Late in the year, I was woken before dawn by the first bombings since the Japanese claimed the island. The sound was distant and ghostly; it reminded me how far removed I was from my old life, how little it had to do with me now. Mrs Sato gave nothing away when she arrived that afternoon. There was no information, only hushed gossip for days about what the explosions might mean. ‘Was it an air raid?’ ‘Maybe it was just a factory accident?’
Two weeks after the new year, there was another spate of bombings. This time, we were wide awake, gathered in the bathroom for our morning ritual – the deep boom of it was unmistakable, as was the sound of planes overhead.
‘Do you know what that means?’ Jeomsun’s eyes were lit up, the high points in her face white and arched like the wing bones of a bird.
I shrugged. The end of the occupation, I thought, or the end of things. I was fine with either.
‘Maybe when the British come, they will bring food with them. And supplies. ‘I’ve had to use the same sanitary cloths for months now.’ She filled her bucket with water, threw in her menstrual cloths and started scouring the strips with both hands. ‘Do you have any clean ones to spare? Mine are so tattered they’re almost useless.’
My stomach lurched. I knew where mine where – tucked in a corner of my room, untouched for weeks. My voice was barely audible when I said, ‘I haven’t bled in more than a month.’
Jeomsun froze. ‘When were you supposed to?’
‘I can’t even keep track of the days anymore. How can I know –’
‘Don’t panic. Maybe… Maybe it’s just because you’re so thin,’ she circled her damp fingers around my wrist to emphasize her point. ‘It happened to a lot of girls when we were in China, when we were close to starving.’ But she didn’t sound sure; Jeomsun, who said anything she pleased and nothing at all when she didn’t want to.
‘Maybe I should tell…’ Mrs Sato, I thought. Maybe she could do something. I thought about the way she had talked about herself and her daughter that night little more than a year ago. The way she had put her hand on mine.
‘No, wait. See what happens. It could be nothing.’ She gave me a stiff smile that only showed how helpless she felt, then straightened her back and turned to glare at the other girls, who were all watching, eyes agog.
‘You’re right. It’s probably nothing.’ I nodded to reassure her. A child, I thought. Impossible. Back in my room, I thought about how a Chinese doctor would deal with it – I had overheard my neighbours talking about it once, some yatou, little wretch, who had gotten herself into trouble. She had taken dong quai and a whole pineapple, cut herself slice after perfect, circular slice. I wanted to look up those neighbours and ask them if it had worked for the girl.
I saw less than ten soldiers that day. Spent most of my time thinking about my mother. How I had watched her through three pregnancies, two brothers. How one little girl had died at birth. I was six then; my task had been to boil water and keep watch over Yang as my mother screamed in the next room. I remembered the midwife’s repeated urges for her to push, and how, after hours of listening to my mother groaning in the bedroom, a silence had settled, thick, unnerving, over our home. The midwife had come out with swathes of old cotton wadded together, her face glossy from exertion, the corners of her mouth set straight. She didn’t look up as she passed me on the way to the kitchen. My father, who’d been waiting outside, had gone in to see my mother and left again, his face dark. ‘What happened to the baby?’ I’d asked, once the midwife was gone. My mother shook her head and told me not to be nosy. Then she changed her mind. ‘The little girl died. Too small.’ She closed her eyes and two heavy drops of tears slid down the side of her face, pooled in the seashell of her ear.
I wondered what they would have named the baby had she lived.
Names. I rested my hand on my stomach, pinched the ridges of my hip bones. No, it can’t be, I thought, though I knew it was there. How clear the signs had been, looking back: small but seismic shifts in my body – the fullness of my breasts, how the rice tasted in my mouth – like something gone off. Even water was different, metallic. But I had pushed it all away, out of mind.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Not like this. Not the way my parents would have wanted. A man of their choosing. An auspicious date plucked out of the astrologer’s book. I couldn’t help trying to guess who the man might be. The other half of the child. The only face that came to mind was Takeo’s but it couldn’t have been – I hadn’t seen him in more than a year, he could well be dead. I wondered who it was, and if the child was already formed, with eyes and ears and toes, growing.
‘You. You don’t know anything,’ I said to myself.
Over the next few weeks, the other girls kept their distance from me as they waited for something to happen. Jeomsun was the only one who continued speaking to me, garrulous as ever, though she talked about everything else but my pregnancy: about Huay and how much she missed her, about the different things she would eat if she ever got out of here alive. There, in her words, lay a shred of hope that everything would be over before the pregnancy began to show itself. The bombing raids had begun afresh, this time in earnest. One night, I heard faint human cries carried across the island by the wind. After that came the smell of burning rubber. It was then that I thought about my family, imagined them running for shelter and crouching in a ditch. With a start, I realized that their faces were beginning to blur; all I could see was their brown legs whipping through grass, arms crossing above their heads to try and shield themselves. The faces of both boys melded into a strange composite. The wrong eyes, the wrong nose and mouth, so that I ended up picturing someone only vaguely familiar, whispering harshly for my mother to hide, quick. In the house, there was no announcement, no orders for us to get up and be ready to dash to the nearest bomb shelter situated a little away from the building. We remained in our cells while Mrs Sato gathered her people in the kitchen. I had to strain to hear the staccato sounds of their hastened speech, the rising and falling tones of anxiety. They went on like that for a few minutes before dispersing, their footsteps dusting over the concrete. Once again, soldiers ceased to come by. No one opened our cell doors except to slide food across the floor, quarter bowls of rice cooked with an increasing amount of grit.
Every night, I went to sleep hoping for the war to be over and for the baby to be gone the next day. But when I found a smear of blood in my underwear one morning, I started to cry.
‘What’s wrong?’ Jeomsun said when she saw me.
I showed her my balled-up underwear in my hand.
‘That’s nothing. It happens. I know it from my mother.’ She said nothing else but continued looking at me. Her eyes were steady. Now you know what you want, at least.
I didn’t tell her that I wanted half of the baby. Nothing of whichever man had done this. I closed my eyes and tried to picture going home, walking through the door with the baby in my arms. ‘Who’s that?’ My father might ask. And I would have to say that it was mine. He was mine. I had the image of the child all of a sudden. It would have the roundness of my face and when it smiled, I would be able to see a little of my parents, my brothers.
‘They’re going to find out.’
‘Try to hide it for as long as you can. They might not find out. We haven’t seen the doctor – not since the first bombing. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe we’ll be free next week. Anything could happen.’ Jeomsun clasped my hands in hers and squeezed.
The air raids continued, reminding us that something was going on even if we thought the rest of the world had fallen away, given up on our little island. Both Mrs Sato and the caretaker were distracted by the lack of sleep, the diminishing rations they were receiving and their quickly emptying pantries. I kept count. Three months. Four months.
I tried to stay invisible until the bump appeared – four to five months into the pregnancy – almost overnight, as if magicked by an imp into being. I switched dresses with Jeomsun, who was almost a head taller than me. Bent double to hide my stomach as I shuffled to the bathroom each morning, keeping my eyes to the floor.
It might have worked, save for the fact that there were still soldiers coming through every single day. It was a gamble but I quickly found that few of the men cared. Some of them even rubbed the top of my belly as if for good luck before they left. My own luck lasted until one evening, when an officer came into my room. He took great care in pulling off his boots and lining them against the wall before looking at me and stopping, mid-approach, to frown. Without a word, he picked up his boots and left the room. I heard him speak – just a few short, cutting words – and Mrs Sato reply, her voice at once apologetic, coquettish, confused. Then she appeared in my doorway and pulled me up to wrench open the front of my dress. Once she saw my filled-out stomach, her businesslike manner vanished.
‘How long has it been?’ When I didn’t reply, she grabbed hold of my arm to pull me close. ‘How many months?’
‘Five. Maybe six. I don’t know.’
For a second she looked ready to scream, had her head reeled back, as if gathering force. Instead, she shook her head. ‘Foolish girl.’ The expression on her face was hard to read, seemed something like concern and tedium combined, when she nudged me back into my room. ‘It’s too late to do anything about it. And anyway, you’ll be surprised to see how few of them mind it. Keep yourself looking well, a woman can be at her most beautiful when she is –’
‘What do you care? You let Huay die. Why not have me killed as well?’ Or let me go. The unsaid ringing out loud in the quiet after my words.
That was when I saw it – a look, as if she were seeing past or through me, at someone else entirely. ‘Do you know what happens to girls like you? No family will want you back. Not like this. You don’t know what they’ll do to you. You don’t know –’ She shook her head, stopping or waking herself, both. ‘If I put you out there, you’ll starve on the streets or resort to doing worse things than this just to scrape by. I’m doing you a favour, trust me. I’m saving your life.’ She waited for me to thank her or scream something else in reply. When I didn’t, her face fell. Regret or something like it flashed on her face and she slammed the door shut.
The house saw fewer visitors as the bombings continued. Some of the soldiers walked out the minute they saw I was pregnant, some stayed to talk, perhaps pretending that I was someone else: a mother, a wife. Most of them, as Mrs Sato said, simply didn’t care and did what they wanted to do with me.
I didn’t tell the other girls that I was getting a little extra food, that Mrs Sato would bring me dinner on occasion: a fish head on top of the usual pitiful rations. A single tangerine. I took the food gladly but I remained the way I was – skin and bones. The baby kept growing. It seemed everything I ate went to it; it took and took from me. Every day, as my belly filled out, the other girls paled, shrank. There was more hair in the drain and less chatter in the bathroom as everyone fought to preserve any bit of energy they could gather for the day. One girl fainted in the bathroom, cracking her forehead open on the sink. Another had to be carried out of her room when an infection refused to ease. I watched from behind the half-closed door as Mrs Sato supervised her exit; a guard carrying the girl by the shoulders, the caretaker taking her feet. I never saw the girl again.
‘What happened to her – the girl they took away yesterday?’ I asked Jeomsun the next morning.
‘She got stabbed by one of the men two weeks ago. Her wound refused to heal. I think it got infected.’ She got stabbed. It wasn’t the first time. It wasn’t even the first time in six months. These incidents were becoming more frequent with the bombings, as if fear was chipping away at the men, the people they once were, before they left home and came here, and made monsters out of them.
‘Where do you think they took her?’
Jeomsun shrugged, too weary to speculate. I wanted to tell her that it should have been me. That it was meant to be me. That I’d killed her. That I was killing everyone else in the black-and-white house. Taking up space. Eating food that could have been shared, that could save them. Each time Mrs Sato arrived with the extra morsels, my throat burned with shame even as I devoured every single crumb. I was afraid that the stink of tangerine on my dress would betray me and frequently thought about keeping something aside for Jeomsun but I never did.
I talked to myself, to the baby, as I ate sometimes. Telling it that I wished I had more to give. That I was eating for its sake. Half lies. To distract myself from my guilt, I imagined what I would do afterwards. After the child was born. I could be a washerwoman, just like my mother, raise it on my own, even put it through school. I could follow Jeomsun back to Busan, I thought. This was how I fell asleep: picturing mountains I had never seen before, grassland so wide I never saw the end of it. In my dreams at night though, I was watching the guard and caretaker carry the girl out again. Except when I looked closer, it was my face I was looking at; it was me.
The child arrived in the night. The pain started slowly, lulling me out of my sleep. At first I thought they were merely hunger pangs but the pain intensified and spread, turning my stomach tight, hard to the touch. A dampness spread under me and I turned slowly from side to side, wishing it away, until I couldn’t deny it anymore – the baby was coming. I got up and paced the room. After some time, it could have been minutes or hours I couldn’t tell, I sank back down again. The only position I felt better in was on all fours, knees dug into the mat. Then I felt the first of it, a pain shooting through my centre, like a vice slowly tightening around my spine, so firmly that I found it almost impossible to breathe, then releasing again. The pain built up, tightening and loosening, tightening and loosening, a little more intensely each time. I called out once or twice, sounds I’d never heard anyone make before, startling myself in the dark. Then I blacked out.
When I came to, I saw that someone had brought in oil lanterns and put them close. I felt the heat of the light, heard the faint rustle of a moth’s wings. Then I saw my mother crouching next to me, getting the wordless, barking caretaker to bring in pot after pot of hot water. I was lying on my back again. Someone had put a thick wad of rolled up blankets under my head. The pain was still there – I could feel it lingering in my lower back and down my spine, gathering momentum. I closed my eyes and waited. When I opened them, my mother’s face was above mine. She said something I couldn’t make out – I was still making that low, animal sound and it was thick, filling my ears and head. ‘I can’t hear you,’ I shouted, trying to be heard through the hum of noise. Someone made a shushing sound and pressed a rolled up towel to the side of my face. It felt cool against my skin and made me think of the time I was ill and in bed with a fever. The only thing that helped then was the damp towel she’d brought, changing it after it grew hot from my skin, and plunging it back into the water until it became cool again. The trill of water falling into the bucket as she wrung the water out sounded like birdcall. I remember holding my breath as she folded the cloth into a rectangle, while I waited for the shock of cold on my warm face.
I held my breath now as my mother turned away. When she turned back, I saw that it was not her after all but Mrs Sato. She was talking loudly and making faces. Then she brought both of her clenched fists up in front of her face, again and again, until I understood that I had to push. It was a long night, a long morning. Once or twice, I heard the whisper of female feet outside the door before they quickly went away again. The rest of the world went on by – trucks arriving and leaving, the sound of deep, male laughter in the front room. A series of people came to the door, and each time Mrs Sato had to get up, her face rearranging itself, forming a smile as she neared the door. I couldn’t help watching as the caretaker left my room carrying bundles of dark-red cloth, heavy-looking, stinking of life and death. How did it look each time she went out like that? I thought. Then I told myself that this, in the middle of war and death and this house, was probably nothing out of the ordinary at all.
When it was over, they wrapped the baby in a clean sheet and put him in the space between my torso and my arm. He kicked feebly and made snuffling noises, like he was about to want something. The last thing I did before I passed out was to pull him to my breast and watch him latch on and feed. When I woke, it was to the sound of approaching footsteps, the clink of cutlery. Mrs Sato was holding out a bowl of rice with shreds of vegetables on top. ‘Eat.’
I took the bowl from her, and she looked at me as if she wanted to say something, stood there for a while working her mouth as if trying to get the words ready. Before she could speak, there was a shout in the front room. She tiptoed out. I finished the food and drifted off again. I might have slept for minutes, an hour, but it felt like days. I only woke when I heard someone slip in, and kept still while the person hovered over me, waiting for me to open my eyes. I felt the child moving in my arms. Then I felt her bend down and pick him up, pulling him out of my reach.
‘Should I take him away from you, so you can rest?’
Huay turned around. She looked just as she had when I saw her that mid-autumn festival years ago, her cheeks flush with youth. Before the war and this house and what it turned us into. She was smiling, her arm forming a perfect cradle under the baby. He was sucking her thumb, eyes bulging from the effort of trying to get something, anything out of it.
‘It’s okay. They said I could be with you for a few days. To help you.’ There was a long pause before she added, ‘You’ve been sleeping for more than a day now. Mrs Sato has been taking care of you herself. Did you know?’
I knew. During those moments, I saw how she might have been at home with her own people as a mother, a grandmother.
‘You should have waited though. It’s not a good month to have a baby.’
‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’ I sat up. It only occurred to me then that I had no idea what date it was. What the baby’s birthday would be.
‘It’s August – ghost month. Didn’t you know? My mother always said it’s the most inauspicious time to have a child. You really should have waited.’
I said nothing. She was still cradling him, the edges of her body fuzzy and spectral no matter how hard I tried to focus.
‘Do you even want him or shall I take him away? Maybe that’s a good idea. He doesn’t look so well.’
No, no. I struggled to form the words but my mouth was numb. The baby started to cry. She was right. There was a yellow cast on his face and he was small. Too small. As I watched him, he pulled his thin arms out from the swaddling cloth and flailed his fists.
‘No, please. He’s mine,’ I finally managed. ‘You can go now. I can do this on my own.’
Huay made no move to suggest that she’d heard me but carried on coaxing the child. Then she looked at me. Her eyes were empty. Dark as a pond.
‘Here.’ She lay him down on my chest so I could pull him close. When he finally started to drink again, the room fell silent, save for the muffled plosive sounds he made as he fed.
‘Have you decided on a name?’
I had, but I wasn’t ready to say it yet. Too early. Naming him and saying the words aloud would be tempting fate. But I had thought of a name as soon as I saw him: Cheng Xun. A name that spelled success, ease.
I shook my head.
‘You could give him away. Someone will want him. People want little boys.’
‘No, I can do it. I’ll bring him home.’ My words echoed in the room. Home. The warmth from my baby and my exhaustion pulled me under for a second, two seconds. When I opened my eyes again, Huay was gone.
The thought of losing my child kept me awake, alert to any movement in the house so that I woke as soon I heard the caretaker rise in the morning, and squared myself in a corner of the room with him in my arms, ready to resist her, Mrs Sato, anyone. Even if it proved useless. But something was different. The house had about it an air of the abandoned. This hush, which should have been welcome, was unsettling. Fewer and fewer soldiers visited the house and the ones who did were sent to the other rooms. When I realized this, I felt guilt, then relief creeping into my bones, took to pinching the tender insides of my arms to remind myself that anything could happen, that I had to stay alert.
I saw less of Mrs Sato. Our time in the bathroom got cut short and we were watched more closely than ever by the caretaker, who seemed unnerved by the quiet suffusing the house. I refused to let Cheng Xun out of my sight and it took more than a week before Jeomsun could convince me to let her hold him while I cleaned myself.
It was one morning, as I watched Jeomsun rock Cheng Xun in her arms that I realized how little he looked. I’d refused to see it but it was clear now that he hadn’t grown much in almost two weeks and was eating half of what he used to when he was just a few days old. Instead of feeding, he slept or else nuzzled blindly, pushed his fists into my chest, as if wanting to burrow himself back into the quiet.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I whispered to Jeomsun. The yellow of his skin was in his eyes as well, and had spread downwards, to his chest, and belly, even the soles of his feet. Jeomsun refused to look up. She had noticed it, I realized, and hadn’t wanted to alarm me.
‘I don’t know. Has he been eating?’
‘Very little. His appetite seems to be getting poorer and poorer… What should I do?’
‘The doctor. Ask Mrs Sato for him.’ She sounded shaky, from hunger or from fear of what she thought was to come, I couldn’t tell.
I tried to get Mrs Sato’s attention that day, shouting out whenever I saw her sandals pass under the door. She paused once, then went on, as if she hadn’t heard me, as if I weren’t there at all.
In the space of a few days came a shift in the air that seemed absolute. Instead of the caretaker’s footsteps and the tap of her cane, I was woken up by the sound of engines roaring past the gates. This continued all morning. We were simply left in our rooms to wait while footsteps passed back and forth in the corridor. No breakfast. No letting us out to go to the bathroom. Only the scrabble of rummaging and the shuffle of drawers opening and closing in the kitchen and in the front room. A little later, I smelled smoke. Burning paper. This was the end, I thought. This was how I was going to die. I hammered at the door for a long time and heard the other girls’ voices, their cries, until the smell of smoke faded along with the sound of boots outside.
The low whirl of activity in the house wound the air tighter, tighter. There was a roll of thunder. Then rain – a sound as familiar as my breath in my lungs. I guessed the time to be three in the afternoon.
Jeomsun shouted in Japanese, something pleading, urgent. Other voices joined in. The girl next door begged to be let out. She needed to use the bathroom, she said, and couldn’t wait anymore.
No one replied.
At twilight, Mrs Sato opened my door to push a bowl of rice across the floor.
‘What’s going on out there? Is there any news? Please, anything.’ Maybe I could push past her. I could try, at least.
She froze as if I had spat at her, then drew her arm back. The baby was in my arms and I turned away so that only the tips of her nails caught the side of my head. My ear was ringing and there was blood on my fingers when I touched my face.
‘You want news? They bombed us.’ Her chest was heaving. I would see Mrs Sato, decades later, whenever I came across pictures that showed the bomb’s sweep of destruction, what it did – simultaneously final but lingering. A wildfire that left nothing behind. But I didn’t care then. ‘My home town, gone!’ This last word, she screamed, slamming the door after her. The baby stirred, then stretched its mouth into a wide, red yawn.
The day it happened, the air was hot and still, waiting to break with rain. We had not heard anything for an entire morning. I was sure we were going to die like this. Forgotten and alone in our individual tombs.
Weak as she sounded, Jeomsun refused to give up. ‘Is anyone out there?’ she asked, in Japanese and then in Mandarin.
‘Can we be let out? Please, we need water,’ someone else said. No one used the words ‘leave’ or ‘home’ – as if the thoughts themselves were too painful to put into words. It was a fragile hope, one that we were afraid to bring out into the open. I said nothing; I didn’t want to wake the baby. That yellow cast on his skin seemed deeper, like a stain that was refusing to wash away. He slept heavily most of the time and I found it increasingly difficult to rouse him for what little milk I could provide.
After a while, the questions stopped. I felt the others tense, their ears keening for the faintest sound: the creak of a door; a light knocking against the windows in the front room; a rustling. It was just the wind, of course, and rats going through the kitchen cupboards. The tree outside, its branch tapping on the wall.
Finally, somebody said what should have been obvious since dawn.
‘They’re all gone. They’ve left us.’
‘Everyone, try your doors,’ said Jeomsun. There was something in her voice I had never heard before – not from her – a desperation, a pleading.
All around me I heard the thud of door against jamb, and the other women saying, ‘No, it’s locked, it’s no use, we’re going to starve’. I tried my door as well. It was locked.
Mrs Sato kept an orderly house.
Two nights passed before someone came to us. I had gone through all the tins I had stolen from the kitchen, the saved up little wrappers and twists of paper in my room. Found half a sweet potato. A tangerine that I had kept aside and half forgotten, the flesh leathery with age.
It was morning when I heard the familiar rattle of a truck, the grind of brakes on tyres. Then, men. Speaking Japanese. I felt the usual dread settle into my stomach. The baby was still asleep; I held him tighter and shut my eyes, wishing the outside away.
Then someone unlocked all the doors and threw them wide open. I had to turn my eyes away from the light pouring in. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that there were soldiers standing in the corridor, five of them, weapons at their sides.
A man yelled, first in Japanese, then in Chinese, ‘OUT! OUT! OUT!’ He banged on the wooden counter to make his point. I wrapped a piece of cloth around my child, got up as slowly as I could to prevent him from stirring, and stopped at the doorway to look around before taking a few steps out, expecting any second to be seized and thrown back into the room. Jeomsun was in front of her door. Her face was pale and unreadable. I wanted to tell her it would be fine, whatever happened it would be okay. I wanted to at least mouth the words to her but the same man shouted again, and there was a surge. All of us moved into the reception area. The front door was wide open and I could see the truck, still running and churning out exhaust, and the woods beyond it.
‘Go,’ the man said, not shouting this time but simply saying it, gesturing towards the door.
Someone moved, I couldn’t see who, my eyes were too much focused on the exit and the soldiers standing around it – their backs and shoulders tight, as if ready to spring. Someone moved and then all of us did.
‘Go!’ His voice cracked at the end of that single word.
I made sure my baby was held tight enough and I ran.
In a moment I was narrowing my eyes against the sun, and then opening them wide, because of the world outside the iron gates and my surprise that it was all still there. For a few seconds, there was nothing else but the scuffle and gasp of flight. Then, two gunshots, just behind. A woman’s voice. One clear, unrestrained scream. For a split second I thought about Jeomsun but I didn’t stop. I ran, making my way off the road and heading straight for the green instead, past the tall, wild grass, into the trees. I ran with both arms wrapped around my child, felt only then the coolness of his skin, his limp body, the shards of dry, fallen fruit embedding themselves into my feet.