When My Name Was Keoko (11 page)

I try to forget about it, about what she's done. Abuji is right—it doesn't matter how it happened. Uncle is gone. That's what matters.

The day after Abuji went to the police station, Omoni tells
me to carve some bowls out of gourds from the garden. Our brass ones are gone, taken away by the Japanese.

I go out to the workshop. Most of the tools are gone, too. But we've kept an ax and a knife. I split the hard gourds in half, smooth the bottom halves with the knife, and scrape them with a piece of broken glass so they'll sit flat.

I spend most of the afternoon working. Sun-hee comes out before dinner to fetch the bowls. I hand her the stack, bottom side up, so she can see what I've done.

With the knife tip I've carved something on the underside of each bowl.

She frowns when she takes the bowls, almost turns them over, but then she sees it.

A faint circle, with a wavy line across it.

Sun-hee looks at it, then at me. And smiles. Small, but still a smile.

Weeks go by, then months. I'm surprised to find that sometimes I don't think about Uncle for hours, sometimes even all day. I feel guilty—it's strange to realize that I could get used to him being gone.

It's partly because we're all so busy with war activities. There's a new project at school. Once a week my classmates and I march into the hillside forests to gather pine roots. The roots are loaded into carts and taken away by the military. They use the resin to clean aircraft and weapons.

We all know what it means: Japanese supplies are low. Coal, oil—things like that. The war is using up everything too fast.

Splinters and scratches. Omoni works on my hands at night. First, she takes out splinter after splinter. Then she rubs herb stuff on the cuts and scratches.

Stickiness everywhere—the pine sap gets all over my clothes. And the smell, no matter how much I wash. Funny, I used to love the smell of fresh pine. Now I hate it.

One day at school, there's an announcement, an exciting one. The Japanese are going to build an airstrip just outside town!

I can hardly believe it. An
airstrip
—planes would actually land here! Teacher asks for volunteers to help build it. Mine is the first hand raised.

I talk to Abuji that night after supper. "I volunteered to help build the airstrip," I say.

Abuji sips his tea. It's not real tea anymore, it's herbs from the garden, but we still call it tea. "How often will you be called on to work there?" he asks.

I was afraid he'd ask that and I know he won't like the answer. "The work on the airstrip is to be done every day," I say slowly. "Anyone who volunteers will be excused from their studies until it's finished." I hold my breath and try not to look away from him.

He frowns. "Your education is important, Tae-yul."

I know what I want to say, but not how he'll take it. "Abuji, I do not mean to contradict you, but if the lessons were worthwhile, I would never even consider missing school."

Silence. He knows what I mean. My lessons: The sayings of the Emperor ... The victories of the Imperial forces ... The superiority of Japanese culture.
That's
what I'll be missing.

Is there a look of pain on his face? Or am I only imagining it? "In the evenings you will study kanji and reading with Sun-hee," he says.

Permission granted! I suck in my cheeks to keep from smiling. "Yes, Abuji. Thank you."

Later I think about it again. I wasn't imagining things—it
does
hurt him to know that my lessons aren't what I should be learning.

I realize something else. Why he's never punished me for not being a better scholar.

The same reason.

A few days later my new life as a worker begins. Every morning I march off with the other volunteers to the field where the airstrip is being built. We're given spades or shovels, then we dig and move dirt all day long, bossed by soldiers.

I didn't expect this. I thought we'd be supervised by our teachers. The soldiers are a lot crueler. Punishment isn't being struck with a bamboo cane across your legs but standing with the shovel held over your head. For a long time—hours, even. Some students get slapped hard in the face for working too slowly or not saluting respectfully enough.

I make certain never to be punished. If I am, Abuji will make me stop working at the airstrip, make me go back to school. I listen carefully, obey orders quickly. It's hard work, but it beats going to school.

Blisters. At night I sometimes wake from the pain. Omoni soaks rags, ties them onto my hands. Soon I have calluses instead of blisters. And then a thick layer of skin, tough as leather.

Two months after I start at the airstrip, I come home with a new badge on my collar: the Japanese flag with wings. Sun-hee notices right away, raises her eyebrows at me, then at the pin. Asking but without words. She's still so quiet.

"All the volunteers got one," I say. I glance down at the
pin. "We're now members of the 'Japanese Youth Air Corps.' If airplanes ever land on the airstrip, the Youth Air Corps will be allowed to greet them. We might even get to clean the planes, or polish them, or whatever they do with them."

I look at her. "Just think—we'll be right there on the field, when the planes land and take off. And while they're here, I might get to see the inside of one—maybe even sit in the pilot's seat."

Sun-hee doesn't seem that impressed. But at least she says something. In a whisper. "That's good, Opah. Will the planes be coming soon?"

I shake my head. "Not soon—we have to finish the airstrip first. How do you expect planes to come here if they don't have anywhere to land?"

She doesn't know the first thing about planes.

After Uncle left, I couldn't trust myself to speak. It seemed that my mouth and heart and eyes were all connected. When I opened my mouth to talk, my eyes would fill with tears. To keep from crying I had to close my mouth. So I didn't talk much.

But that was all right, really. To talk you have to think. And I couldn't think either. It was like being frozen—not outside, since my body still moved and did the things I needed it to do. But inside, everything—my mind, my feelings—was like ice.

No, that wasn't right either. Ice was cold, ice felt like something. This was nothing, a great big hole. When I turned my thoughts inside, there was nothing there.

It helped a little that my body was very busy. Tae-yul and some of his classmates were building the airstrip instead of going to school, and there were changes at my school, too. At least one full day every week was devoted to preparations for an invasion.

We'd been without a radio for more than a year now, so we heard nothing of this; we learned only what the Japanese officials wanted to tell us at the neighborhood accountings. But what they were having us do at school was a sign of their concern. It seemed that the Americans and their allies were pushing hard—so hard that the Japanese feared an invasion of Korea or even the islands of Japan.

My classmates and I were required to make huge piles of stones. If the enemy invaded the town, we were to pelt them with the stones. We filled hundreds of sandbags; the military took them away. It was hard work, but I was glad—the work made me tired enough to sleep at night. It was only after defense-preparation work that I slept well.

We sharpened bamboo poles—-one for every student. These were stored leaning up against the courtyard wall. If the enemy advanced as far as the school, we were to take up the poles and bayonet them. We practiced driving a bayonet into a dummy made of straw that hung from a wooden framework.

"One soldier," Buntaro-san would say over and over again through the megaphone. He was the military attache at this school, the position Onishi-san had held at my elementary school. "If three of you work together to bayonet just one soldier, you will be heroes to the Imperial forces. The Emperor will honor you personally. One soldier for every three students—that is all he asks."

Standing in line, waiting for my turn to bayonet the dummy, I looked around the courtyard. There we were in our worn-out uniforms, which used to be navy blue but had faded to gray. A hundred or so schoolgirls, some older than me but some two or three years younger, and I was only thirteen. With flimsy bamboo poles, most of which weren't even sharpened properly, we were to defeat the enemy invaders, with their guns and grenades and bombs.

Suddenly, I thought of Uncle. How I wished I could tell him about this. He'd have made some kind of funny joke. I tried to think of what he might say, but nothing came to me. I couldn't see the funny side, the way he would have. But I did manage a half-smile at one thing—it was the first time I'd thought of him without crying.

Jung-shin caught my eye, and I could see too that she was thinking how ridiculous this was. Just suppose she and I and another classmate were able to corner an American soldier. He'd have to be all by himself, unarmed, and weak enough to be overcome by three schoolgirls.

Even if that
did
happen, I was sure I wouldn't be able to do as Buntaro-san was commanding. Stabbing a man would be quite a different thing from stabbing a straw dummy.

I couldn't understand what the Japanese were thinking. Did they really believe we Koreans had been transformed somehow—that we were now Japanese? Didn't they know that we
wanted
the Americans to come to Korea and fight them?

But I was worried about something. I'd heard that the missionaries and other white people who had come to Korea couldn't tell the difference between Koreans and Japanese on sight. This astounded me. Both had black hair and dark eyes, it was true. But Japanese men, especially, were easy to tell
apart from Koreans. They were much shorter, and their complexions were darker, more olive-toned. And the way they walked was different—stronger, almost arrogant.

Maybe the American soldiers would be like the missionaries. Maybe they wouldn't know the difference between Koreans and Japanese—they'd think we were all the same, like those black-haired people in the film.

One fall afternoon we were in the schoolyard, having bamboo-bayonet practice. We heard the drone of a plane approaching and waited for the usual all-clear siren, which meant that it was a Japanese plane and that there was nothing to worry about. But for the first time ever, no signal came.

We'd been drilled countless times on what to do if this happened. In seconds we had lined up and were marching back to our classrooms. There we crouched beneath desks and tables, as far away from the windows as possible.

The silence was eerie. Not one student cried or screamed. The engine noise grew louder and louder, and I braced myself, waiting for a bomb to hit the school. Now some of the girls had tears rolling down their faces. Others moved their lips in silent prayer. The girl next to me had fallen over in a faint. Oddly, this made me feel stronger. I didn't want to faint; I wanted to be aware, to see what happened.

But now the noise of the plane was growing fainter and fainter, and soon we could no longer hear it. There was no sound of an explosion, no firestorm. What did it mean?

The teacher crawled out from under her desk. She went to a window and slid it aside, looking out cautiously. Past her head, I could see a patch of sky.

It was snowing.

Not snowflakes. Paper. The sky was filled with falling paper.

We heard the all-clear signal, then Buntaro-san's voice in the courtyard, shouting through the megaphone.

"In your seats, everyone!" the teacher ordered. "Keoko, go out to the courtyard and find out what is going on."

I rushed outside. The yard was filled with students and teachers milling about in confusion. Quickly, I picked up one of the pieces of paper—it was a little folded leaflet—and tucked it into my waistband without looking at it.

Meanwhile, Buntaro-san was screaming into the megaphone. All students were to pick up the leaflets and bring them at once to the back of the school! No leaflets were to be left on the school grounds or even thrown into a waste bin! Every single one was to be burned!

The leaflet in my waistband scratched and tickled me all the rest of the day. I was terrified that someone would catch me with it, but for the first time in weeks my curiosity was stronger than my fear. I wanted to know what it said. If the Japanese didn't want us to read it, it had to be important.

Later I learned that the Youth Air Corps, including Tae-yul, had been sent throughout the town and into the surrounding hills to pick up the leaflets. There was a neighborhood accounting to announce that anyone caught with one of the leaflets would be severely punished. Soldiers went door to door and searched every home.

It all happened so quickly that not many people had a chance to read the leaflet. It was written in Korean, so most people couldn't have read it anyway. We all still spoke Korean at home, but only older people—those who'd learned to read before the Japanese occupation—could read it. Tae-yul had once told me that Abuji could read and write Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Abuji would be able to tell me what the leaflet said.

When I arrived home from school, Tae-yul met me in the courtyard. "Did you see it? Did you see the plane?"

I told him no, that we'd hurried inside.

"I saw it!" he said proudly. "It flew right over the airfield. Sun-hee, you should have seen how fast it went! And the pilot waggled his wings when he went over us, like he was waving!" You'd have thought he'd been flying the plane himself.

I showed him the leaflet I'd hidden. He grinned at me and pulled one out of
his
waistband.

Abuji came home and Tae-yul gave him the leaflets. He read one of them quickly, raising his eyebrows. Then he put them into the stove and burned them. He did it all slowly, deliberately. I thought he'd never get around to telling us what they said.

Finally, he turned to us. "The leaflets are from the Americans," he said, "signed by an army general—a man named MacArthur. He says it is known that the Korean people are not America's enemies, and he promises that Korea will never be bombed by American planes."