, I folded the arms of her dress into myself and knew I held nothing.
Page -198-
Now, as her cries subside into soft hiccuping chirps, I wrap my daughter into a towel, tie her onto my back, and prepare to introduce her to her grandmother. I pour the scorched rice tea and, bowing twice, present it to Induk's spirit in gratitude, to my oldest sister's spirit—wherever she is—in forgiveness, and finally to my mother's spirit in love.
Page -201-
According to my mother, the rituals that accompanied the major transitions in a woman's life—birth, puberty, childbirth, and death—involved the flow of blood and the freeing of the spirit. Slipping out of the body along pathways forged by blood, the spirit traveled and roamed free, giving the body permission to transform itself. Necessary but dangerous, these were times when the spirit could spin away forever, lost and aimless, severed from the body.
Page -201-
"This is the blood of a lost spirit," my mother told me when I first noticed the bloodied pad she unfolded from her panties each month. "Every once in a while a woman opens her mouth and a wandering spirit tries to take her body. I'm just spitting it out."
Page -201-
"When women are forced to bleed, we have to take care to bind our spirits to us, or they will get confused and wander away. Ejected from our bodies, the spirit flows out on the river of blood, losing its name and its place. Sometimes that yongson spirit will try to invade another woman's body—maybe one that reminds them of the body they Left behind. Sometimes they will catch a seed in a woman's body and be born again, but most times they will die. See? Like this one." My mother ripped the iticky pad from her panties, rolled it into a wad of toilet paper, and dropped it in the trash.
Page -202-
"Will that ever happen to me?" I asked, unsure if I was referring to losing my spirit or bleeding out a stray.
Page -204-
"I swallowed a spirit, Mom," I said, half laughing.
Page -204-
"No," my mother said. "It's your own spirit fighting to get out, wanting to travel. We must make the way safe for it to go and then come back."
Page -204-
"I was only joking," I said. "I'm not a baby anymore that you can fool me with this stuff, you know." And then I groaned as a spirit raked its nails against my womb.
Page -206-
"She has crossed the dangerous stream in search of the spirit," my mother called out into the moist air.
Page -206-
"Dance," she said to me. "Free your spirit, Beccah-chan, let it loose." She leaped into the air, twirling and pivoting in a space of her own, dancing and singing a song with no words.
Page -207-
When I dipped my hand into the shallow water of the stream, my mother yelled, "Spirit, fly with the river, then follow it back home." She tapped me on the shoulder. "Okay," she said to me. "Now drink it."
Page -207-
"Now you share the river's body," my mother said. "Its blood is your blood, and when you are ready to let your spirit fly, it will always follow the water back to its source."
Page -224-
"I remember," I sang without knowing the words. "Omoni, I remember the care. Of the living and the dead." I gathered the strands pulled free from her scalp, then packed them into a small drawstring pouch once used to hold jewelry. "I will care for your body as your spirit crosses the river. I will stand guard. I will send you on your way."
Page -225-
"I will massage your arms with perfumed water blessed by the running river. I will massage your legs until they are strong enough to swim you to heaven." I cleaned and cut her nails and placed the cuttings in the drawstring bag. I pushed the bag under her, let her weight settle over my hand before I eased away. "See?" I said. "Your spirit can travel without worrying about what is left behind."
Page -225-
After I washed her, I shook out the damp strips of cloth and, one by one, draped them over the length of her body, wrapped her arms and legs. Her words, coiled tightly in my script, tied her spirit to her body and bound her to this life. When they burned, they would travel with her across the waters, tree.
Page -228-
About to sprinkle my mother's ashes in the garden behind our house, I heard the song of the river. The music had always seemed faint to me, but now it drummed in my ears. I carried my mother through the break in the fence and traveled the path we took the year she blessed my wandering spirit.
Page -228-
I opened my mother's box, sprinkling her ashes over the water. I held my fingers under the slow fall of ash, sifting, letting it coat my hand. I touched my fingers to my lips. "Your body in mine," I told my mother, "so you will always be with me, even when your spirit finds its way home. To Korea. To Sulsulham. And across the river of heaven to the Seven Sisters."
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Search inside (28 results) soldiers
Page -27-
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.
Page -27-
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.
Page -32-
She is like the wild child raised by tigers, I heard them say to each other. Physically human but able to speak only in the language of animals. They were kind and praised me when I responded to the simple commands they issued in Japanese: sit, eat, sleep. Had they asked, I would also have responded to "close mouth" and "open legs." At the camps where the Japanese called us Jungun Ianfu, military comfort women, we were taught only whatever was necessary to service the soldiers. Other than that, we were not expected to understand and were forbidden to speak, any language at all.
Page -32-
But we were fast learners and creative. Listening as we gathered the soldiers' clothes for washing or cooked their meals, we were able to surmise when troops were coming in and how many we were expected to serve. We taught ourselves to communicate through eye movements, body posture, tilts of the head, or—when we could not see each other—through rhythmic rustlings between our stalls; in this way we could speak, in this way we kept our sanity.
Page -35-
Still, I cried. She hugged me, then pinched me. Grow up now, she said. No mother, no father. We all have to make our lives. She didn't look at my face when the soldiers came, didn't watch as they herded me onto their truck. I heard them asking her if she wanted to come along; your sister is still so young, not good for much, they said. But you. You are grown and pretty. You could do well.
Page -36-
To this day, I do not think Induk—the woman who was the Akiko before me—cracked. Most of the other women thought she did because she would not shut up. One night she talked loud and nonstop. In Korean and in Japanese, she denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop their invasion of her country and her body. Even as they mounted her, she shouted: I am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive. I am seventeen, I had a family just like you do, I am a daughter, I am a sister.
Page -37-
Although I might have imagined the frogs. That was my first night as the new Akiko. I was given her clothes, which were too big and made the soldiers laugh. The new P won't be wearing them much anyway, they jeered. Fresh poji.
Page -37-
That is how I know Induk didn't go crazy. She was going sane. She was planning her escape. The corpse the soldiers brought back from the woods wasn't Induk.
Page -51-
I was strapped down when my daughter was born too. My hands cuffed to the bed, flat on my back with my knees up, I heard the low keening of a wounded animal in the etherized darkness. Surrounded by doctors, unable to move, I felt my mind slip back into the camps. You're a doctor, I screamed, help me, help me get home. But he only laughed and pushed himself on top of me, using my body as the other soldiers had done. Afterward, as he wiped himself on my shift, he opened the screen partition and let others watch him examine me. This one is still good, he called over his shoulder. He pried the lips of my vagina open with his fingers. See? he said. Still firm and moist.
Page -70-
As my mother flipped through the book, I saw myself and my sisters as children, hanging on to our mother as she moved through our barley field and tended to our garden. And 1 saw us holding on to her body as we cried the death cries for her spirit. I saw myself underneath the pumping bodies of Japanese soldiers and, in the later pages, saw my oldest sister beneath the same soldiers. I saw myself sitting in the river, and I saw myself walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping, until I died.
Page -70-
My skin felt waxy, as Induk's had the day after the soldiers killed her, the day after she reclaimed her name and I became the new Akiko. When the other camp women and I went to the river to bathe, we found her skewered body, abandoned alongside the path. We wanted to take her to the river with us to prepare her body for the separation of its spirit. Someone she loved should have cleansed her skin with her favorite scented oil. Someone who loved her should have laid her body out, with her head to the south, and prepared a feast to feed her soul for its next and longest journey.
Page -70-
The women from the camp wanted to do these things for her, but in the end we left her, just as the soldiers had, mounted on the pole, her nakedness only half concealed by the forest's undergrowth, her eyes dry and open and staring toward the river.
Page -84-
Even in the camps, where the soldiers banged in and out of the comfort cubicles, in and out of our women's bodies, what was left of our minds we guarded, kept private and separate.
Page -86-
When the congregation stood, opening and riffling through their black books, I heard the shrieking of bullets ricocheting at the feet of women the soldiers were momentarily bored with.
Page -87-
And in that song I heard things that I had almost forgotten: the enduring whisper of women who continued to pass messages under the ears of the soldiers; a defiant Induk bellowing the Korean national anthem even after the soldiers had knocked her teeth out; the symphony of ten thousand frogs; the lullabies my mother hummed as she put her daughters to sleep; the song the river sings when she finds her freedom in the ocean.
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I felt as if he had slapped me with the name the soldiers had assigned to me. I wanted to shout, No! That is not my name! but I said nothing, knowing that after what had happened to me, I had no right to use the name I was born with. That girl was dead.
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Induk, I panted, I had to do what the soldiers told us to.
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Unable to reconcile that thin, watery voice, the voice of a broken old man, with the Descendant of Heaven who had the power to sacrifice thousands like me, I did not trust the announcement. Still, I let myself be pulled along by the cheers. Mansei, Mansei, the missionaries and their charges yelled out the windows. Koreans ran into the streets, unfurling the blue-and-red Taeguk-ki into the wind that carried their shouts and cheers. Everyone became silent, though, when they saw that Japanese soldiers still lounged in the streets as if nothing had changed, as if they had not heard the news.
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The war was over, but the search for traitorous foreign sympathizers continued, with pressures and demands from the various People's Committees that struggled for political control. Day after day, as the Japanese were disarmed and replaced by Russian soldiers who stripped factories and farms, accusations and condemnations seeped through the walls of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches building. Some of our neighbors—who had changed their names to Yamada or Ichida or Sakamaki during the war and were once again Kim or Pak or Yi and members of either the newly formed Nationalists' North Korean Five Province Administrative Bureau or the Independence League—threw rocks and shouts at our doors and windows. Outsiders go home, they yelled at us over and over, until the day the missionaries started to pack their belongings.
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Near Kaesong and Panmunjom, we passed roadblocks set up by the military. I thought of the soldiers at the Yalu River and tried to run away, but the minister husband pulled me alongside him. As we moved toward them, I could feel their eyes studying me—my face, breasts, hips, and poji—judging my worth as a niku-ichi P, and I knew they would pull me aside, question me, ask me how I had escaped, and then send me south to hell, to Japan. But when we moved past them, I saw that they were not even Japanese. Bored, the guards did not look at me at all, or at any of the faces moving past them, but stared instead at a point above the human river, toward the mountains in the north.
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And then the soldiers, rifles crossed against their chests, waved us through the barricade, and we were on the other side. It still seems strange to me to think of Korea in terms of north and south, to realize that a line we couldn't see or feel, a line we crossed with two steps, cut the body of my country in two. In dreams I will always see the thousands of people, the living and the dead, forming long queues that spiral out from the head and feet of Korea, not knowing that when they reach the navel they will have to turn back. Not knowing that they will never be able to return home. Not knowing they are forever lost.
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Because of me, my oldest sister always reminded me, our family could not participate in what was to be the last full-moon celebration in our village; before the year was out, the Japanese soldiers arrived to enforce the Emperor's edict banning Korean holidays.
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After the night Induk came to me, opening my body to her song, I saw the soldiers' fear of death and disease in my husband's eyes. His fear that instead of saving me, he had damned himself. That he could not pass the test his God devised for him. And I knew then that he would not use me again like that. I knew then that he could not.
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At the camps, both the women and the doctors always talked about the monsters born from the Japanese soldiers' mixing their blood with ours. When I became pregnant, I could not help worrying about what my baby would look like, wondering if she would be a monster or a human. Korean or Other. Me or not me.
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Then, over the agreements of Yes, yes, more students, someone and then another someone yelled, Soldiers! but the crowd continued to surge forward.
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My mother said that when the people recognized the troops of Japanese soldiers in their Western uniforms, armed and mounted on sleek horses as if ready to charge into battle, a cry went up from the multitude. But instead of sounding angry or fearful, the cry was strangely happy, like one that lovers might utter after a chance meeting in the street.
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In unison, as if from some invisible command, the troops, sabers flashing, fell forward, sinking into the crowd. Amidst wordless screams, my mother heard people shouting, Stand! Stand! and for a moment the marchers stood and the soldiers stood, unable to force their way through the compact press of humanity. Then somebody up ahead threw a curse, and somebody else threw a rock or maybe a shoe, and somebody who was close enough cracked a flag stick against a slashing sword.
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The soldiers charged for a second time, their weapons hacking a path through the street. In front of her, my mother could see people she knew being sliced and gutted, bleeding and screaming and falling as they tried to turn away. But what was worse, she said, was that behind her, people still did not know what was happening and continued to laugh and shout Korea! Korea! and push forward in their happiness.
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Search inside (3 results) chongshindae
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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.
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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 Emperors orders, the holes of our bodies were used to bury their excrement. Under Emperors 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 Emperors orders, we could not prepare those in the river for the journey out of hell.
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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.
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Search inside (106 results) comfort
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Comfort woman / Nora Okja Keller.
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What stays with me, though, is the color of his eyes. While his face, his body, sit in shadows behind the black of the Bible he always carried with him, the blue of his eyes sharpen on me. At night before I fell asleep, I would try to imagine my father as an angel coming to comfort me. I gave him the face and voice of Mr. Rogers and waited for him to wrap me in that cardigan sweater, which would smell of mothballs and mint and Daddy. He would spirit me away, to a home on the Mainland complete with plush carpet and a cocker spaniel pup. My daddy, I knew, would save my mother and me, burning with his blue eyes the Korean ghosts and demons that fed off our lives.
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She is like the wild child raised by tigers, I heard them say to each other. Physically human but able to speak only in the language of animals. They were kind and praised me when I responded to the simple commands they issued in Japanese: sit, eat, sleep. Had they asked, I would also have responded to "close mouth" and "open legs." At the camps where the Japanese called us Jungun Ianfu, military comfort women, we were taught only whatever was necessary to service the soldiers. Other than that, we were not expected to understand and were forbidden to speak, any language at all.
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When my husband brings home toys for our newly born daughter, I pick out the dolls with the plastic skin and the unyielding, staring blue eyes and put them in the linen closet. Their skin feels like day- after-death skin, cold and hard though still faintly pliant. I feel sick thinking of my baby lying next to, gaining comfort from, the artificial dead. After I bury the dolls under the sheets and towels, I pick up my child, placing her against my chest. My body feels cold against her sleep-flushed warmth, yet she still snuggles, roots against me. As she nurses, her heat invades me and becomes mine, her heart beats against mine, becoming mine, becoming me, and gives me life.
As I swept, washed dishes, pasted labels, followed gestures and pointing fingers, instead of hearing the broom or the water or the fat sucking noise of glue on paper, my ears were filled with memories of the comfort camps.
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Invading my daily routine at the mission house, shattering the gaps between movement and silence, were the gruntings of soldier after soldier and the sounds of flesh slapping against flesh. Whenever I stopped for a beat, for a breath, I heard men laughing and betting on how many men one comfort woman could service before she split open. The men laughed and chanted niku-ichi—twenty-nine- to-one, one of the names they called us—but I heard the counting reach one hundred twenty-four before I could not bear to hear one more number.
Even in the camps, where the soldiers banged in and out of the comfort cubicles, in and out of our women's bodies, what was left of our minds we guarded, kept private and separate.
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Comfort Woman "-* 69
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They are silly songs that my husband sings to comfort our child, but I hate them and I hate him.
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After one of the missionaries' communal dinners, the person who came to take the chopsticks from my hand was the minister the girls always followed. By then most of the people there had stopped speaking to or looking at me, unnerved by the silence by which I was surrounded. But when this man took the chotkarak away from me, he held my chin and looked into my eyes. He looked until I was forced to stop listening to the women crying in the comfort camps, until I looked back and saw him. And then he smiled, rubbed a napkin over my lips, and helped me stand. He took my hand and led me down the basement stairs, where the world turned on its side once again.
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Even as words continued to spill from his mouth, the minister backed away, but not before I discovered his secret, the one he won't admit even now, even to himself, after twenty years of marriage. It was a secret I learned about in the comfort camps, one I recognized in his hooded eyes, in his breathing, sharp and fast, and in the way his hands fluttered about his sides as if they wanted to fly up against my half-starved girl's body with its narrow hips and new breasts.
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Comfort Woman ■-* 95
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When my daughter cries in her sleep, caught in a dream of sorrow, I wonder what she has experienced in her short life to make her so unhappy, so afraid. I try to fold her into the comfort of my body, but she pushes away from me, startled into wakefulness. She watches me, her eyelids dropping solemnly until they shut her into sleep once again, taking her somewhere I cannot follow. Does she dream about her birth, about her expulsion from her first home? Or does she cry dreaming that she is there, trapped, once again?
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Comfort Woman •-* III
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Comfort Woman
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His attempt at comfort only made me howl louder. "No!" I managed to sputter before I rolled to the floor, unable to explain that a yongson is the ghost of a person who traveled far from home and died a stranger.
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Comfort Woman •-* \A\
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When she was alive, she did not seem so impatient. But then I knew her only at the comfort stations, when she had to hide between layers of silence and secret movements. I want to say that I knew she would be the one who would join me after death. That there was something special about her even then, perhaps in the way she carried herself—walking more erect, with impudence, even—or in the way she gave the other women courage through the looks and smiles she offered us.
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my mother felt her life was over. She was so alone that she knew she could cry forever and never again would there be anyone to comfort her.
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I could not view my mother, whom I had always seen as weak and vulnerable, as one of the "comfort women" she Hesrrihed. 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.
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Comfort Woman ••* 195
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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.
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keller /comfort mohan
