Two days passed before I ate anything or spoke to anyone. Two full days of lying on the damp mat, being bent and held down into submission. Thumbs pushed into the sides of my mouth so I couldn’t bite down. There was little reprieve, especially in the first week. One soldier would be done, would be withdrawing from me when the next man barged in, making impatient gestures while undressing himself. All of them merged to form one faceless, nameless beast—all body and inhuman noise. It was a year later, with a recent young captive among us, that I realized that this was what they did with the new girls, that word spread so the men would queue up, the line snaking out of the door, to visit this new face and break her in like a pair of shoes. Several times during the first hours I had to put my hands up to fend off blows from several soldiers affronted by a look or any resistance on my part. One man slapped me so hard I spat out part of a tooth. I learned to play dead after that, closing my eyes and lying so still that I felt myself sinking into the floor. At night, I would see my mother before me, turning her head away in shame as I tried to sleep. Or else my own clear-eyed face looming and hissing at how pliant and easy I was. You could have killed yourself when you got the chance, or jumped from the truck, I thought, the bottle of antiseptic—there—might end things quick.
All of this until I fell into a numbing, dreamless slumber. I cannot recall getting up to wash or going to the bathroom, although I must have—I remember gnashing my teeth as I squatted, the dull soreness turning so sharp it almost split me. Someone must have come for me. It was the way things went in the black-and-white house. You adhered to the schedule or they, Mrs. Sato or the caretaker, dragged you along with them. At some point during the first day I noticed a bowl of rice on the floor. Left it to grow cold until it became too late. Only after insects began to swarm around it did I start to feel hungry. When it became clear that the caretaker wasn’t going to give me a fresh meal before I’d finished this one, I scattered the black ants that had lined up from the wall to the bowl and scraped handfuls of rice into my mouth with my fingers. Two mouthfuls and it was gone. When the caretaker returned to pick up my empty dish in the evening, she sneered at me and I understood then that I was theirs, that I belonged to them.
“Come on, come on. Get up, lazy ones.”
The voice was close enough to wake me up from my second night of fitful sleep. A nightmare, I thought, opening my eyes. Then the door opened for someone to slide a half bowl of rice across the floor. Mrs. Sato’s head appeared in the gap. “Eat. Then it’s off to the bathroom with you.” Then she went on calling out instructions down the hallway. “Make sure that all of them wear a sakku. If they don’t have one, call out for me,” and, “Don’t forget to collect the tickets from each soldier!”
No, not a nightmare. I pushed myself up and was at once distracted by a jolt of pain, both sharp and dull at once, spreading from my pelvis down to my legs. I did the only thing I could. Ate. Then got up to go to the bathroom.
There were a few women in there but it was the one who’d nodded at me my first morning who came up to me then. I was washing up when she came and leaned against the wall, waiting. I glanced at the exit, nervous about the caretaker, but there was only her wooden cane, leant against the door frame. “Don’t worry,” the woman said. The trick, she told me, was to grow eyes in the back of your head. “The caretaker has bad legs and likes to sit in the kitchen. She’s supposed to watch us to make sure we don’t chat in the bathroom but she gets tired. See?” She pointed at the empty doorway. “I sometimes count up to two hundred and give up because I lose track.” She paused as if to let me take it in. “What’s your name?”
I wanted to tell her to leave me alone but I stayed silent, blinking water from my eyes. She asked again, thinking I hadn’t heard, and my voice cracked when I replied, “Wang Di.”
“Jeomsun. My name is Jeomsun. You’re new, aren’t you? From around here?”
Without further preamble, Jeomsun told me about how she had survived the week-long transport from her hometown in Busan to Formosa, where she’d been moved from camp to camp and the women around her succumbed, one after the other, to dysentery and typhoid fever. Then she had been taken away and put on a boat to Singapore. It was luck, she said, that she was in here. “Conditions here are better. You even have running water. The places we were in before...” There was a pause. When she spoke next her voice had lost much of its energy. “I feel so much older now than when I started. Older than my twenty years. But you. You can’t be more than sixteen, surely.”
I had to think for a moment before I replied. “Seventeen.” I had just turned seventeen. My parents had forgotten my birthday because of the war and their frantic efforts to find me a husband. For a moment I pictured my photograph pressed between the pages of Auntie Tin’s red notebook and wondered if she was still showing it to potential suitors and their parents.
Jeomsun shook her head and gave me a pitying look. “Still... You aren’t the youngest. There was a girl...before you arrived. She was twelve.”
“Where is she now? The girl?”
“She tried to run away.”
“What happened to her?”
“The soldiers caught her. They brought her back here and... The things they did to her...” She stopped there.
I wanted to ask her to go on but a change had come over her, turning her inward, her eyes hard. She looked older than her twenty years but her eyes were quick, birdlike. Her face was wide and pale, without a touch of blemish except for a faint, circular scar on her right cheek. Whenever she felt nervous or hungry, she would smooth it with the tip of a finger, as if trying to rub it away. A cigarette burn, I discovered, given to her by a soldier.
The other girls were finishing up, silent in the shells that they were already beginning to form around themselves. No one spoke. No one talked about what had happened the previous nights. As Huay passed me I saw an imprint of a hand around her upper arm but I kept my eyes on the stone floor as I went into the cubicle and flinched when I saw my reflection in the water—a bruise on my neck, my upper lip red and split with a cut. As I picked at the dried blood, I wondered what Yan Ling was doing—if she was at home in the kampong or on her way to work. If, for the first time, she felt relieved, grateful for that single deformity, the deformity her mother frequently cursed her for being born with.
In the days following, Jeomsun and I often met in the bathroom. As I washed up, she would keep an eye out for the caretaker and talk, keeping her voice low so it wouldn’t carry. She obsessively compared our breakfast rations, asking how many mouthfuls of rice I’d had, how many pickles, or else she complained while she washed out used condoms—as we were meant to do every morning—in the sink. She would talk about Busan sometimes; as she did her face would change, lifting and unclouding itself as if she were being warmed by the sun. She told me about the mountains and the sprawling farmland she had grown up on, and how much she missed it. Never about her parents. All this, she communicated with a child’s rudimentary Chinese, picked up during her time in Formosa, and filled in the rest with hand gestures. Whenever she was tired, she would start off in Chinese before trailing off in Korean and I leaned in to listen to her even though I understood nothing. The sound of the vowels cushioned the air around me and rolled around in my head even after we split up to go back into our rooms.
Jeomsun explained that there were two types of soldiers: officers—the ones who got as much time with us as they liked—and all the rest, who were allotted twenty minutes each, no longer. She advised me to try to please the former as much as we could, and I nodded even though I didn’t know what that entailed.
“And make sure the soldiers wear a sakku before they do anything with you or you might get pregnant. And eat. Eat as much as you can. You never know when they will start cutting back on rations. The doctor comes every Monday to perform a health inspection so pinch your cheeks pink before you go in to see him.”
“Why?”
“You need to look healthy. Otherwise they might take you away.”
“But if we look unhealthy, they might not want us, right? And if we fall sick, they might put us in hospital, won’t they? They might let us go...”
“Huh. You think they’ll send you to hospital to get treated? And waste good supplies?” Jeomsun scoffed. Then she turned to face me fully, straightening herself. “You know what happens to girls who fall sick here? Or who get pregnant?” She jerked her thumb toward the back of the house, where the rubbish bins were. Into the heap, she meant. Gone.
As much as I could that first week, I tried to avoid Huay, ignoring that pinch in my chest whenever I saw her. Her presence provided a bittersweet reminder of home—the trees, the whitewashed wood on our house, its palm-thatched roof—a familiarity that felt dangerous, untoward. I decided that I didn’t want her around me—didn’t want her bearing witness to everything that was happening in the house. It would not do, I thought, to have another witness to my shame. If we were ever let go, she would go back and tell everyone what had happened and I couldn’t bear it—the thought of everyone knowing or suspecting anything close to this. And even if she kept quiet, I would see the regretful knowing of it in her eyes and I wanted it—all this—swept away afterward, as if it had never happened. Except that wouldn’t be possible with Huay around. If I went home and she did as well, she would be a constant reminder of what had happened, what was never supposed to happen. If not, I would be able to tell my family that I had spent the entire time working in a factory. I would lie to myself first, then to everyone else after.
It was Monday morning, after our second inspection, after the doctor nodded at Mrs. Sato and she turned to nod at me as if to say good, well done. I remember being relieved even though I didn’t know what there was to be relieved about. A little later, in the bathroom, I asked Jeomsun if we would get a visit from the doctor every week.
“No. Only for the newcomers, and then every month for the rest.”
For the rest? I thought. Jeomsun saw the look on my face. She stopped cleaning her teeth with the corner of her facecloth, took me by the shoulders and did not blink, not once, as she spoke. “Listen. Do what helps you. If hoping helps you survive from day to day, then keep hoping that they’re going to release you. The truth is, I’ve never seen them let anyone go. But if it helps you. I’ve done this for five years. Since I was fifteen. What helps me is getting through one day at a time. I don’t think about what’s going to happen tomorrow. I focus on being clean. Eating. Talking. If I couldn’t do these things I would have died a long time ago.”
Five years. I felt myself sway on my feet.
Before I could reply, Jeomsun nodded to show that the conversation was over with and walked into the cubicle. I never found out if it was the way she had learned Mandarin, communicating as clearly as she could using the limited words that were available to her, or if this was how she was. Clear as a bell. Unmistakable. Perhaps she was exactly the same when she spoke in Korean.
I was at the sink when Huay came in. I turned and looked at her fully for the first time since we arrived. She was trying to keep her dress closed around her torso but all of the buttons on it were missing, like mine, and her left sleeve was ripped wide open, the bottom cuff dangling loose like an open jaw. The gap revealed red and purple marks all the way up her arm. When she moved, I saw more bruises blooming on the inside of her thighs. When she noticed me staring, she touched the marks on her arm, shifted her dress to cover them. When that didn’t work, she let her arms fall and turned away. Someone had hung a mirror, a circle of warped plastic, above the sink and she looked into it as if she had just discovered a creature, newly born. She had never been taller than me but I saw now that she had grown smaller. Lost weight in little more than a week. How the blades of her shoulders poked through her dress like the wings of a bird.
I set about ignoring her the way I had for the past week until she turned toward me, her mouth half open to say something before dropping her eyes, no doubt discouraged by how I was standing—feet away from her, ready to leave. I was exhausted. Exhausted from the effort of keeping her away, from telling myself that I was going to be released (any day now, I just had to wait). This hope was nothing, I realized, but a vanity. Girls like Jeomsun had been enslaved for years. What made me think I might be singled out and released? Nothing. My fists were balled tight and I opened them now to splash water on my face. When I looked up again, I felt lighter, as if the effort of hoping had fallen away from my shoulders.
“Are you okay?” I whispered, keeping one eye on the door.
She shrugged and held her stomach, smoothing a hand over her pelvis. I thought, for a moment, that she was going to say what I felt as well: it hurts, here. But she didn’t. Instead she shrugged again and looked down at her feet.
“Don’t fall ill. Remember what Jeomsun said the other day.” I didn’t know what else to say, felt my mouth hanging open, useless. Then a voice floated into my head: Have you eaten? I could picture my mother’s face as she said it, and the way she said it, with a stiffness, a regret, because she couldn’t manage anything else—it was the closest she came to asking Are you well? Are you okay? I’m thinking of you. I swallowed before saying it now, to Huay, “Did you eat your breakfast?” Cringing at first from the briny practicality of my words, then savoring them. My mother’s voice in my head echoed again, again, again.
She said yes but her eyes were distracted, flicking from my face, to the sink, to the window high up on the wall, and she jumped then, at the sound of Mrs. Sato’s voice, ordering us to hurry. I went into the cubicle, was still thinking about my mother when Huay said, “Do you think they’re looking for us? Our parents?”
I stared at her, thinking that she had read my thoughts before realizing that my question must have reminded her of her own parents. In the water, my reflection showed a smear of darkness on my cheekbone. It was days old, I barely felt it anymore; it only made me think of my father’s bleeding face. How my mother had held him as the soldier pulled me away. A bitterness gathered in my mouth and I had to spit. “I don’t know.”
“I just hope my sister is safe. She’s eleven, almost twelve.”
I tried to recall if there’d been a child in the truck but couldn’t. “Did they—they didn’t take her, did they?”
“Oh, no. Fortunately, no. I was watching from the truck to make sure. She’ll be home right now. My parents stopped her from going to school after the invasion. I’ll need to help with her schoolwork when I get back.”
I wanted to ask when she thought we would be let go but didn’t. “What’s her name?”
“Rong. Xiao Rong. She’s the youngest.” Over the next few months, I would find out that Huay used to carry her around when she was an infant and pretend that she was her own. That the two of them were inseparable even though they were four years apart in age. “If being here means that Xiao Rong is safe, I would do it. Gladly.” I said nothing in reply because I couldn’t imagine it—that kind of love, not yet.
The caretaker started shouting, a wordless hacking, as if she were coughing up her lungs. She rapped her cane on the floor until Mrs. Sato appeared.
“Let’s go, girls. Time to work,” Mrs. Sato called out, long fingers reaching for us as if to stroke our arms, but just missing us. “Remember, it goes into your wages at the end, Fujiko.” She tapped the wooden tag hung outside my door as I went into my room. In the black-and-white house, Huay was “Kiko” and Jeomsun, “Hinata.” But Mrs. Sato and her staff were the only ones who used these names. Few of the soldiers noticed these plaques and fewer still addressed me at all, but it helped. In the morning, Fujiko was the one who pressed her lips over rouge paper to put color into them, and then put on the clothes that were a little too big for her. Fujiko received the tickets and tucked each one under her mat before she lay down on it. At the end of the evening, I would run my thumb along the edge of the stack, measuring the thickness of it against my hand. Mrs. Sato would ask for them before locking us in every night, and I would hand mine over, telling myself that it was all adding up to something, at least—a few dollars that might make its way to my parents.
These were the lies that I told myself to get from day to day. I knew, even as I sat in my windowless room, that my parents would never receive anything from Mrs. Sato, that she painted this story in order to get us to comply. The involvement of money, just the very thought of it, made her captives more compliant; it made us guilty, somehow, in all that we had endured. None of us mentioned the word rape. No one had to.
Every day passed in the same way. I woke at about six thirty to the sound of the caretaker rising from her cot in the front room and bustling about the kitchen, clinking dishes before coming to us, opening my door just wide enough to shove a bowl through. With my rising came an ache in my chest, which would grow and grow as it got closer to opening time. But I ate through it, devouring my meagre portion of rice and making the lone slice of pickled radish, just a half moon, last three bites. At seven, we would be let into the bathroom. Huay, Jeomsun, and I would wait for each other, then take turns at the sink with the one toothbrush. While we cleaned up, we chatted softly, hoping not to be caught. In the meantime, Mrs. Sato would arrive, filling the house with her floral perfume, the sound of her voice rising over the dash of water, our whispers.
Once the front doors opened at nine, the soldiers would begin to arrive, laughing and chattering as if they were boys making a beeline for the sweet shop after school. I would hear the clink of coins as they jangled their change in their pockets before handing them over to Mrs. Sato for a ticket. Once they were in my room, they would drop the tickets—pink squares of paper—leaving me to scoop them up after for Mrs. Sato. One day during my first week, I had stood in the center of my room and thought of the only ticker-tape parade I’d seen as a child, how the ground had looked afterward, a mayhem of color. Then I knelt and picked up each pink slip, counting forty-two, so I could hand them over to Mrs. Sato before lights out. We would only be given another meal after the last man had left. Sometimes dinner would be withheld from me if the caretaker caught me talking to Jeomsun or Huay in the bathroom and I would have to go to sleep aching with hunger. At ten, Mrs. Sato would go around to close up, locking each of us in before finally putting the bolt on the front door, leaving us with the caretaker who spoke no Chinese. Outside, she would say nothing to her driver as she climbed up into the back of the rickshaw and sat down with all her weary weight, and I would hear the wheels creaking as they went down the driveway.
I dreaded Mrs. Sato’s departure, though I hated even more her arrival in the morning, the way a caged animal could be uneasy but hopeful around its keeper. I watched her the way I used to watch my mother, when I was five, six, wanting desperately her attention. Wanting to learn what crossed her, what would put me in her good graces. How I would look out for any warm gesture. A smile, sometimes. The way she pressed a twist of radish omelet into my bowl. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, the way all little girls do of their mothers no matter what they look like, until one day, they don’t. The realization making their stomachs drop with disappointment.
I almost wanted Mrs. Sato’s favor in the same way. The way baby animals always find a parent in the unlikeliest of places, latching on out of helplessness, from having been left without a choice. Her beauty though, was real. Even in her forties (or fifties, I couldn’t tell), her skin was buffed porcelain and her hair, richly black, wound up and away from her face with a silver hairpin. Some of the girls called her Mrs. Sato. Some called her Madam, but all of us saw her as a mother of sorts, troubling as it was. Most of us were little more than children after all, aged fourteen to twenty. I had never been away from my family, not even for a night. Mrs. Sato was the closest thing I had to a guardian, whether I liked it or not. Each evening, before she left, I would take care to arrange the tickets I’d collected that day and smile as I handed them over to her. She would always smile back and touch my arm to say good job, well done.
Her absence made me nervous, as if worse could happen while she was away. The first week I had followed the sound of her departure, all the while keenly aware of how near I was to freedom, I liked to think it was simply a matter of two locks and a gate, until I remembered the men, of course. The soldiers, that large compound housing them just a minute’s walk away. Their closeness as clear and present as a toothache. On each of those nights, I fell asleep hoping that I would be released the following day. I kept on hoping until it seemed like I was holding on to a shard of broken glass in my hand, and I was squeezing tight, tighter, in an effort not to let it slip away from me. After a month, I stopped. Stopped counting the days and weeks. There was a clock above the counter in the front room, which I could see if I went down the hall far enough. The clock served as my only accurate unit of time. The doctor’s visit, which happened every month, served to mark the passing of four to five weeks. Each of these were small lifetimes, periods during which some of the women I slept and suffered next to would disappear and never be seen again.
“I’m never going home,” Jeomsun said. There had been another visit from the doctor. At the end of the checkup, Mrs. Sato had come in with two soldiers, pointed out Quek Joo—a girl who had been brought in the same day Huay and I had—and made the soldiers bind her wrists. Then they led her out, pulling on her bind as if she were a dog. It happened so quickly that no one had time to react.
“What do you mean you’re never going home?” I said. “You never look as happy as when you talk about Busan. Or when you talk about mountains. There are no mountains here, you know?”
“Go home to the people who sold me in the first place?”
Huay looked incredulous. “But surely they didn’t know. No one could sell their own daughter to let them be—” She stopped, refusing to use the words she knew for what we were doing, what was being done to us.
“They sold me. That’s all I know. They got money from selling me then said that I was to go work in a factory. Liars. I’m never going back to them, even if I’m let go.”
“Is that what happened? They let Quek Joo go?” She had been ill, I recalled, bleeding on and off for three weeks and soaking through countless menstrual cloths, her dress, her mat. The doctor had found her unfit. “Contagious,” Jeomsun had overheard. Of what, we weren’t sure. After she was gone, Mrs. Sato had the caretaker take all her things out back to be burned.
“I don’t know. Perhaps. Sometimes they move women around the different houses in one region. Sometimes they send them away to another country, like I was. Sometimes they take the sick ones to the hospital. That’s what I heard. Except I don’t think the Japanese are going to waste medicine on us. I’ve seen so many women get taken away when they were ill, both here and back in Formosa. Only a few returned.”
“Then where do you think she was taken?” Huay whispered, her voice sharp with desperation.
“Maybe she was let go. Or maybe they left her in a clearing to die. I don’t know. I don’t know everything.” Jeomsun got up and left.
It had been a month. One long month that felt like years. I caught my reflection in the mirror one morning and started. A stranger’s face, I thought, aged and bitter, warped by the house and all that went on it in. I imagined going home and knocking on the door only to have my parents draw away from me and say, “This is not my daughter.” I could see my father shake his head, the violence in his movement making it look like shock, a spasm. They would look at me and see what had happened, what I had done. Then they would close the door in my face. I did not know anything—how we would get out of here or if we would at all—but I knew this.
Huay was still next to me and I grabbed her arm. “Promise me something. If we do get out, we’ll tell people we were working in a factory. We’ll tell them that we were ill-treated, that we were fed badly, but that all we did was work and put things together.” This, they might believe. Especially if it came from the two of us. Huay stared at me, and I knew I looked mad in my desperation to make her understand this. “Do you promise?”
She nodded. A hasty, single nod. “I promise.”
Over the course of the next few months, I learned what to do. What not to do. Mrs. Sato frequently urged me to look more welcoming. “Always so glum, Fujiko. Smile a little, smile!” And I did, especially if I was afraid. I would smile and then when he was done with me, I would smile at the next one, and the one after. There was always the threat of a fist or a boot. A pistol, which I would see, tucked into his belt, out of my reach. The only thing I could do was not resist even when the days seemed impossibly long, when it seemed that the stream of men coming through would never end. After the initial week, I served around thirty men a day. On weekends and festival days, the number went up. Forty, fifty. Both Mrs. Sato and Jeomsun had told us that we were to make sure each one of them wore protection. I tried once, pushing the soldier away and pointing at the condom that he had left on the floor next to the mat. He responded by getting his knife out and pressing it against the base of my throat, leaving a shallow cut that refused to heal for weeks, then a white scar after it did. With time I found that it was easier to avoid looking at them completely. I could control nothing else but what I thought about. Not the pain, which started between my legs, fanned up to my stomach and wrapped around my lower spine. Its presence was solid, constant. The more men I’d had to work for that day, the more likely it was that I got no sleep—the ache, dull during the day, shot spikes through me when I was trying to rest. This pain, I couldn’t control. But to keep alive, I made no noise, did nothing, and tried not to exist. Those were the only things I could do.
After my morning ablutions and my breakfast, I would lie down on the mat and wait. I would remain lying down much of the day except for trips to the bathroom, and mealtimes. While I was lying on the mat, I would think about how I used to hide amid the tall grass in the field on my way back home from the market. Especially when I was done earlier than normal. I would sit on the ground and then fall back into the soft grass. There were lalang, with their soft white tails, and weeds sprouting white balls of fur that the wind would take away, one by one. I would lie on the mat and pretend I was there again, in the late-afternoon heat, warm against the ground, watching as the clouds rolled past. I did not close my eyes. If I did, all I would hear was what was going on around me, and in the room on the other side of the thin plywood wall. So I kept them open, focusing on a water spot in the ceiling and reading shapes into it—a frog, a paper plane, the floral pattern on a blouse that I wore during the last mid-autumn festival back home.
I tried never to look at the soldiers if I could help it. The fact that most of the men seemed not to care at all, not even if I were ill or bleeding, made it easier for me to pretend that this wasn’t happening. Most of them entered the room and climbed on top of me without even shedding their boots. Some came in with their trousers already balled up in their hands and left as soon as they were done.
The ones who frightened me most were the men who pretended to treat me as if I were human, at least at first, on the surface. The first time it happened, I found myself looking at someone my age—he couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, with a face so nondescript, so familiar, he could have been a shopkeeper in our village or the son of a neighbor. I understood little Japanese but it was his voice, soft and reasonable, a sharp contrast to the barks and cries and spat commands, that drew me out of myself and made me look at him. He was clean-shaven and his eyes were warm, laughing. When he took his cap off, thick black hair fell forward, making him look even younger. He spoke again, and I listened this time.
“Konbanwa.” Good evening. He dipped his head and smiled, bringing pink into his cheeks. Then, fully-clothed, he sat down on the floor, a foot away from my mat.
It felt strange to smile back. The muscles around my mouth were tight, as if withered from the lack of use. I said good evening to him and sat up.
He pointed his finger toward his chest and said, “Takeo desu.”
“Fuji...” I started, before changing my mind. “Wang Di.”
“Wang Di,” he said, trying the words out in his mouth. Then he drew something out of his pocket and put it on the mat, in front of me. A rice ball, wrapped in wax paper. I ate it in a few bites, almost choking. When I finished, I realized that he was talking. He talked for a long time, making shapes in the air with his hands and nodding at me, even though it was clear I understood none of what he said. That day, he did nothing. He was one of the few who visited and did little but try to talk to me; he didn’t even try to satisfy himself on his own, as a few of them did. When his twenty minutes was up, he bowed again before rising and leaving the room, murmuring something in Japanese as he backed out. That night, I tried to guess what he might have been saying, couldn’t help but hope that he would be back to visit and would take me away from this place.
“What do you mean he didn’t touch you,” Huay said when I talked about Takeo the following day.
“He just sat there, with his legs crossed. Talked quite a bit. And then he left.” I referred neither to his name nor his gift of the rice ball. Any mention of food was almost worse than talking about home; it provoked jealousies the way lovers might in a world outside this one.
“You be careful of him. I’ve heard about men like that,” Jeomsun said, “they’re always bad news.”
I made myself stop thinking about Takeo and was surprised when he appeared again in my room two weeks later. There he was, that smile again, showing his white teeth. This time, he reached forward to touch my face. I drew back out of instinct but he didn’t mind. He sat back down and talked. When he leaned forward again minutes later, I hesitated only a little before letting myself be pushed back onto the mat. Nothing new, I thought, but for the first time, I looked up while he was on top of me, saw how he squeezed his eyes closed and wondered if, outside of this, back in my old world, I might have wanted to be with him. I was still thinking this, asking what this question meant of me when he finished, wiping himself with the edge of my dress. Before he left, he reached into his pocket and showed me a small white jewel—a sugar cube. I ate it quickly and was sorry when it was gone, the lingering sweetness a sharp ache on my tongue.
I thought about Takeo that night and the nights after that, blinking into the dark when I should have been asleep. I didn’t want to but the thoughts came to me, as seductive and inviting as any hot meal. Perhaps I could ask him to get me out of here. Perhaps he might want me for his own. I waited. It was perhaps a month before he returned. This time, when he came in, his eyes were far away. He undressed quickly then pushed me onto the mat. I put out an arm out of surprise more than anything else. This, he took as a slight of some sort, and shoved me back, pinning me to the mat when I was down. When I reacted with a yelp, he slapped me, a tight, matter-of-fact slap. Afterward, he put on that same smile, the smile that showed his teeth, was all politeness again when he said good-night and left.
I would have asked what happened if I could. But the answer was clear to me: that I was as unworthy as my parents had always suggested. That I would have been better born as a boy. Everything that I had done up until my capture—helping around the house, working at the market—was all to do with righting the wrong of my birth. Now that I was here, I wasn’t even nothing. Less than. It didn’t matter what Takeo thought of me—he was what I deserved. Someone like that. After Takeo, the men became faceless again with a few rare exceptions: one soldier who seemed to me only a boy. No older than fifteen. He had said nothing as he came into my room and I heard the familiar jangle of a belt being unbuckled, then silence. I lifted my head, looked. He was kneeling. I saw his face for just a moment—a child’s face, with milk fat still on his cheeks—before he put his head in his hands and wept. He stayed kneeling as he tried to compose himself. It took him fifteen minutes. A few more and the next soldier in line would start hammering on the door. I wanted to give him a handkerchief except I didn’t have one, could only sit up as he bowed again and again, whispering something that sounded apologetic. When he recovered, he dried his face on his sleeves, stood, buckled his belt, and left, shutting the door quietly behind him. His ticket lay on the floor where he’d knelt. I picked it up and put it away with the rest.
Trapped within the black-and-white house during the day, my mind wandered through the walls, between the bars of the gate, over the fields in the dark. Most nights, I would dream about waking up at home from a savage nightmare, relieved that it wasn’t real after all. Meng, still sleepy, would clutch my hand as I brought him to school just as light was starting to color the sky. On my way back to the village, there would be dew on the grass, shimmering like so many glass shards floating in midair. I would go to feed the hens and gather their eggs, still warm from the nest, then walk to the market, savoring the electricity of the place, the heat and noise. This is where I want to live, I would think. After dinner, my mother would sit by the kerosene lamp and I would listen to the pluck and weave of her sewing. Her movements set the rhythm for the evening, quieting the boys, making my father relax into his stiff, wooden chair. And then I would go to bed with my brothers next to me, kicking each other as they drifted off. I would wake up seven hours later in the dark, slide forward until my feet touched the floor, and then it was three steps across the bedroom, then six before I got into the kitchen where my mother was. There would be porridge simmering in the pot. I would ask if I should crack a single egg in it as a treat, and she would reply yes, okay.
The first time I had this dream, I woke up thinking that I was back home. There was a wide patch of saliva on my mat and I was getting ready to inch my way off the bed when I realized I was lying on a mat, at ground level. It took a moment before I remembered, before I noticed the smell of damp in my windowless room, the sting of disinfectant, felt the chill of the cement under my hands when I reached out to touch the floor. The blow of realizing where I was took me back to my first week. I thought about drinking all the liquid in the bottle of disinfectant nearby, but I couldn’t move for the weight on my body, my chest. Each time I had this dream, I minded less the moment of waking. After a while, it was all I had to look forward to—sleep.
It was just after the end of the rainy season when Mrs. Sato announced that we had to give a performance in honor of the Japanese emperor on 29 April. The whole of Japan would be celebrating and this extended to all its territories—even Syonan-to, she said, using the Japanese name that had been given to Singapore. I looked around the bathroom as she talked, at the gaunt faces of the other girls, and thought she must be blind or mad to ask this of us. Dengue fever had swept through the house for months, felling even the caretaker. But the caretaker received treatment and was given two weeks to recuperate elsewhere. During her convalescence, one girl—just twelve, the youngest I’d seen so far—had been found in her room, shaking and foaming at her mouth as the soldier she’d been servicing kicked at her, thinking it was all an act. Alone, Mrs. Sato had seemed frayed. The soldier’s loud fury, and her subsequent attempts to revive the girl, had drawn each of us out of our rooms to watch on helplessly as the girl flailed on the ground and then finally stopped, her face still and white. The rest of us only suffered the milder symptoms, a few days of bone-aching fever, a rash, then a long, slow period of recovery, unaided by the fact that our rations had diminished to a third of a bowl of rice for each of our two meals, and little else. What Mrs. Sato was after now, a dance, “a bit of cheer” as she called it, seemed impossible.
“It’s an important day so I need all of you to practice once a week for the next four weeks—I would give you more time if it weren’t so busy here but there you are,” Mrs. Sato said, her cheeks ruddy with warmth. “Hinata,” she said, pointing at Jeomsun, “you know what to do. Teach everyone a few songs, a dance. You’ve done this before.”
Jeomsun was no singer but she taught us the only song we needed to know: “Aikoku No Hana,” Patriotic Flowers, which she had learned in Formosa. We practiced every Monday, the quietest day after the rush of the weekend. It was only right before the emperor’s birthday that Mrs. Sato started talking about the stage, how it would have to be set up outside, close to the trees in case it rained. For seven days, it was all I could think about. The earth, the grass, and the trees. Outside.
When the day finally arrived, the six of us were led out by the caretaker and two guards toward a low, wooden platform close to the larger, main house, which was draped with Japanese flags for the occasion, the scarlet centers of them like so many bloodred suns against the white of the building. When we had gotten into place, one straight line in the middle of the stage, I felt—for the first time in months—the warmth on my face, arms, and legs. It had rained the night before and the air was rich with metal and earth. As we waited, the soldiers filling the rows of seats in front of us, a breeze swept through, loosening a few leaves from the rain tree above us. Green blades, small as fingernails, drifted upon the stage. One landed on Huay’s head and I picked it out and held it in my sweaty hand throughout the rest of the performance. The music started without warning, and I croaked along, letting Jeomsun and the record do most of the work. It didn’t matter, the soldiers were clapping before we’d even finished. We danced and sang (mouthed to) two more songs. The men sitting through it all quietly until we got to “Aikoku no hana,” the song making them spill over with pride so they got up, the mass of them swaying left and right. When the music was over, they roared “banzai” and toasted each other with the cups they held in their hands. A little way off, at the far corner of the stage, was Mrs. Sato. Her face was pink and glowing, as if she’d been running laps around the compound. It might have been the heat or the smoke of the men’s cigarettes, but I thought her eyes were filling, were bright with tears.
While we sang, I couldn’t help but think the gate was just a short sprint away. A few hundred meters at most. How long would it take me? I wondered. And how long would it take for the men to draw their guns? The same men who had visited me in my tiny room, spat on me, kicked me, and threatened me with their guns and knives. I stayed where I was between Huay and Jeomsun, filed back in the direction of the little black-and-white house. Once we were inside, the smell of the house alone—the rotted-fruit stink of crushed bedbugs; the deep, vinegary musk the men left behind—was enough to make me wish I’d run.
Celebrations for the emperor’s birthday also meant time off for the men, and so we worked long into the night. We were all surprised when Mrs. Sato came in with extra rice balls for breakfast the next morning.
“These have sour-plum centers, my daughter’s favorite. I made them myself,” she said as she handed me my portion. “The army was kind enough to share its extra rations with me yesterday,” she added under her breath, secretive, her cheeks flushed red. She watched me take a bite, smiled, and closed the door behind her.
“Mrs. Sato has been different, don’t you think? A little...softer,” I asked later, in the washroom.
I’d expected Jeomsun to pipe up with a precious nugget of information. She had been here the longest, had experience from her time in Formosa as well, but it was Huay who spoke.
“You mean yesterday? She was drunk. Most of the men were, didn’t you see? I could smell it even from where we were standing. My father, he used to...” She stopped, the shame of this confession burning her cheeks.
Even Jeomsun seemed surprised by this insight. “I know the men were drunk last night but Mrs. Sato...”
That many of the soldiers got drunk on weekends was no secret; they were usually the ones who spat on me after they were done, or who worked themselves into such a rage that they spent their time beating and cursing me. “I thought something was different but I meant today. This morning—”
“Well, she hides it and she’s not a bad drunk. Not like my father. He’s sneaky as well and can turn into the devil without anyone noticing him take a drink. Then the next morning he would be sick. But Mrs. Sato is one of those who wake up rosy-cheeked and refreshed, like nothing happened the night before.”
I couldn’t picture it. Except for one time when my mother was cajoled into taking a sip from my father’s glass at a wedding, I had never seen any woman take a drink of alcohol.
Jeomsun looked around her before she whispered, “I heard she was a brothel owner back in Japan.”
“Who said that? The caretaker?” I asked.
“No, the men. Sometimes they talk. But my Japanese isn’t very good. I might be mistaken. But this I know—she was married. Her husband got conscripted and killed in Korea. That’s why she hates me so much.” It was true. Mrs. Sato never missed an opportunity to pinch her or yell at her. “She’s soft with you though,” she continued, looking at me. “Maybe you look like someone she knew back home.”
I waved a hand at her, dismissing the thought.
Huay bit down on the side of her thumb and winced. “Do you really think she was a brothel owner?” I knew what she was thinking: If Mrs. Sato was a madam, what did this make us?
“I don’t think anyone else would be able to do this. Anyone who had a normal job before the war, I mean. Don’t be fooled by her. She smiles a lot but I’ve seen her slap a girl so hard she lost two of her teeth.”
“I didn’t know that. I thought she was nice.”
“Huay, you think everyone is nice.”
“I think... I don’t know. I think she’s just trying to survive.”
“Oh, you two. Tell that to the parents who’re never going to see their daughters again.” Jeomsun went into the cubicle, leaving us to steep in a hard silence and wish we hadn’t begun the conversation.
To change the subject, Huay asked, “What did you do? You know, back home?”
Back home. “Nothing much. Helped out by selling eggs and vegetables at the market.”
“Oh, I remember now. I saw you at the market a few times with Yan Ling. Is that her name? Or Yan Qing?”
“Yan Ling.” Her name caught in my throat as I said it.
“I was in school. You know, I’d just decided that I would go to teacher’s college straight after high school. I wanted to go back to teach in our village.”
I know the place, I wanted to tell her. “What would you teach?”
“Chinese and maths.”
I shook my head admiringly. “I can’t even write my name.”
For a second, I had the image of Auntie Tin writing my name in her notebook, then shook my head again, quicker this time, to rid myself of the matchmaker’s face, the feeling of falling that was about to overcome me, and watched as Huay leaned across me to write in the condensation on the mirror.
望 弟
“Wang—looking forward to, wishing, looking out at. Di—brother,” she said. Half smiling. As if she felt sorry for me.
That was when the image formed: there I was, waiting at the door for my brothers. Except I couldn’t remember what home looked like, couldn’t picture anything more detailed than a house made of wood. I wondered how they were doing. Imagined them going to school, playing football afterward in the fields, and in the evening, Yang pointing out the mistakes in Meng’s Chinese homework as my father watched on, unable to help. Not for the first time, I wondered how my life would have been if I had been one of them. A boy instead of who I was. What I was now. But perhaps this was all for them—as my name suggested. My life for two of theirs.
I could almost tell myself that I had become used to it. The fact of my new life. Except that this was not my life, couldn’t be anyone’s—not in the sense that this was an existence I (or anyone else in the house) could have chosen for myself. A life that involved each day being divided up into twenty to thirty-minute segments, during which my body was not my own and belonged to strangers, who seemed not to think I was human. Things were done to me that I would never speak about, could only deal with by believing that it was happening to someone else—“Fujiko,” my changeling. Unlike me, Fujiko deserved it, this other life, because she willingly pressed her lips over rouge paper to put color into them, and wore clothes that gave the men easy access. Fujiko received the tickets and tucked each one under her mat before she lay down on the mat. She was no one, and she was me.
Throughout the months I wished for death, until that too became something that I didn’t seem to deserve. I kept this thought to myself, harbored it feverishly—the way I used to dream of a better life when I was living at home with my family.
All the women in the house kept falling ill. Colds. Stomach bugs. Infections that none of us talked about because it was clear the men had passed them along to us. The three of us took care of each other in turns by saving any food we got from the soldiers and passing it along to the one who felt poorly. Other than this act of comradeship, each of us reacted to illnesses and our constant hunger in a different way. Jeomsun coped by talking about the food she would eat if she got the chance again. I coped by keeping quiet and gritting my teeth.
“Why don’t you say something,” Jeomsun once begged me. “What hurts?” And I—not knowing the proper words, only the ones used by men for cursing—could only point down.
Huay, usually the most sanguine of us, would turn somber and morbid. It seemed to be a cold, this time, though it was hard to tell. Eating little else but rice made us vulnerable to infections and stomach ailments. She had become more and more lethargic, lost all her appetite. Her forehead, when I felt it, was hot to the touch and she began to complain of aches and pains. A week after that, rashes appeared on her body—scatterings of brown spots flecking her pale skin. When I asked, she said they didn’t itch, that she didn’t mind them that much, not compared to everything else.
“Wang Di?” she whispered one night. Both of us had taken to pushing our mats right next to the dividing wall so we could talk sometimes. Even when we had nothing to say, hearing her breathe or mumble in her sleep gave me a small measure of comfort. “Am I dying?”
“Don’t talk like this. It’s just a cold. Jeomsun had it last week and now you have it... You’ll be fine.”
“I feel terrible. Maybe I should ask Mrs. Sato for the doctor.”
“No, don’t. You know what will happen if they get involved.”
“How do you know for sure? Maybe they were taken to hospital and let go afterward. Did you actually see it happen?”
“I believe what Jeomsun told us.” I didn’t need to add that they didn’t think much of feeding us only rice and thin soup for months, much less depriving us of penicillin during the outbreak of dengue fever. I didn’t dare to imagine if it might be true, what was rumored—that they wilfully discarded girls who were too far gone to work by bringing them to a copse and shooting them, leaving their bodies to rot in the undergrowth, or else by driving them to the center of town in broad daylight and abandoning them by the side of the road barefoot, barely dressed. Let their own people kill them with shame and loathing.
“It’s okay. Maybe it’s better if I’m dead. Maybe I deserve it for—”
“Stop talking and rest. You’ll feel better in a day or two, you’ll see.”
“I’ve always wanted to get married but I don’t think that’s going to happen, do you? I wanted three children. Two girls and a boy.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say or summon up the will to lie so I stayed silent.
“Wang Di, promise me that you’ll tell my family if I die in here... Tell them that I miss them. Promise me.”
“Don’t talk like that. Rest. Shh.” If not for the wooden partition between us I would have started smoothing her hair the way my mother used to smooth mine when I was little and ill. Her fever broke the day after and she returned to herself, her smile, her quiet rectitude. It was as if she had never said any of it.