Comfort Woman (30 page)

I remembered my mother saying this as I fingered the tape she had marked as mine. Under this cassette, bound with a rubber band, was an envelope stuffed with paper and yellowing newspaper articles. I scanned the articles, most of them clipped form the
Korea Times,
reading what I could, and translated something about World War II, the Japanese, and camps. Unable to get far without my Korean-English dictionary, I put the articles aside for later and picked out two official-looking documents. Both, in essence, were missing-persons reports—one from the American Embassy in Seoul, the other from the Red Cross.

“Dear Mrs. Akiko (Kim Soon Hyo) Bradley,
” they
read. “I am sorry to inform you that we can find no trace of your sisters-Kim Soon Mi, Kim Soon Hi, Kim Soon Ja—presumed dead or residing in North Korea. ”

I had to read these opening lines twice more before I understood who was who, that my mother once belonged to a name, to a life, that I had never known about. That the names I had known only in relation to the Seven Stars belonged to women I could have called
imo,
and that my mother, once bound to others besides myself, had severed those ties—my lineage, her family name—with her silence.

I sat, surrounded by the papers, by the secrets she had guarded and cultivated like a garden. I sat and I waited for some way to understand, to know this person called Soon Hyo, thinking that I had always been waiting for my mother, wasting time in the hallway of her life, waiting for an invitation to step over the threshold and into her home.

My mother died more than once in her life.

Before she died with her head in my hands, leaving me with an emptiness so big I would never fill it until the birth of my own child, she died in March of 1919 on the streets of Seoul.

In the weeks following the signing of the Korean Declaration of Independence, she and her friends from Ewha College joined the throngs of displaced farmers, out-of-work merchants, and idealistic students celebrating in the streets. Day after day, on the corner of her street, she met the boy with whom she hoped to make a yonae, a love match. Holding sometimes a red banner, sometimes a flag, he would wait on the corner with some of their friends, to throw off the gossips. Under cover of their friends and a flying red cloth, they would link arms before becoming part of the river of people meandering through the city.

We were happy, my mother would tell my sisters and me. Not just me, not just my friends, but everybody who marched in the streets. You can't imagine how close we all felt.

Of course, my mother added, either in explanation or in mockery, I was in love.

The first time my mother was dragged home dead, her own mother had had a premonition. Don't go, she told my mother, I beg you. She wrapped her arms around her daughter, trying to anchor her to the earth of their home, to hold and protect her. But my mother only pushed at the grasping hands, hauling my weeping grandmother across the room and out the door. When my mother finally broke away, my halmoni shouted after her a warning and a curse that sealed my mother's fate: Watch out for him, that no-good, do-nothing-but-yell boy! He'll ruin your chances for a decent match!

My mother—dressed in her pleated white skirt that swung like a bell against her legs, her hair carefully braided and tied with a red bow to catch the eye of her boyfriend—followed where the crowd took her. She dodged the children who sang “San Toki, Toki Ya!” and jumped like mountain jackrabbits, jackrabbits ya! in and out of the parade, and she stole glances at lovers stealing kisses behind their flags. Maybe she thought her own boyfriend would try to kiss her that day.

Several groups of people around her chanted slogans, each trying to outshout the others until their words would be the only ones heard. Her own group of friends were arguing about whether to chant Korean Independence Forever! or Long Live Korea for Ten Thousand Years!—Man Sei, Man Sei!—when my mother became aware of an undercurrent of noise, a strange murmur trickling down from the direction of the Chang Duk Palace grounds, the planned gathering place for the independence celebration.

Listen! one of the louder students said. It's the ghost of the idiot king, farting along the empty halls and wailing about losing his country!

After laughing, perhaps wanting to reassure my mother, my mother's boyfriend explained: Probably just the students from the other side of town.

Their slogans must be louder and better than ours, someone else joked.

Then, over the agreements of Yes, yes, more students, someone and then another someone yelled, Soldiers! but the crowd continued to surge forward.

My mother said that when the people recognized the troops of Japanese soldiers in their Western uniforms, armed and mounted on sleek horses as if ready to charge into battle, a cry went up from the multitude. But instead of sounding angry or fearful, the cry was strangely happy, like one that lovers might utter after a chance meeting in the street.

And then it happened.

In unison, as if from some invisible command, the troops, sabers flashing, fell forward, sinking into the crowd. Amidst wordless screams, my mother heard people shouting, Stand! Stand! and for a moment the marchers stood and the soldiers stood, unable to force their way through the compact press of humanity. Then somebody up ahead threw a curse, and somebody else threw a rock or maybe a shoe, and somebody who was close enough cracked a flag stick against a slashing sword.

The soldiers charged for a second time, their weapons hacking a path through the street. In front of her, my mother could see people she knew being sliced and gutted, bleeding and screaming and falling as they tried to turn away. But what was worse, she said, was that behind her, people still did not know what was happening and continued to laugh and shout Korea! Korea! and push forward in their happiness.

One of her friends, maybe her boyfriend, yelled: They're killing us, they're killing us! Break away! And as if releasing a deep breath, the mass of people behind them surged and finally broke, becoming a tidal wave, immense and unstoppable in their efforts to escape.

Caught in the rush, my mother and her boyfriend stumbled against each other and, their bodies careening out of control, pushed into and over others—I know what it feels like to step on a human body, to feel the rush of blood flood into my shoes, my mother once said—beibre they finally pitched forward into an alley-way. My mother managed to cover her head and curl her knees into her stomach, waiting to be trampled, when her boyfriend fell on top of her.

When she could breathe again, her breaths sharp with the scent of smoke and blood, she asked the boy to move off her. Only after my mother asked him to move a second and then a third time did she become aware of the comforting feel of his blood blanketing her arms and torso. She said she knew he was dead, but instead of feeling fear or revulsion, instead of pushing away the weight of his body, she wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into her. His stillness and his blood made her feel safe, almost cherished. Nestled beside his cooling body, she slept, until she heard silence and realized her eyes were open. My mother said that from that day on she never closed her eyes, even in sleep.

From underneath the dead boy, from the sides of her eyes, my mother said she saw streets littered with the bright fragments of clothes, hats, shoes, strips of fabric torn from banners and flags, and bodies. And wading through air thick with groans and smoke from burning churches and the fertile smell of blood, the spared and the wounded came to reclaim their dead.

My mother held on to her body and waited.

When my mother's eyes could see again, my grandmother was wailing the death chant and clipping her fingernails to bury next to her.

Never cut your nails at night, my mother would break into this part of the story to warn my sisters and me. Sign of a life cut short.

My mother said she tried to take back her hands and tell my grandmother she was not dead, but according to the story, my grandmother pushed her back down and hissed, “Yes, you are!” Then she wailed loud enough for people on the next street to hear. When she was supposed to catch her breath for the next death cry, my grandmother hissed, “Stupid girl, I'm saving your life.”

In order to protect her, my grandmother killed her daughter off. She sent my mother north, to Sulsulham, to marry my father.

It was because she loved me so much, my mother explained. They were burning the homes of suspected revolutionaries and arresting or shooting the people who ran out.

In her special box, in which my mother stored treasures from her past life or for her daughters' future ones, my mother kept two types of clippings. Among the first was a newspaper article from the June 1919 issue of the
Daedong Kongbo
denouncing the official report of the arrest of young hoodlums rioting in the streets and said what my mother said: Most of the city was dead. Churches and homes burned. Forty-six thousand, eight hundred forty-seven Korean nationalists arrested. Fifteen thousand, nine hundred sixty-one wounded. Seven thousand, five hundred and nine—including one boy significant only to one insignificant girl—dead.