In the long months that followed, I watched as the rashes on Huay’s body turned to sores, then healed to form faded marks up and down her limbs. She seemed to get better for a week or so before lapsing again into episodes of fever and sickness. This cycle repeated itself until my dismay at her illness turned to dread and a frustration that I kept to myself, the thought that she must be doing something wrong, that she wasn’t trying hard enough to recover. Jeomsun and I didn’t talk about it, but when her hair started falling out we took to fashioning it every morning to disguise the thinnest spots on her head. Each time her fever returned we saved what we could from our meals, or kept the morsels a few of the kinder soldiers occasionally brought so we could bring them to her in the mornings. These gifts Huay took with a gratitude that bordered on shame. When they cut our rations again (giving us soup with broken grains stirred through at night, down from a half bowl of rice) and we had to stop hoarding food for her, I wanted to apologize but left it. There was nothing to explain. Among the three of us was a silent understanding about how we should take care of each other: the three of us before the rest of the other women, and then, within that, each of us before the other.
The doctor’s visits were another source of worry. I was certain Huay would be declared unfit and taken away sooner or later, but he seemed not to see or care too much. Then a small triumph. “Did you hear them fighting? The doctor told Mrs. Sato to give us more food. Said the soldiers weren’t happy with the state of us. Mrs. Sato said she couldn’t do anything about it—she said the food was all going to the soldiers fighting overseas and that she couldn’t afford to buy things from the black market. They went on and on for half an hour like that, at least.”
I thought about the bottles of sake that Mrs. Sato had taken to drinking in the evening, in plain view of anyone who chanced to be in the front room. Couldn’t afford it? “So what happened in the end? What did they decide?”
“I don’t know. They went outside to finish talking. I couldn’t hear the rest.”
It became clear though, how their argument had ended—along with the soup at night, the caretaker gave each of us a half bowl of dirty rice, strewn with grit and chaff, but edible. The change was conspicuous. For the first time in months, my stomach did not grind at night and sleep came easily. I woke up still hungry, but not desperate. And though we didn’t have the chance to talk, not that morning, Jeomsun and I exchanged a look as we passed each other in the hallway, what her eyes said was clear: it’s fine now—we’re going to be okay.
The act of dispensing this largesse (forced as it might have been) seemed to suffuse Mrs. Sato with a looseness and cheer she didn’t possess before. More and more, she would saunter in midmorning, displacing the caretaker, who’d had to step in to count out change and dispense condoms in her absence. On these days, Mrs. Sato would become rowdier as the day wore on. We all heard her. Late at night when the men had left, she would start singing to herself until the rickshaw arrived to take her away.
On New Year’s Day, she brought in a record player and sang along to the songs as the men goaded her on while waiting for their turn. She stayed past the close of the doors at ten, talking to the caretaker, her speech getting slow and slurred so I knew she was drinking. Then, a few minutes of silence. I thought her gone when my door unlocked and the caretaker’s face appeared, lit by the orange glow of a kerosene lamp.
“She wants you,” she said—the first words of Mandarin I’d ever heard her speak.
Rubbing my eyes, I got up and followed her down the hallway, into the kitchen. Mrs. Sato was slumped over the table, a small bottle of sake in front of her. Her makeup had slid off from the heat of the day and her normally perfect updo was slightly askew. For the first time, there was a softness in her face, the beginnings of a few lines on her forehead.
“Ah, Fujiko! Come here, sit.” She gestured to a chair next to her. Once I was seated, she reached out and I flinched, expecting a slap. But no, she put her hand over mine in a conspiratorial grip. “How old are you? I never asked.”
Her hand was hot on mine and her thumbnail, round-tipped and pink, polished to a shine. My first instinct was to pull away but what was one more touch? Just one more, after the hundreds, thousands of others, and from a woman not much older than my mother? “I’m eighteen,” I said.
But she had moved on. Was talking about something else. Her daughter. “She’s your age. She wanted to be a nurse but I forbade her to because that might mean they’ll want to ship her off...close to a war zone. She’s such a good person. Here, try this,” she said, pouring a splash of alcohol in a cup and watching as I took a cautious sip. There was a smell of sweet almonds and when I swallowed, the heat of it bit through my throat. “Everyone should know how to drink sake, even women. Not like that. You’ve got to inhale it first. There you go. And then a small taste... I taught my daughter how to but she’s not really one for drinking.” She poured out the last of it into her cup and set the bottle down so hard I thought it would crack.
“Ayame was supposed to get married soon but we’re waiting until I get back. I want to meet the suitors myself, see what their families are like. Because you know. Men.” She stopped here and shook her head. Had she forgotten who I was or what I was doing there? There was a long pause before she continued. “The men we see every day, they do their soldiers’ duty, their shouting and killing, glorifying our country and saving others, like yours, from the white man’s rule. Back home, they celebrate what their sons and fathers are doing. Even the dead go back heroes. But the women?” Here, her face turned bitter. A warped mask. “I did my duty for a while, back home. Just like you’re doing. I did it until I got the chance to leave. Help set up a place to provide some comfort to the soldiers. It drives a man wild, do you know, being so far away from home like this...”
I might have made a sound like a yes or some other noise but it didn’t matter, she didn’t seem to be listening.
“When this is over. When everything is as it should be, I won’t go home to a hero’s welcome. I am just a woman. But for now, in this place, I can save someone or I can send another away to die. I am as good as a man. Even better, sometimes I am god.”
“What happened last night? Was it you the caretaker came for? I had the fright of my life—I thought they were taking one of you away,” said Jeomsun the next morning, as she washed out a pile of condoms for reuse.
“No, it was just Mrs. Sato. She wanted to... She was drunk.”
“I heard her talking. What did she say?”
I thought about repeating everything she’d said to me but in the light of day, in the filth of the bathroom and its dank closeness, none of it seemed real. Did it happen? “She wasn’t making much sense. Just rambling, mostly, about the men and war and... I don’t know.”
“Was I right then? Did she own a brothel?”
I winced at the word. Brothel. “She might have even been a... You know. A working girl. When she was young.”
It was at this moment that Huay turned around. She’d been staring at the air vent high up on the wall. I thought she’d been listening but it was clear from her face, when I saw it, that she’d been elsewhere. “You look familiar,” she said to me. “Maybe you can tell me when we can go home. I don’t like it here. I think I’d like to go home now.”
Jeomsun laughed, more out of surprise than anything else. A coarse sound like a gasp. Huay’s face stayed questioning, waiting for an answer.
She must have a fever, I thought, and put my palm on her forehead, ignoring her when she squirmed. But her skin was cool to the touch. “What do you mean? Do you...do you know my name?”
“Of course I do. It’s...” She smiled, then faltered, flicking her eyes left and right, the fear in them clear and infectious.
I leaned into her. “I’m Wang Di. This is Jeomsun. You’re here with us, in the black-and-white house. You’re not going home. Not today.” It didn’t help. I could see her panic building up into wide-eyed alarm. “It’s okay, Huay. We’re here now but we take care of each other. See? We’re your friends.” I repeated this and nodded at her. By and by she started nodding along with me, a trusting child.
“Okay, okay.” She put her hand to her head as if it were hurting her. “I think I’m just a little tired. I keep seeing double... Maybe my eyes are going bad.” She rubbed them, blinking like a just-woken child. But of course, at little more than seventeen, she was almost a child.
That morning, she screamed. I heard her plainly, telling someone to get off of her. There was the sound of a man’s voice before Mrs. Sato’s voice drowned out everyone else. Then the slam of Huay’s door, shutting. When the soldier in my room was done, I crept to the wall.
“Huay, don’t scream. And you mustn’t fight them or they’ll hurt you. Do you hear me?”
There was no reply.
I heard her crying that night, the way she used to during our first nights here. She cried for a long time before I tapped on the thin wooden partition between us and asked if she was okay. No answer, then: “How long have we been here?”
“Almost two years.”
“When can we go home? How long do we have to do this?”
“I don’t know.” Then, sensing her dismay (as well as mine), “Not much longer. We just have to be patient.”
Huay alternated between being confused or looking so worn she seemed to be sleeping on her feet in the bathroom. She complained of aches—mostly in her head and neck—pain that went away and returned, seemingly without cause. It wasn’t long after the monsoon season that Mrs. Sato announced the upcoming celebrations for the emperor’s birthday once more. This time, the prospect of being outdoors was unmatched by my worry about what the physical exertion might do to Huay or what the lines of men afterward would take out of all of us. I was trying to think about what we could do, how much food we could possibly spare for Huay, when Jeomsun touched my elbow and pointed at her, coming out from the shower—her rash, which we’d thought long gone, had returned and erupted in red blotches all over her back.
“I remember it now, where I saw a rash like that,” she said, pulling me away so Huay couldn’t hear her. “It’s not the lack of food. We’re thin and sickly too, but Huay—what she has is something else. I’ve seen it before, in other girls back in Formosa but never this bad...”
“I don’t understand. Did they have the same illness? What is it?”
“It looks the same. Something they caught from the soldiers. The doctors don’t always notice because the symptoms go away for a while before returning. It was going around in Formosa—I was one of the few who didn’t get infected. At least that I know of.”
“Why didn’t you say something before?”
“I wasn’t sure. Thought maybe it was something else. And then it went away. I didn’t want to worry anyone, least of all her.” She rubbed the scar on her cheek until she saw me watching. “And what could we have done anyway? Ask for treatment?”
I thought about Mrs. Sato, who had turned up at the usual time the day after our late-night conversation, her face a perfect mask. I had expected an acknowledgment of some sort, a nod perhaps, but she scarcely glanced up when I passed her in the hallway and seemed to avoid looking at me at all if she could help it. It was as if that conversation had never taken place. It couldn’t hurt to ask, I thought, and began looking to see if I could catch her on her own. But she never seemed to be alone. Especially not when the house was struggling to accommodate the increase in the number of visitors—soldiers shipped in from around the region, smelling of rain and mud and rot. We worked longer hours, sometimes seeing men past midnight. A pain that I had never thought possible lodged itself into my body so intently that I couldn’t remember a time I had been without it. I started to bleed continuously, something that hadn’t happened since my first week.
Then the day arrived. My limbs were heavy with dread when the caretaker escorted us outdoors. The morning passed—hot and breezeless—in a blur of song and clapping. And then it was over, and it came time for the men. The lines of them impatient and never-ending. Yet Huay seemed unaware of what was to come, even turned her face up to the sun when we were onstage. She smiled at me after the last song and I thought about saying something then, something quick to warn her, but before I could, the caretaker was lining us up and pushing us into our rooms.
It was sometime in the afternoon when I heard Huay, pleading.
“Please, please. No more—” A scuffling sound, her feet on the floor. Then a wet thud and a man’s shout. There was the crash of her door opening. More shouts. Words I couldn’t make out. Then a soft, surprised cry before something collided into the plywood wall between us, making a crack like the sound of a tree being split apart.
“Wait! Please!” she cried. More thuds, sustained. I counted five before I realized what it was—boots meeting flesh.
When it was over, someone called out. The same male voice: “Sato-san? Sato-san?” Curt, bouncing off the walls in the corridor. Nothing for minutes. Only the sound of my own breath and heart in my ears. When the soldier in my room was done, I got up and peered around my door, pushing past several people to go out.
“Huay?” I nudged her door open. She was lying on her side, halfway off the tatami mat, her breaths coming shallow and quick. “Huay?”
“Fujiko! Into your room.” Mrs. Sato pulled me away from the doorway. “At once!”
For what seemed like hours, I tried to listen out for Huay even while the men passed through, kept quiet by lying still while the men went about their business. Some time passed before I heard footsteps advancing down the corridor. The hinge whined as they opened her door and I heard a metallic click as the men talked. Then two pops, quick and deafening. I had to put my hand over my mouth to keep my heart from leaping out. Someone else in the house screamed, I couldn’t tell who. When the men left, their footsteps were unhurried. The rest of the day was a blur. I was only let out after the last of the men were gone, and only to the bathroom.
The next morning, I woke to the smell of iron in the air so thick I could almost taste metal on my tongue. Then I remembered: Huay. Her door was locked when I tried it. I hadn’t been sure before but the moment I saw Jeomsun at the sink, her eyes red, I knew that Huay was dead.
“They shot her?” I said, wanting to hear the words, even if they were my own. Someone had to say it. “They shot her.”
After breakfast, Mrs. Sato appeared at my door. “Get rid of her things.” When I didn’t move, she bent to look at me in the face. “Kiko tried to attack one of the men and escape. You need to know that this is what’s going to happen if you try to do the same. You still have friends here, I know, so don’t try anything. No one wants to see you hurt. Kiko was foolish. Learn from her mistake.” Her eyes were soft and she lingered for a beat, as if she wanted to say something more but she rose and arranged her skirt around her legs as she walked away.
Huay. Her name is Huay, I thought to myself.
I pushed myself up to stand and stumbled into the corridor. There, on the left, was Huay’s room. Her door was wide open, and I walked in. It was only then, standing there alone, that I saw that Huay had filled the little space around her tatami mat with wrappers and paper bags. All from the kitchen or from the men who went in to her, bearing gifts. Most of the bags were filled with oiled leaves and waxed paper, both used for serving or transporting food. This was all that was left of her, my last link to home. The remainders of her. A pang when I remembered how, at the beginning, I’d wanted her gone so I wouldn’t have to worry about her telling if we returned home. Now I had what I wanted. Witch, I spat. My body felt heavy and I sat down then. Rifled through the odds and ends until I found I couldn’t stop. I went through every one of them until I unearthed a single rice ball still wrapped in a layer of waxed paper and ate it without hesitation. In another, I found a coin which I put in my pocket. As I did this, going through and crushing all the bags and papers into a sackcloth bag, I ignored the blot in the center of the room—a large, imperfect oval—until the caretaker came in and dropped a bucket close to me. There were a few strips of cloth in it, floating in the water like pale sea creatures. She pointed at the stain on the cement floor and left. Most of the blood had dried and it was so dark it looked like mud. The darkness had stained the mat, the black of it eating away at the rattan like a disease. I rolled up the mat, poured water on the floor and fell to my knees. My tears fell straight onto the floor as I scrubbed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I scrubbed until most of her blood was gone. A ghost of it lingered on, as if she had seeped into the floor overnight. I worked on the patch until Mrs. Sato came to get me, pulling me up by my shoulders and saying that the men were lining up, that I needed to start work.
“Her poor mother. Her parents. I wonder if they will ever find out. I’m going to tell. Tell everyone what happened.” Jeomsun’s voice was trembling with a cold anger that I couldn’t muster up. I didn’t want to talk about what had happened. Talking never helped and it certainly wouldn’t help Huay now, I thought as she continued. “I’m going to tell everyone.”
I felt tears coming up, felt myself start to shake with the effort of containing them. “Who’s going to listen? Who are you going to tell?”
“I—Someone. Anyone.”
“Who’s going to listen?” I repeated.
This time Jeomsun didn’t reply. Her silence was unbearable and I wanted to confess about the food I had stolen from Huay’s room. The coin that was hidden underneath my tatami. Instead I said, “At least she doesn’t have to be here anymore.” I bit the side of my tongue as soon as the words were out of my mouth. How scared she must have been. How desperate. I felt this same desperation rising in my chest, stewing into madness. And I let it out now, gave it voice. “Maybe. Maybe she’s just—maybe they took her away. I don’t know. Maybe she’s not dead. Did you see her body? I didn’t. There was blood. But not a lot of it. Just a puddle. I could easily spare that amount of blood. It’s just blood. Maybe she’s at the hospital. Did anyone see her body? Anyone?”
I swiveled on my heels. Heaving. All the women were staring at me, mouths agape, from the other end of the bathroom. They looked so far away. Only Jeomsun was close. I felt her breath on my ear. Her lips pressing into my forehead. She said something unintelligible. Not Chinese. And then my name, “Wang Di, Wang Di,” as if trying to remind me who I was. Bringing me back to myself.
“No. Don’t call me that. My name is Fujiko.” I was close to retching and bent over the sink. The cool of the porcelain. The grip of Jeomsun’s hands on my shoulders. My body was light, as if the ground had been pulled from underneath me and my feet were treading air. I felt nothing much else for a long time after that.
As each month passed, the rations diminished. Dinner was once again reduced to a bowl of soup and grain, and the work I was subjected to left more and more changes on my body, each one more noticeable than the one before. The color of my skin washed out and turned gray, scaly. This was two months after Huay’s death. Patches of sores, which started out as bug bites and widened into raised welts that refused to go away. Three months. My pelvic bone jutting like the edge of a rock. Half a year. My body kept time and I watched it as if observing a strange life form. This isn’t me, I thought. Even Jeomsun was starting to fade away. She spoke less and the light in her eyes—that quietly burning anger—had all but extinguished. The same thing happened to the other girls, their color and skin and flesh withering away into pale shadows, until they were little more than a collection of cuts and bones and bruises, badly healed. This, I thought, this is how we’re going to disappear.
Many times, I dreamed about breaking away and running into the woods at night. I would hide during the day and trek at night toward the shore. There, I would be able to find someone, a fisherman, or a raft to help bring me away from the island and onto the Malay peninsula. Or even farther north of that. This was where my daydreams ended each time. I had no money to pay my way. I might end up trekking circles and dying of hunger. Even if I managed to avoid recapture and decided to remain in Singapore instead, what then? I could never go home, not anymore. With what I had done and what I was now used to. My parents would never have me back. I imagined them turning away or drowning me the way they used to drown strayed women, forcing them into pig baskets meant for taking the animals to slaughter, and then dropping them into a deep body of water. Even if I made it and arrived at a place where no one knew me, everyone would see—from the clothes that I had on, the way I looked—where I had been for the last few years. What I was.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Huay, wondering what it must have been like to feel the same fear of her first day again and again. How painful her bewilderment was to Jeomsun and me, not just because of her certain, inevitable doom, but because of the reminder it served us, how we had come into this place. How the months and years had chipped away our horror, and what we had to get used to to survive. I thought about the objects she had collected in her room and tried to imagine if they provided some small comfort, or a modicum of control over her life, the little life left to us in the dark of the night and early morning. Perhaps the walls—blank but for the little dashes of blood and fluid, the dark Vs of water that ran down from the ceiling whenever there was a heavy storm—had simply been driving her mad. The way they were driving me mad. Eventually, like Huay, I started collecting things, things that I believed to be of value or potential use: bits of string; bottle caps; paper wrappers from candy some soldier had given me; empty tins that the cook left in a corner of the kitchen after preparing dinner; the faded thins of paper that I colored my lips and cheeks with, all the red rubbed out of them. I assembled them along the walls, under my mat, under the extra dress in the corner of the room. I was saving them up, for what, I didn’t know. But I thought it might keep me safe somehow, that this little store of odds and ends would be useful one day—nothing would go to waste.