Comfort Woman (17 page)

On August 15, 1945, as we pooled our rations to prepare bi bim kook soo for the afternoon meal, one of the missionaries turned on the radio for the news. Though most of the Japanese-controlled broadcasts still promised victory for Japan, explaining that they were retreating for covert military purposes, we heard what they did not say: that Japan was losing the war. When the Russian Allies and Korean freedom fighters had crossed the Yalu into Korea just a few days before, we knew that the end was near.

Yet when it came, I thought it was a trick, one more attempt to ferret out traitors to the Japanese state. The radio announcer called for everyone to stand by, and after a spurt of static, the Emperor himself announced Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allied forces.

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.

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.

We are being called home, back to America, they explained to the girls in their care. We will find homes and sponsors for you, if you wish to come with us.

Most of the girls declined, saying they would try to find their families, saying they had somewhere they could return to, now that the war was over. They could pick up the threads of their lives, weaving them into a future as if the war had been a minor disruption in the fabric, but I knew I had to leave with the missionaries. I knew, had known the moment I crossed the Yalu and entered the recreation camps, that my home village of Sulsulham was as far away as heaven for me.

So when the minister told me I should marry him if I wanted to leave Pyongyang and come to America with them, I did. I made it easy for him to take me.

This girl, he explained to his fellow missionaries, has no place to go, no one to guide her. I can give her a new life. God is giving me a chance to save her, to guide her into the flock by yoking her to its shepherd.

Some of the women missionaries grumbled, Why not just adopt her?

No time. The minister smiled. Besides, she is eighteen, an adult.

One of the ladies blew—
Humph
—through pursed lips, and said something in English, too fast for me to follow.

The minister touched her arm, then answered in Korean. She says she is, and we will not be unevenly yoked; before the marriage ceremony, we will baptize Akiko.

He took hold of my hand and pulled me in front of the missionaries. His fingers slithered across my palm. No, he said, I am not sacrificing myself, for I am answering God's call.

God's call? said another missionary. Are you sure it is His voice you hear? Remember what He has said: Whosoever looketh on a woman with lust hath already committed sin in his heart. Cast her out, brother, for if the right eye offends, pluck it out so that the whole body can live.

The missionary's nails bit into my palm as he cleared his throat to hide his growl. I believe, he said, God also said: Why be holdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own? What is it,
brother,
that you see?

My hand clenched and sweating in his, I stood on display with my head bowed, unable to look into the faces of the missionaries and the Korean girls still remaining at the mission. But I felt their whispers and thoughts striking me in the chest.

After a week of frenzied prayer and fervent packing, the Pyongyang mission was dismantled. We packed what we could as fast as we could and loaded up the carts. On the last day, we gathered on the front steps for a final prayer, and one of the missionaries pushed us shoulder-to-shoulder for a picture.
Cheese,
he said. I did not know what he meant, but all the missionaries smiled. The camera clicked twice, and then, as if on signal, the neighbors and their families swarmed into the building. They marched past us to look through the house, sorting through whatever was left behind. Jira-handa, those hama, those dungbo! I could hear them call to each other, loud enough for us to hear their insults. See how stingy those fat hippos are: hardly anything good left! Rags! Empty matchboxes! Dishes I wouldn't feed a dog off of!

Years later, after the minister drove me through America, we received a copy of that picture in the mail. In it the minister and I are standing in the center of the stairs, surrounded by missionaries. One of his arms wraps loosely around my neck. He is smiling; I am not. Our heads have been circled in red, like ink halos. This is our wedding picture.

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.

I tried to push the dress away, but she said, Don't bother to thank me; it must be a dream come true.

She wrapped me in the dress, which kept slipping off my shoulders and dragged through the dust as we walked. Hold it up, the missionary lady kept whispering to me as she eyed the hem of what I think were her cast-off underclothes. You're getting it dirty.

I did not look up at her, even once. I kept my eyes on the trail and watched how the white cloth, the color of purity and death, soaked up the earth.

When we reached the river's edge, the congregation stopped, but I kept walking. I stepped onto the rocks at the shore and waded toward the center. Stop, I heard the minister yell. That's far enough.

The dress billowed around me, a bell on the water, and then, caught by the current, entangled me. I fell to my knees.

See how earnest she is, the minister shouted to the witnesses as he yanked on my elbow. What's the matter with you? he whispered. Get up!

Instead I threw myself facedown into the river. Stolen by the cold, my breath rushed out, bubbling in the river's froth. I held my body stiff, felt the waters turn me, testing my sturdiness against its rocks, and then I let go. I felt the pull of the river in my legs and my lungs, felt the need to dissolve into her body. I opened my eyes and my mouth to taste her—and then I was yanked by the hair and jerked upward.

I gagged on air. Nose streaming, eyes burning unprotected in the wind, I turned to look at the minister. Wet up to the chest, one hand clutching my hair, he delivered me unto the Lord. I baptize thee, he said, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

He pulled me from the river by the hand and the hair, and as I stumbled away from the river and into the arms waiting along the bank, I felt empty, desolate, abandoned.

Drenched and dripping, I heard someone ask me if I took the minister as husband. I nodded, unable to speak, and then I was led to the cart and given my own clothes.

You are born again, said the woman who had given me my wedding gown. As a Christian, as a wife, and as an American. Congratulations.

Before we left the river's edge, I reached down to touch the earth. I felt the mud under my hands, then quickly took a pinch into my mouth. I rubbed it across my tongue, the roof of my mouth, and I ground it between my teeth. I wanted to taste the earth, metallic as blood, take it into my body so that my country would always be a part of me.

As thousands of exiled patriots from Manchuria returned to Korea to cheer the enemy's descent into their own lands, the Christian missionaries and those who followed them were in turn pushed south. We moved toward Seoul, hundreds of us, through a nation we thought free. And just as many people from the south moved north. In the months when all directions were open for travel, people roamed the country, searching for family members and homes, pieces of their lives and themselves that were severed and scattered during the war. Or they moved to escape memories, to search for new lives and new homes.