Читать книгу Sad Peninsula - Mark Sampson - Страница 9

Through years that fell like rain to join the flow of the Han River, she would learn that the only thing that kept her alive was the value her mother had instilled in her, the value of knowledge. Her umma had taught her, as early as the girl was old enough to absorb it, that it was better to know things than to not know them. Even girls need to know things, her mother would say when tucking her in at night, whispering it so that the girl’s father wouldn’t hear. Learn everything you can, my little crane. Even the hard things. Never be afraid of wisdom. And whenever she uttered these words, her mother called the girl by her true name and never the one her Japanese teachers had given her.

In the years that fell like rain, the girl would learn just how much her mother had known about what was happening to their country, the fate that awaited the young girls in it, and learn that it was this knowledge that eventually pierced her mother’s heart and killed her. These thoughts always brought the girl back to the Han River, its churning acceptance of the rain that fell like years. She would ponder that Korean word that shared the river’s name, shared the name of their people, their language. Han. Which meant, among many other things, the long, constricting accumulation of a lifetime of sorrow.

Despite her father’s fussing, the girl was allowed to go to school. This was not what he wanted when he brought his family of six from their ancestral farm to the growing capital of Seoul. That was in 1934, a year after the girl’s baby sister had been born. In the city, her father expected the boys, the two oldest, to study briefly before becoming labourers, and the girls, the two youngest, to stay home and help their mother in the small house that the Imperial government had allowed them. His plans were precarious at best, and the girl watched as her mother toppled them with a kind of quiet sedition, a restrained glee.

“She is going to study,” her mother said one day in their dark kitchen, chopping vegetables for a stew.

“The hell she is,” her father retaliated from the washtub, where he stood scrubbing the day’s grease off his hands from his new job in a munitions factory. The girl watched them argue while spooning mashed rice into her baby’s sister’s mouth. “No daughter of mine will be caught in a school,” she heard her father say.

“There’s a small academy for girls near the police station. I found it on my way to market. I’ve already paid the tuition. I’ve already arranged it. She is going to study. Next year.”

“ Aigo! To what end?” her father snarled. “How will this help us? To have our daughter at a desk all day, learning to read and speak Japanese? How will this help you? You can barely keep up with your housework as it is. Aigo!”

“You don’t know what the future will hold, my friend,” the girl’s mother said, dropping radishes into a dented pot of boiling water. “You can’t say how it might help us to have at least one of our children properly educated.”

“Must everything change?” her father sighed as he dried his hands and then collapsed into his flimsy wicker chair near the door. To the little girl’s eyes, his now-clean hands looked weak and shrivelled as they fell limp in his lap, like two dead birds. He spoke almost to himself. “They have taken my fields, forced us to live in this city with less land than a dog. And now girls — girls — going to school. Must everything change?”

“Yes, it must,” her mother replied, putting the lid on the pot and wiping radish juice off the knife with a rag. “I cannot watch her twenty-four hours a day. And I will not bear the thought of her wandering these streets unsupervised. I will not bear it.” The girl watched as worry fell over her mother’s face then, a shifting in the han that flowed through her. “She is going to school. She’ll be safer there.”

And the little girl felt that tickle in her mind, the ache for wisdom. “Safer from what?” she asked from the table. But to her surprise, her mother would not answer.

So here was the little girl in school, grappling with that ache, these questions, this sense of entitlement instilled deep within her. She perhaps learned more slowly than the other girls that some questions were okay to ask, questions like when? and where? and how much? — but others, like why?, were not. “Why” seemed off limits; “why” was a waste of time and reached for answers that existed beyond the outskirts of the teachers’ patience. Questions like: Why can’t I eat rice while sitting at my desk? Why must I ask before I can go to the bathroom? But also: Why do we stand each day at the beginning of class to sing the Kimigayo, the Japanese national anthem? Why is there a picture of Emperor Hirohito on the wall above the blackboard? Why must we bow to it several times when we finish singing? And why have you given me a Japanese name — Meiko? I hate this name. It sounds so babyish. This is not the name my mother calls me. It alarmed the girl how forcefully her teachers could quash those plaintive whys, cut them off before they were even all the way out of her mouth.

Despite these mysterious dead ends, the little girl did enjoy studying. Her first year was her favourite because they got to learn how to read and write Hangul — the Korean language that her family spoke in the privacy of their home. It enraptured Meiko to watch her tiny hand convert words and phrases into script, a multitude of tiny circles and tents and perpendicular dashes. Doing it correctly, getting full marks on her workbook, filled Meiko with greedy pride. And yet, in Grade Two, things inexplicably changed. All of a sudden, the girls were not allowed to write or even speak Korean. If one of them was caught doing so, the teacher would make her stand in the corner under the picture of Hirohito and hold a metal pail heavy with pebbles over her head. “You’re not babies anymore,” the teacher would tell the rest of the class while the offending girl, head down, struggled in the corner to keep the pail upright. “It’s time to leave your childish habits behind.”

So every class became in some way about Japan. The girls learned to read and write its language. In geography class, they memorized Japan’s islands and major cities. They learned about the bodies of water surrounding the nation, including the one that led to its colony of Korea, the very colony they lived on, but the geography for which they were taught nothing. By Grade Four, the girls began learning Japanese history. They were told of how Japan had generously taken over the “administration” of the Korean peninsula in 1910 with the idea of leading its illiterate peasants toward an overdue modernization. This, they were taught, was part of an even grander initiative that Japan, in its infinite graciousness, had taken upon itself throughout the wider region, a program called “the Co-prosperity Sphere in Asia.” This involved Japan overseeing the administration of less-evolved nations all around the Pacific Rim (the teacher pointed to these countries on her map), to insulate and expand the Oriental way of life in the face of growing influences from the West. The teacher spoke as if this were her nation’s greatest accomplishment, its gift to the world. Meiko raised a hand. If the Co-prosperity Sphere was so great, then why had all-out war erupted between Japan and China the previous year? (Meiko had, after all, overheard her parents arguing about it: the conflict had increased her father’s hours at the munitions plant and also threw into doubt the future of Meiko’s two older brothers.) The young teacher, usually a tight drum of calm, grew instantly enraged by these questions. She stomped over and began screaming into Meiko’s face in a flurry of Japanese that came too fast to follow. She then struck Meiko around the head with her pointing stick, dragged her by the collar of her dress to the corner, filled the pail with a double helping of pebbles and made her hold it over her shoulders for the remainder of the class.

Despite these cruelties, Meiko could not deny how much she enjoyed being smart. She loved to pore over a text, to memorize fascinating facts and fill out answers in her workbook, even if they were all in Japanese. The knowledge she gained gave her an advantage over the children in her neighbourhood who did not get to go to school: she could read the growing number of Japanese street signs and understand the stories that appeared in the free newspapers on every corner. If she and her friends were playing outside and were approached by the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, Meiko could speak to the officers in stilted but serviceable Japanese. The police often accused them of being spies, which struck Meiko as silly. “No,” she would tell them, “we’re just little kids playing innocent games. No spies here.”

But the more Meiko studied, the more it infuriated her father. Sometimes he came home at night to find her on the floor, her papers spread in a halo around her textbook. He’d march over to grab a fistful of them at random and head toward the kitchen stove. Meiko would chase after him in tears, upset that he had disrupted the careful system of memorization that she had set up for herself. He would fend her off with one hand while stuffing her papers into the stove with the other. When finished, he’d turn to her and yell, “Girls who study become foxes! Why don’t you get a job, you slut?”

Getting jobs was exactly what had happened with her two older brothers that year, 1938, when they were fifteen and thirteen respectively. As planned, the boys dropped out of school after acquiring a bare minimum of education. They took jobs as delivery boys for a local Japanese restaurant. Their total combined income was less than half of what their father made at the plant, but the family was desperate for money and the boys were forced to work every day. It was also that year that the plant announced a pay cut for all Korean workers despite the growing war in China. This left Meiko’s father in a constant state of fury. He would explode at the children over the simplest of trifles, like if they raised their rice bowls a fraction of an inch off the table while eating. Whenever these outbursts happened, Meiko and the boys would mutter at each other in Japanese about their father’s bizarre behaviour. This would send him into another long rant about how the Japanese had infiltrated every aspect of their household, to the point where children could mock a father in a language he did not understand.

Meanwhile at school, Meiko’s teachers had begun grooming the girls to join a new organization that Japan had introduced, called the Jungshindae — Voluntarily Committing Body Corp for Labor. The teachers said that this was the highest calling for every girl in the Empire, to give her body and spirit over to Emperor Hirohito and his many worthy causes. In a few years, they would be called up into good-paying jobs as teachers and nurses and entertainers, contributing whatever they could to Japan’s military success in the region. Meiko rushed home to explain the Jungshindae to her mother, expecting her to share in Meiko’s excitement. Instead, her mother exploded into anger and broke a rice bowl on the lip of her washing tub. “Don’t listen to them!” she shouted. “They will not have you. Do you hear me? I will pull you out of that school and lock you in the cellar before I let them own you!”

But every day Meiko would come home praising some new aspect of the Jungshindae. When her baby sister, who was now six years old, heard these things she began wanting to go to school herself, but her mother would not allow it. “Why does she get study and I don’t?” the youngest daughter asked. “I wish to learn things, too.”

“Girls who read books become sluts!” their father belched by rote from his wicker chair.

Her mother squatted down to be eye level with the girl. “You will stay home with me, little one. We can’t afford to have two girls in school. I will teach you things here.”

Meiko watched this with a shake of her head. “Umma, you should let her study. Our teachers have promised us good-paying jobs with the Jungshindae. In a few years, we’ll be able to support both you and father.”

Her mother’s eyes filled with an emotion Meiko could not understand. “Don’t listen to them,” she wept. “My wise little crane, do not listen to them. And you are to come straight home after school — every day. Do not linger on the streets with your friends. Do you hear me?”

The girls could not know what their mother knew, nor could their father. It took being a housewife, going to markets every day, talking to other women, to learn what she had come to know: that young girls in their teens had begun disappearing from the neighbourhood. It became a common sight to see a mother, not much older than Meiko’s, splayed out on the curb outside her house in anguish, her fists pounding her face as she screamed incoherently at the sky. The only words that Meiko’s mother could make out were, “My daughter! My daughter! Mydaughtermydaughtermydaughter! Theyhavetakenmydaughterawayfromme!”

In early 1941, the boys both received draft notices from the Teishintai — the Japanese Volunteer Corps for Men. The government was mobilizing the entire country for war and this included conscripting Korean boys as young as fifteen into the Imperial army. When the draft notices arrived, Meiko’s mother burst into wails and collapsed onto the floor in front of her washtub. Within a couple of weeks, the boys were sent to the city of Daegu for six weeks of basic training before getting shipped off to the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Meiko’s mother was inconsolable. Her husband lamely brought up the boys’ lost income in his first attempt to comfort her, as if this were partly the source of her grief. “Are you insane!” she wept as she shoved his arms away. “Don’t you realize that your sons are as good as dead? As good as dead! Their lives mean nothing to the Japanese. They will put them right up … up on … on the front lines …” Meiko and her baby sister watched as their mother choked on this knowledge as if it were poison. Over days and weeks, Meiko’s father would try different ways to comfort his wife, and grew frustrated at his inability to do so. This precipitated even more arguments between them. Their fights raged for hours in the evenings, growing so intense that Meiko and her sister had to hide away from them in the small bedroom they shared.

It was on a morning during the height of these battles that Meiko, now thirteen years old, discovered the sticky marks of blood that had arrived overnight in her underpants. She found them while dressing for school. She did have an inkling about these blood marks, suspecting that they were not uncommon for a woman. She sometimes found faint droplets of crimson left behind in the squat toilet if she used the bathroom immediately after her mother. But still, Meiko convinced herself that this blood was a dire omen of illness, and to share this news would only add to her mother’s stress. She found a rag to place between her legs before dressing and hoped the bleeding would go away. Yet the discharge got worse the next day and worse still the day after, until Meiko had to discreetly drag her mother into the bathroom, close the door and show her what was happening.

At first, a blush of pride swept over her umma. “Oh my wise little crane, this just means you are becoming a woman,” she said, taking the girl’s face into her hands. “I should have mentioned something to you long before this.” She went on to explain how the girl should expect a number of days’ bleeding each month, and when it came she was to place a special kind of cloth in her underpants to catch the flow. But no sooner had her mother finished this instruction than a shadow darkened her face, as if a delayed reaction, an ominous and barely spoken secret, began sinking through her like a stone through water. “My sweet child,” she said, and began weeping. “We must figure out … what we’re going to do about this …”

Do about what? Meiko thought. About the blood? Or about me becoming a woman?

Meiko soon became the focal point of her parents’ arguments. Her father was adamant that she now leave school to get a job. The plant had yet again cut his wages, and even with the boys off at war he still struggled to feed his wife and two remaining children. “She could become a cleaner or errand girl,” he said. “Or she could use her Japanese to work in an office somewhere. That would bring in some money.”

“Absolutely not,” her mother said. “We must find a matchmaker and get her a husband. Now that she is a woman.” Meiko’s mother knew that other families were rushing their teenaged daughters into a chungmae — an arranged marriage. Girls not much older than Meiko were getting paired up with neighbourhood widowers who were often twice or three times their age. Meiko’s father scoffed. “Marriage? So soon? She’s only thirteen. Besides, who in this neighbourhood could afford an acceptable dowry for a girl with seven years of schooling and good Japanese?”

On a day during the peak of this bickering, Meiko spoke up for herself. “I don’t want a chungmae, and I don’t want a job right now,” she blurted from her ring of homework on the floor, interrupting her parents in mid fight. She climbed to her feet to face them. “I want to stay in school until I’m eighteen and then join the Jungshindae. To support you and father. And then, when the war is over, I want to find a yonae.” They both stopped to stare at her, nearly burst into laughter at Meiko’s use of that word: yonae, a love match.

“You naive fool,” her father spat at her.

“My little crane, this is not practical,” her mother said. “You don’t understand what is happening to our country. We must find you a husband right away. You shouldn’t —”

“Mother, it’s you who placed me in school. It’s you who always said it’s important to learn everything you can. Why has the blood between my legs suddenly changed that?”

Her father took two large steps across their wooden floor and struck Meiko hard on the face. She fell in a heap amidst her homework. He stood over her, trembling in rage. “What did my ancestors ever do to burden me with this life?” he quaked. “To live in a house full of vulgar whores? Am I not the head of this family?” He looked at his wife, at Meiko, at Meiko’s sister who was watching the fight from her bedroom door, her eyes filling with silent tears. “We’re all going to starve,” he said, then walked over to grab a jacket off the hook by the door. “Don’t blame me. We’re all going to starve.” And then he was gone outside, into a street vandalized with Japanese signs he could not read.

Meiko remained in school mostly by default because her parents refused to agree on what to do with her. School seemed to be the safest place to be, even if every class simply groomed the girls to serve the Japanese empire. By Grade Nine, Meiko and her classmates had flowered into silent and hardworking servants of the Emperor, skilled at music and storytelling, experts at keeping their faces pleasantly devoid of emotion. They came to class with their hair tied into the long, twisted braids that were the Korean symbol of chastity, and their developing bodies were covered in the unflattering tent of hanbok, the traditional Korean dress.

One day, their teacher announced they were having a special guest to class. She welcomed him in and told the girls he was a well-respected Japanese businessman. He took his place in front of the blackboard, his masculinity so foreign in the room. To Meiko’s eyes, he didn’t look like a businessman; he looked like an army sergeant. The teacher made some more introductions and then turned the class over to him.

“How many of you have older brothers?” the man began. Several girls, including Meiko, raised their hands. “And how many of those brothers have been shipped off to fight for the Emperor?” None of the hands went down. “And how many of you have fathers who work in factories or on construction sites, barely making enough to feed whatever remains of your families?” Most hands stayed in the air, including Meiko’s. The man nodded as if he knew all along what the answers would be. “Well, I am here today to offer you all an opportunity. An opportunity to provide for your families in a way that your men cannot.” He told them that Japan was prepared to offer each girl a year-long job in a new textile factory in the Japanese city of Shimonoseki. The government would cover everything: their transportation to and from Japan, their accommodations while there, their meals and clothes and entertainment. And the jobs themselves would be some of the highest-paying in the Empire. “You’ll most likely make more money than your fathers, and you’ll be able to send those earnings home each month to help out your families. There will also be extra pay for those willing to work extra hours.”

The girls were too frightened and excited to raise a single question. Meiko thought: Why us? Why not just send our fathers? But kept her “why” questions to herself.

“Go home tonight and discuss it with your parents,” the man said. “It’s a big decision. You’ll be away from your families for a year. But the journey will not be too arduous: Just a train ride south to Pusan and then a ferry across the Sea of Japan to Shimonoseki. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, come to the Tanghu train station two Sundays from now, in the morning, and we’ll provide you with more information. You won’t have to make any decisions then. But we can at least tell you more about this and begin filling out the necessary paperwork should you decide to say yes.”

For the next few days, Meiko could not keep Shimonoseki out of her thoughts. Walking the streets of her neighbourhood with the early January snow falling, she kept pondering what it would be like to live and work there and become the main provider for her family. Was this not what she had been training herself for all these years? It was a Korean girl’s duty to be silent, respectful, and hardworking. She knew she had probably failed at the first two, but at least she was capable of hard work. Her studies had proven that. She could go away and make enough money to put an end to her parents’ bickering.

She came home one afternoon about a week later to find her father home alone, sitting in his wicker chair by the door. His presence in the house startled her; he should have been at work. “Father, are you okay?” she asked, hanging her wool shawl on its hook. He raised his left hand to show her what had happened: streaking across his blackened knuckles was a dark paste of half-clotted blood. “I got careless with one of the machines,” he told her. “They sent me home to let this heal.” Meiko hurried to her mother’s washtub to fetch a clean rag. She brought the soaked cloth over, knelt in front of him and began washing away the oil and grit seeping into the wound. “There there,” she said with the gentleness of a nurse, “let me look after that for you. Here, turn your hand this way. There. Let me wash that …” She sensed him staring down at the top of her head as she worked on him, and that was when she caught the odour of soju on his breath. It filled her nostrils each time he exhaled. Ah, so you didn’t come straight home after your accident, she thought. Meiko would not look up at him as she washed his hand; she would not look up at him even when he cupped his other hand, also filthy but unmarred, to the side of her head and allowed his fingers to crawl up into her virginal braids. She froze. “My daughter,” he said. “I feel like I fail you every day. Do you know that?”

“Father, don’t say such things,” she swallowed.

He leaned back against the wall, the wicker chair creaking beneath his weight. “Did you find a job today?” he slurred. She resumed cleaning without looking up. He let out a laugh that was tinged with frustration. “Of course you didn’t. Because you’re just a girl. Your mother’s right. You need to be in school for a couple more years and we’ll arrange a chungmae. Then you’ll become some other man’s problem.” When he laughed, his grip on her skull grew tighter, as if he wanted to grind her head into the floor, or somewhere else.

“Father,” she said, “if I am ever offered a job, do you think I should take it?”

He looked down at her with his dark eyes and drew her closer to his lap. He leaned over her until his face was nearly crushed into hers. “I no longer care,” he whispered, his words as poisonous as his breath. “Whatever happens to you, I don’t care. As long as you become another man’s problem before these devils kill me.”

Outside, they could hear Meiko’s sister hurrying up the stone walkway to their house, her mother’s voice hollering behind her. Meiko and her father quickly released their grip on one another. She was just standing up and straightening her dress as her sister burst through the door, her mother appearing a moment later. She looked at the two of them over her canvas sack of vegetables. “What are you doing here?” she asked, and for an instant Meiko thought she had been speaking to her.

Y ou don’t have to make any decisions today. That’s what the man said. You can just come and get more information about the job in Shimonoseki. That’s all.

When Meiko arrived at the Tanghu train station, she found about forty girls standing in a line that snaked up to a long table manned by what were clearly Japanese soldiers. She recognized only a few girls from her class, standing up further in the line. They were dressed as she was — in full hanbok and braids, looking to make a strong impression on these potential employers. But the other girls here were clearly not from their academy or any other. They looked as if they had been shipped in from villages outside of the city. They wore ragged, rural-looking dresses, and their hair was matted against their heads as if they spent the previous night sleeping awkwardly on a train. She also noticed that they did not seem to speak Japanese very well. A soldier was moving up and down the line asking random questions, and when one of the rural girls attempted to reply in Korean he screamed in her face and then struck her. Meiko swallowed and looked around, trying to figure out a way to slip from the line she had entered without getting noticed. But it was impossible: the soldiers were watching to make sure each girl made her way to the table, answered their questions, and then moved off to the side.

When Meiko arrived at the table, the Japanese man sitting there made only brief eye contact before hovering his pen over the large ledger in front of him.

“Name,” he ordered.

“Meiko Teshiako,” she answered.

“Year of birth?”

“1928.”

He then asked for her parents’ names, their address, the name of her academy, and how she had come to learn about the day’s recruitment.

“Recruitment, sorry?” she asked. “No, I’m here only to get more information.”

“Any sexually transmitted diseases?” the man asked.

Meiko flinched, stared at him while he waited for her answer. “I … I don’t even know what those words mean,” she replied.

He gave the smallest smile, then motioned to the side. “Okay, go stand over there with the others. We’re done.”

“But I don’t —”

He looked past her and screamed at the next girl in line. “Please move forward! You’re next. Keep the line moving please.”

Meiko floated over in a daze to join the group of girls who had cleared the table and were now huddled under a metal awning by the railway tracks. She spotted one of her classmates, Huriko, standing with her chin buried in her chest, tears pouring over her face. “Huriko, what’s going on?” she tried to whisper to her. As soon as she did, a Japanese soldier stomped over and yelled in Meiko’s face. “No talking! Stand still and don’t talk, Chosunjin!” The word he spat at her, Chosunjin, was a racial epithet for Koreans, bastardizing the true name of their nation, Chosun. His use of it froze Meiko where she stood.

Once all the girls had taken their place under the awning, they had to wait several minutes in silence while the soldiers processed the names in the ledger and typed up small passports for each girl. When one passport was completed, a soldier would call out the girl’s name and then hand her the slip of folded paper. When Meiko stepped forward to receive hers, the young Japanese soldier handing them out leered at her. There was no kindness in his grin. “You’re very beautiful, Chosunjin. Look at you — like a little porcelain doll. You will do very well where you are going.” And Meiko thought, stupidly, What does beauty have to do with working in a factory?

When all the girls had received their passports, the soldiers herded them across the station platform and told them to board the waiting train. The girls were no longer making attempts at silence: they were crying, calling out for their mothers, pleading with the Japanese to let them go. Some tried to run, but soldiers chased them down and threw them gruffly back into the line that flowed into the open train carts. Meiko was squeezed through the door and pushed deep inside, nearly tripping on her hanbok in the swell of bodies. Soon she was pressed up against the far window. All the windows were covered by a canvas blanket tied loosely down with twine to hide the view outside. Once all the girls had squeezed in, the soldiers pulled the rattling metal door shut and locked it with an iron clunk. For a few seconds, there was an absurd silence as the girls stood stunned in the darkness. Along the cart’s walls, squares of sunlight peeped around the blankets covering the windows. Soon the girls broke out with more weeping, with more calls to their mothers. “I don’t want to go to Shimonoseki,” someone yelled in panic. “I’m not ready … I just wanted information …”

There was an abrupt jolt beneath their feet as the train began to move. The girls closest to the door began pulling at it uselessly, whimpering “No! No!” as they realized there was no way to get it open. The shift and steer of the moving train squeezed them all to the right, crushing Meiko where stood against the blanketed window. The crying grew louder, but Meiko found she could not summon the breath to join in. She moved her fingers to the edge of the blanket at her shoulder and pulled it back to reveal the moving landscape outside the window. She watched as the structures of the train station and then the city itself thinned out and faded away, replaced by a spare and rural landscape. She looked up to see the sun hover in the cold January sky. Its position above them filled Meiko with a sudden, frightening wisdom. As the train picked up speed, Meiko beseeched the sun to shift its place in the sky. When it didn’t, her realization rose up like vomit and suddenly she could find the breath to speak, the breath to scream.

“We’re moving north!” she yelled out. “Do you hear me? We’re moving north! They’re not taking us to Pusan. They’re not taking us to Shimonoseki. Do you hear me? They’re taking us north!”

But her knowledge seemed lost in the cacophony of weeping. And Meiko realized too late that this had been her mother’s worst fear all along — this, a train packed with ignorant, terrified girls, and heading in the wrong direction.