“Good morning, time to get up!” I woke to see a middle-aged woman standing in the doorway, smiling. She was fine-boned, tall and it looked like someone had wrapped a length of broad cloth around her to make a dress, a sober dark blue dotted with fine white squares, the thread of which shimmered silver and gold as she moved. “Come, follow me.” Her speech was hushed but firm, and there was a lilt in her Mandarin that I couldn’t place. The skirt of her dress rustled against the doorway as she turned, and I got up to follow her down a narrow corridor and into a kitchen with a charcoal burner on a table in front of the window, a wok and two large pots next to it. There was a screen in the middle of the room and I could see someone’s shadow behind it, moving calmly. Four other girls joined me in the kitchen, none of whom I’d seen before, then Huay. The woman counted heads, then smiled. “Good morning, everyone. My name is Mrs. Sato. We are your guardians now.” She turned and pointed at another woman, slightly older in her fifties, standing next to the far wall. All of us turned to look at her but she didn’t move or introduce herself. “Now, we will need all of you to take off your clothes and shoes. Everything.”
There was a wave of movement, a gasp and shift backward on our feet. One of the girls started weeping but the woman made a clucking sound with her tongue. “It’s just for the doctor. He’s here to give everyone a quick checkup and make sure you are clean and healthy,” she said, keeping her hands close to her body while she spoke. “Go on. The quicker you do it, the quicker you will finish.” She flashed a buoyant, maternal smile. Finish? I thought. The way she said it made me think of the market, putting what little I had left away in my basket and heading home. Maybe that’s what she meant, that we could go home afterward. And I started wondering how long it would take for me to walk back to the village, and if my family would still be there, alive, by the time I got back. Finish. I fixed my eyes on the cracks running through the cement floor and took my clothes off. My trousers in a heap on the ground. My blouse. Done, I gathered them up in a ball in both my hands and held it against my body.
“Your underwear as well. Go on.”
I hesitated, frowning hard in an effort not to cry, and took them off, trying to shut out the sound of the girls. There was a noise in my head. A chattering. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of my teeth clattering together in my mouth. I tried to clench my jaws together but it just made the clattering louder, more violent.
I looked up to see Mrs. Sato leading Huay past the screen. After five minutes, they came back and she picked out another girl and led her away.
Then it was my turn. I watched as she came closer, soundless as she walked over to me in her open-toed sandals. With one hand under my elbow, she guided me past the screen, toward a man standing next to a long wooden table.
“Could you get onto the table and lie down?” Except it wasn’t a question the way she said it, had moved close, impatient to have this over with. I lifted myself up, unthinking, and slid myself back on the warm wood.
“Feet on the table, legs apart.”
It was this that made me almost spring up but Mrs. Sato was close to me now. Watching. So I lay on the table, gripping the sides of it with my hands, hoping that I’d misheard. She waited for a second, then she sighed and placed her hands on my knees, forcing them wide. She stayed holding on to me and I remember thinking that her skin smelled of soap, the kind that we used to wash with before rationing was put into place. It was only when the doctor leaned forward and touched me that my eyes filled and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out.
She started to shush me. A mother, all of a sudden, calming her own child. “Stop crying. Nothing has happened yet.”
It was the word yet that kept ringing in my ears as the doctor pushed two fingers inside me. I yelped and tried to get up but Mrs. Sato’s grip was stronger than her hands suggested and she held me down without much effort. With any escape made impossible, the doctor’s hands were the only things I was aware of for several seconds—his skin and flesh and bone, cold, certain. The way he reached in and then paused, as if waiting, then withdrew, nodding in satisfaction at Mrs. Sato before going to the sink in the corner to rinse his hands.
“Good girl. You can put your clothes back on.”
They turned away from me to confer with each other. As I felt for the floor with my feet, Mrs. Sato laughed, a coquettish laugh that sounded practiced, businesslike.
I don’t recall walking out but I must have because the next thing I remember was being in the room I had waited in earlier with the rest of the girls. When everyone had been seen by the doctor, Mrs. Sato shepherded us into the bathroom at the end of the corridor. We all had to wash up between seven and eight every morning, she said, adding that there was to be no loitering, and no chitchat—the caretaker would be close by to make sure of that. The space had a single barred window above a row of sinks and taps, showing a bit of sky, all cloud, no blue. Next to the sinks were two cubicles, both with a toilet in the floor and an earthen jar that came up to my hip. It was filled with water and there was a bucket floating on top, and in it, a bar of soap, half used. The doors had been taken off their hinges, leaving them gaping open so that the scent of soap and water wafted out freely.
Three women were standing at the sinks, finishing up. I couldn’t tell where they were from but there was something different about the way they looked that went beyond place of birth or language—the way they held their faces and moved and breathed. The way they stood. I watched as one of them dried her legs, letting the front of her robe fall open as she bent over. It reminded me of a puppet show I watched once at the market, the absolute blankness of their faces. Mrs. Sato gave a dismissive wave with her hand and all three of them walked out. As they passed, the first of them looked up and gave me a little nod. This, I soon found out, was Jeomsun. She told me later on that she wanted to take our hands and lie to us, tell us that it was going to be okay. We had reminded her of herself on the first day, years ago, back at a camp in Formosa. How lost we had looked.
The older woman came in with an armful of folded cotton and handed them over to Mrs. Sato. “These are the clothes you will wear from now on,” she said, passing one to each of us.
The dress I got was blue and looked used. The weave was soft, as if it had been laundered many times over and put out to dry in the breeze. I folded mine over my arm and smoothed the worn fabric, calming myself.
It was only much later that I would admit to Huay that the dress had made me hopeful. “I thought it could be a uniform. Hoped it was a good sign,” I told her. “I thought we were there to be dancers, to cheer up the soldiers. Or cooks. Or servants.” Underneath this shallow assumption was a torrid wave of fear. I had an idea about why we were there, a whisper that I was trying to shut out. Listening to the whisper would have pulled me under, like an invisible current, and swept me out to sea. For now, I clung on to anything I could. Even a glint of hope as faint as this.
“But what’s going to happen? When can we go home?” Huay asked. Her voice was soft, clear as a spring.
Mrs. Sato’s eyes flashed. It was like watching a small, silver fish dart to the surface and flicker away again into the depths. “You’re here to help serve the Japanese troops. Make them feel welcome.”
“What do you mean? What do we have to do?” someone else said.
“You’ll get rewarded for good behavior. Didn’t they tell you? You can help your families by making money. I heard that everyone’s hungry, aren’t they? Money will help.”
All around me, there was a nervous fidgeting. A wishful twisting of shirt ends. Money, I understood. I knew Huay did as well. She nodded once, her chin dipping almost imperceptibly. Even though the house, the soldiers, the knot of apprehension in my stomach told me to think otherwise, I wanted to believe it as well and nodded along with the rest of them.
“Good, good. Now everyone needs to wash up. It’s going to be a long day.”
I didn’t think about what she said then but the words came back to me right after, in the dark. A long day, she had said. Mentioning nothing about what we had to do.
As Mrs. Sato left the bathroom, she called out in Japanese. The older woman hurried toward us and stopped just outside the door. She had a bamboo cane in her hand and leaned on it as she kept silent watch. Huay was the first to move. All of us turned away as she undressed. I felt their gaze on me as I went into the other cubicle and skimmed the surface of the water in the earthen jar. Cold. I stripped down, draping my clothes over the wall of the cubicle because there was nowhere else to put them. The patch of dried blood on my trousers had turned dark, and I found myself thinking about my father, my family, wondering if they were back inside, taking stock of what the soldiers had taken and what else they had lost. How we had spent an entire afternoon sweeping up broken glass and putting the cupboard doors back on their hinges the last time the soldiers passed through. The flash of realization—that there was nothing my parents could do now—made me start to shake, so I poured a bucketful of water over my head, washed the dirt off my feet, hands and face, and listened to the sound of water cracking as it met the floor. As I scrubbed, I focused my attention on the barred window showing a bit of sky, the sinks and taps a convenience I wasn’t used to.
This can’t be too bad. It couldn’t be, I told myself, a wish more than anything else.
Afterward, I put on the dress. It was different to the ones that Mrs. Sato and her assistants wore—the sleeves were short and there were two buttons on the bodice, easily fastened and undone. The fit was loose, and the skirt wide instead of slim-fitting, as was the fashion then. My things, when I looked around for them, were gone. So were my undergarments, which I had tucked within my clothes. I felt naked and started shaking again from another wave of panic. Maybe our things have been taken away to be laundered, maybe it’s just the way they do things here, I told myself, pushing away the sound of Mrs. Sato’s voice in my head, the thin cheeriness of it when she mentioned the soldiers. We would never see our clothes again. Shoes, those who still had them, would be taken away as well. I would go barefoot for the next thirty-six months. The first shoes I got after the war were wooden clogs and I wore them until they broke, got them mended, then taped up the straps when I was too ashamed to bring them to the cobbler’s anymore. But that would be years later.
“Now, don’t you all look nice. Just one last thing before you go back into your rooms.” Here, she proceeded to give us our new names. Japanese names, which she said made things easier for the staff. Huay, I noted, was Kiko and mine was Fujiko. I said the words under my breath. Fujiko, the edges of it round and barbed at once, a strange fruit in my mouth.
Mrs. Sato hummed a tune under her breath as she came for each of us. When it was my turn and she spun me around gently to go back up the corridor, I saw, for the first time, an armed soldier standing at the start of the entryway, watching as I was led back to the room I’d slept in. The kerosene lamp was lit and in the warm light of the single flame, it was easier to tell myself that it was going to be okay. Perhaps it wasn’t what I thought it was, this place. Perhaps we were there to mend uniforms, or take care of the wounded, or prepare food in the army kitchen. It’s going to be okay, I told myself, and looked around the room—the light from the flame illuminating a V of brown damp spreading down from the ceiling, and, at eye-level, little dots and splashes on the walls. I went close, squinting, and saw that they were bloodstains, turned dark. Then I saw the words scratched into a corner of the plywood wall. Three characters. A name, perhaps. The name of the girl who had been in this room before. Maybe she was home now, I told myself. Maybe she had done a good job and was now home with her family.
Less than an hour later, I heard the rumble of engines as several vehicles rolled in beyond the gate and settled into the driveway, as the stamp of boots came close, closer. Then quick and unrestrained laughter, the sudden pelt of it making me start. I told myself not to panic. Reminded myself that they needed women, surely, to be nurses and cooks and cleaners.
I made myself think this until the first man came into the room that morning.
There was no mistaking it then, when the door opened and he came in. I scrambled for the exit but he only had to reach out to catch hold of my shoulder, spinning me around as the door slammed behind him. I could not help but look at him—his wide-set eyes. The shiny, wet corners of his mouth as he said something in Japanese and put his arms around me. As if we were playing a game. I kept fighting to get out of his clasp and after a moment, he stopped smiling and gave an impatient sigh before reeling back and hitting me with his open palm. I fell to the mat and he kicked me in my side, the sharp jab of it a warning more than anything else, to make sure I stayed down before undoing his trousers. Then he knelt, pushed my dress up above my waist, and put one hand around my neck as he straddled me. He kept a grip on my neck the entire time so that I couldn’t move my head away from the rasp of his stubble on my cheek, his oily breath. The wet on my skin where he drooled or perspired. The sound of him as he rutted on top of me. The only thing I could do was to close my eyes and wait and wait for it to be over.
When he left, Mrs. Sato rapped on the door and called through, reminding me to clean up with disinfectant. In the haze of what had just happened, her instructions were almost a comfort, a clear line of thought I could follow. Even the solidity of the bottle was comfort. It was real. My body was not. Compared to the objects in front of me, the rag, the bottle, the liquid sloshing within, I felt hollow and strangely weightless, as if I didn’t exist. I wiped myself and looked down to see that the cloth had come away bloodied. The thick smear of it like something alive. It was all I could do to breathe when I thought about my mother and the way she had taught me to trim away squares of cheap cotton when I got my period for the first time. “You’re a woman now,” she had said, her voice somber. She had not looked at me—not once—as she explained how I should replace and wash the cloths several times the first three days, fewer after. “And keep them away from your father’s things when you’re doing the laundry,” she’d added at the end. I knew why without asking. We were bad luck—our things, our blood.
Then the next soldier appeared. Young and smiling. He bowed and started to take off his boots. No, no, I said out loud, I think. One, I could have lived with. Maybe. But another. I told myself to try harder, fight harder, so I sat up and put my hands out when he tried to descend upon me, shoving as hard as I could. For a moment, he looked dispirited and I thought he would leave. Then he reached into his pocket and brandished a gun.
“You’re a woman now,” my mother had declared. A verdict. I had said nothing, just stared at the fissures around her fingernails, shiny red, as she showed me how to fold the cloth into rectangles. How strange I had felt when I sat down to dinner with my brothers and my father a few hours later. Yang had looked at me in a way that made me wonder if he sensed something had shifted in the air around us, something irreversible.
Like this. I would not be able to go back. I would not be able to look my mother or father in the eyes again.
That is what I was thinking about when the third soldier came in, the fourth and fifth. I made myself stop counting after that and kept my eyes closed all the way through each of them, their oil and dirt and rumbling, until they eased their weight off me and left the room. Until the clip of boots outside the door grew faint, and died away. A woman came in to turn down the kerosene lamp in the room. Then all was dark.
I tried to curl up into myself, on my side, but when I moved, the space between my legs felt as if it had been lit on fire, so I lay still on my back and closed my eyes. That night, I heard someone crying on the other side of the wall. I was about to tap on the partition between us when someone yelled out in Japanese. The crying stopped for a second before it continued, muffled this time, as if the person had clamped her hands over her face. Even when I fell asleep, the sound of her weeping seeped into my dreams, crowding out everything else. It seemed like too soon, a minute or so, before I opened my eyes and there was light again under the door—it was dawn.