Sad Peninsula (7 page)

“What's that?”

“Oh, it's very hard to translate directly into English, but it means, like, a high-maintenance princess. That I suffer from the
disease
of being a high-maintenance princess!”

I laugh because this is exactly the kind of Korean phrase that Rob would insist he learn.

Jin thinks I'm laughing at her. “I am not
kong'ju'bong!
” she whines, slapping the table with her palm. “I am very, how you say,
down to earth
.”

“Hey, I believe you.” I grab the ladle and refill my cup.

“Anyway. Rob Cruise was a mistake. Try not to think about him.”

“I won't if you won't.”

A silence falls between us as we work our way through the
pa'jun
. It's impossible to hide from Jin how useless I am with chopsticks; they fumble around my plate like paralyzed limbs. Without prompting, the waitress passes by to set a fork discreetly next to my plate.

“So tell me — what is the deal with your roommate, Justin, anyway,” Jin says. “He's even more reserved than you are. What's
his
story?”

“Justin's stories are his stories,” I reply. “I'll leave him to tell them.”

Jin refills her own cup and blinks at me a little. “Okay, so tell me your stories, Michael,” she says. “Why did you come to Korea?”

I have my stock answers prepared to unleash on her, the same answers I give anyone, Korean or
waegookin
, who asks: half-truths about lingering student loans needing to be paid off, the desire to see another part of the world and experience a different culture, blah, blah, blah. But the impatient tilt of Jin's head tells me she's heard it all before and won't buy it. I'm feeling loose and fuzzy-headed, not at all like myself, and, consequently, embrace the truth.

“I got fired from my job in Canada.”

“Oh? Really?”

“Yes. In fact, you could say I got fired from my
career
in Canada.” I could leave it at that, sufficiently mysterious, but I find words coming out that I'd rather keep in a box. There is something in the angle of Jin's chin, in her freakily beautiful double eyelids, in the restaurant's shadowy light falling on her hair, which welcomes full disclosure from me. So I tell her everything — or almost everything. I at least have the good sense not to mention my ex-fiancée; this
is
a first date, after all. But I tell Jin about my father the politico and about my mother the lush. I tell her about my journalism in Halifax, such as it was, and how, orphaned and rudderless, I drifted into disgraceful acts of forgery and fiction. Soon I've gotten up some steam and tell her about getting caught and how my dishonourable deeds were broadcasted across Canada. I was fired and with no hope of finding other work in my field. I needed money and a
break from myself
, so I came to teach ESL to Korean kids, which has proven more palatable than suicide, which I also considered.

“I'm very ashamed,” I tell her, finishing off my cup and looking into the pot to find all the
dong dong ju
gone. “I'm very ashamed of what I did.”

Jin looks as if she might touch my hand lovingly, but doesn't. “Michael, don't be ridiculous. You're in Korea.” Then she pauses. “You have no idea what real shame is.”

“What do you mean?”

But she shakes it off. There's more there, I can tell, but she won't say what it is; unlike me, she has control of her tongue. “Look, I've met many ESL teachers,” she says, “and sure, I've had relations with more than a few of them. But one thing I've noticed is that they've all come to my country because they're running away from something in theirs. Maybe not as big as
your
something, but they're running just the same. Except,
they
never admit it.” I think of Justin and Rob, the little bits of themselves they've shared with me. “You're different than that,” she says. “You're
better
than that.” She leans in. “Tell you what. Whatever you did before we met is none of my business, and I promise not to judge you for it. And whatever I did before we met is none of
your
business, and you promise not to judge me for it. Deal?”

“Deal,” I reply.

“Good.” She settles back again and flags down the waitress to order us, me, a pitcher of water.

O
ut on the street, away from Insadong, we're standing in that awkward, absurd silence that comes at the end of a first date, where I feel the full weight and obligation of my gender crash down around my shoulders.

“You're not taking the subway?” I ask, stalling.

“No. I have to go to a family event not far from here, so I'll take a taxi.” Her face goes grim. “Ugh. My mother will not be pleased that I'm half drunk on
dong dong ju
.”

“Half drunk,” I snicker.

“Anyway, this was fun,” Jin says. “I want to see you again, Michael.”

“Okay.” So I lean in to do the unbearable, to take that one brave step. Big mistake. She pulls back from me at a forty-five degree angle as if forced by the wind. For the first and only time, her face looks ugly to me — all flat and slanty, muscles pulled back as if by wild dogs, and full of cultural indignation. It says,
What are you
doing
?

I fall back and she falls forward. “Call me,” she says, patting my shoulder.

I stand there as she disappears into a cab, disappears into the city. And I hate myself for the thoughts that plague me then. I blame the drink.
What the fuck, Jin. It was just a kiss. What the fuck. You bloody well slept with Rob Cruise the first night you met him.

N
orth
. An incredulous direction. Above Seoul, above Panmunjom, above Pyongyang itself — did the earth not drop off and vanish if you went farther, become a place that existed strictly in textbooks, in rumours? The thin black thread of the rail track weaved through the unwelcoming white of winter, the train hurrying from the cold stasis of Chosun and into the hot oven of war. Chugging toward the place that Meiko knew only from textbooks and newspaper articles, declaring the glory of battle, of empire. A place someone, somewhere had named Manchuguo.

Manchuria. Northeastern China.

They stopped at a small station nestled in the mountains not far from the border and the girls were unloaded and allowed to eat. They sat outdoors in the frigid wind on wooden tables, huddled over plates of pale, wet rice and hard radish, shovelling the food into their mouths with their fingers. The Japanese soldiers orbited them like leering moons, their rifles slung on shoulders, long bayonets pointing at the sky. The girls were not permitted to finish before they were forced to their feet again and returned to the train platform. There they were separated into groups, pulled apart from friends by stern soldiers and ordered to wait in silence. One train arrived and a group disappeared into it, leaving the others to stand weeping and confused in its wake. Another train and another set of girls gone. And then another. Meiko's group was the last to leave; they stepped onto a smaller train, just a few carts long, which began moving the moment the doors closed behind them. Meiko felt her stomach hollow as the heavy thump of track lines beneath their feet went on, hour after hour.

Two days later, they arrived at another, smaller station on an icy mudflat near a large marsh. The girls were unloaded, fed, and then made to line up at a loading dock. A large army truck with a canvas roof came rattling in and backed up to where the girls stood, and they were ordered to load boxes into the back. Unlike the other girls, who appeared more or less illiterate, Meiko could read most of the Japanese words on the boxes' wooden lids. She saw boxes for ammunition, for dry goods, for medical supplies. There was one Japanese word she didn't know stamped on smaller, lighter crates.
Saku
, it said. Something like
sack
or
bag
. Small sacks.

Once all the boxes were loaded, the girls were ordered to get in the back with them. As Meiko waited her turn to climb on board, she spotted a small wooden sign dangling on the side near the front of the truck. Her eyes strained to read the words. At the top, they said:

W
AR
M
ATERIALS

and below that:

E
SSENTIAL

As she was shoved up into the truck and found a box to sit on among the other girls, she thought vaguely to herself:
Essential. They have labelled us all essential, like the ammunition
.

W
hat is this huge house nestled in the mountains, this bright red mansion? It was someone's home at one point — perhaps an aristocratic Chinese family lived here before the property was confiscated for Japanese purposes. As Meiko was unloaded from the truck with the others, she looked around and imagined this courtyard a peaceful place for wealthy children to run and play, to read under a tree or explore the copse that surrounded the property. Now it was a place of menacing line-ups: lines of trucks pulling in with supplies; lines of trucks pulling out with soldiers ready for battle; lines for food and water; and lines leading inside the house.

The girls were forced into their own line to stand outside a large green tent set up at the courtyard's edge. This was the camp's makeshift hospital. The girls were led inside the flap one at a time, grasping their identification papers in terror. Meiko noticed that the girls didn't come back out the front again, but were instead led out the back and toward one of the wings of the house, their skin flustered red and chins crushed into their breastbones. When it was her turn to enter the tent, Meiko swung in under the flap to find an army doctor and a Japanese soldier waiting for her, the latter ordering to see her passport and papers. He gave them a cursory glance and then told her to sit up on the examination bench. The doctor came over, tilted her head back, examined each of her eyes, stuck a tongue depressor in her mouth.

“What is this place?” she asked when he began checking her braids for signs of lice.

“You speak Japanese,” the doctor said, then turned to the soldier. “This one speaks Japanese. That should make things go faster.”

The doctor ordered Meiko to lie on her back on the bench. He came around the other side and she thought he was going to examine her feet. “Take off your underpants,” he ordered. She sat up quickly. “What? Sir, I couldn't. What are you asking me? No man has ever —”

The soldier was over to her in a second, grabbed a handful of her braids, pulled her head back and placed the intrusive weight of his knife at her throat. “You will learn quickly,
Chosunjin
, to do what you're told here!” he barked. She looked up at the doctor who stood between her legs, waiting. She panted under the weight of the knife, stared at the doctor with a fury she refused to hide. He huffed impatiently and forced his hands into her dress, bunched it up, then yanked down her underpants and spread her legs apart. Meiko screamed as she rested her head back against the bench, and the soldier's knife followed her down. The doctor's fingers were stiff and impersonal as they moved her labia around and around. He looked up at the soldier. “She's intact,” he said. Then: “And beautiful. You should check out the clit on this one.”

The knife left her throat as the soldier came to look. They each grabbed one of her knees to keep her legs apart so they could stare at her loins, and then the doctor began batting at the small nub of flesh atop her opening. When she felt her nipples stiffen, Meiko let out another scream of shame and lashed out without thinking. Her heel slammed into the doctor, a short horse's kick right to his hipbone, and he took a step backwards. The soldier's knife was up in a breath, and he moved to stab it like a peg into the slit between Meiko's legs. “Oh, just leave her!” the doctor said with his hand raised, half-laughing under the pain, and the soldier stopped. “She's got some spirit, but she's a virgin. Leave her.”

The soldier lowered the knife, but then grabbed Meiko by the back of the knee and threw her off the bench and onto the floor like a sack of peppers. As she scrambled around on her knees, he kicked her in the rump towards the tent's back door. “You exit that way,
Chosunjin
,” he spat at her as she pulled her underpants up. Then he turned to the doctor. “I'll get the next girl.”

S
o this was how it worked. You got your own small room in the house — a stall really — and some nice clothes and make up and some musky perfume to spray on yourself. They gave you a tatami mat to sleep on and a box for collecting the tickets that the men brought in to give you. Each morning you would bring these tickets to the house manager, who wrote the quantity down next to your name in a ledger to keep track of your pay for providing services to the soldiers. But what services? What is this place? It was a question Meiko had kept asking herself all through the afternoon and into that first evening. “This is a place of comfort,” the manager had told her, told all the new girls. “You are here as a gift from Emperor Hirohito; your job is to give our warriors comfort.” But what did that mean?
If we're here to entertain these men, shouldn't there be instruments in our rooms — a beautiful
gayageum
to rest on our laps, to send our fingers fluttering across like birds? Am I to sing, to dance, to tell the men adorable little stories that help them forget the horrors of the battlefield? What do they mean by comfort?
The girls who had already been there when they arrived, who knew, offered no answer — they moved through the hallways of the house with their heads down. In her room, Meiko saw nothing with which to comfort the men. Besides the ticket box and tatami mat, there was a small wooden crate of the
saku
she had seen on the truck. She opened it to find mysterious squares of tinfoil inside with the words Assault No. 1 stamped on them. Next to the box, there was small ceramic bowl full of cloudy water, heavy with the scent of disinfectant.

Meiko lay on her mat waiting all evening, listening to the sounds of men being comforted in the rooms down the hall from hers. What wretched noises! They sounded like they were in such delirious pain, that the girls were injuring them somehow. Wait, that wasn't quite right: there were mutual screams, men and girls, reciprocal anguish, though the girls' tears seem to go on for several seconds after the soldiers had let out their last, tortured bellow. If it was all so unpleasant, then why were the soldiers lined up the hall, awaiting a go at it? They were yelling
hayaku! hayaku!
— hurry up, hurry up! It's my turn. Hurry up and finish. It's my turn.

Night came and a strange, errant peace fell over the house. There were still sounds of comfort coming from the rooms but the hallway seemed less busy, less crowded. Meiko was nearly asleep on her tatami mat when the curtain to her stall opened abruptly. She perked up in an instant and scuttled back against the wooden wall to see a man, a Japanese officer, standing at her threshold. He was short and corpulent but full of authority, his eyes sharp and small.

“Hello, my little one,” he said. She could not bear to talk. Tears were already forming below her eyes. “Do you speak Japanese?” he asked. She nodded hurriedly. He smiled, tossed the little red ticket he came in with into her box, a minor formality, then glanced down to make sure it was the only one in there. “Don't be afraid. There's no point to being afraid. What is your name?”

Again, that silly temptation to summon the Korean name her parents had given her, but she shook it off. “Meiko,” she replied.

“Meiko,” the officer repeated. “What a pretty name for a pretty little girl. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

The officer let out a slow, happy breath and took a step forward.

“Sir, are you here for comfort?” Meiko stammered.

The officer blurted a chuckle at her. “Oh, Meiko, very much so, yes.”

“And how am I to comfort you?”

“By doing exactly as I say. Do you understand?”

Meiko could not bring herself to nod. She looked at the floor, and when she looked up again she saw the officer already undoing the front of his trousers and pulling away his loin cloth. His man muscle fell out, a thick, short cord, and he took it in his hand and began stroking it to life. Her eyes widened in horror.

“See this?” he moaned softly. “Watch me, Meiko. Watch me. Don't turn away.” He petted himself slowly and the meat in his hand grew longer and stiffer. “Now come here. Come here, little one.”

She was too terrified to disobey. She took one reluctant step that brought her close enough for him to take her by the wrist and pull her all the way over. “Now you do it. Here.” And he put her hand on him. “Now you do it. You do it.” She ran her hand up and down him clumsily, her face streaking tears.

The officer leaned into her and began bunching up her dress in his hand, pulling it up by her hips. “Oh, you have such beautiful legs, Meiko. Look at that. Look at that.” He stared at her legs for a long time while she stroked him. Then he turned up at her with eyes glossy with pleasure. “Now put me in your mouth.”

She thought she heard wrong, got his Japanese wrong.

“Meiko, here, put me in your mouth.” He forced her to her knees, took his meat back from her and pressed it toward her face. He slapped her chin with it, a heavy thump that left what felt like a cobweb behind. “Stroke me with your mouth. Come on — comfort me.”

“No,” she blurted out, finally. “No!”

“Meiko, take it. Take it in your mouth.”

“No!”

He thrust his hips against her head, mashed the tip of his meat between her lips. Without thinking, she seized it in her teeth and bit down. The officer let out a howl and ripped himself away from her. “She bit me!” he screamed. “Fucking bitch!” and he drove his knee as hard as he could into her sternum. She yelped. Crumbled onto the floor in front of him, a deep bow.

“She fucking bit me!” he screamed again, pulling up his trousers and hustling from the stall. He was gone for only a moment, not long enough for Meiko to regain her breath or find a way to escape. When he came back, he was holding an iron poker he had yanked from the charcoal stove in the main room, its tip glowing an angry orange. The house manager was racing up behind him, pleading “Give me that! Would you give me that? What the hell are you doing?” He shoved the manager away and then knocked Meiko onto her back with one expert stomp into her clavicles. Even before her head hit the mat, the officer was climbing aboard her, pinning her legs down with his knees. Hiking her dress up with one hand, he dragged the hot poker across the narrow shelf of her shin with the other. She filled the room with a scream that seemed to originate from every cell of her body. The manager reached over the officer and stole the poker from him. “Would you give me that! You're going to start a fire in here!” The officer turned himself around and forced Meiko's legs up and apart, draping the back of her knees over his shoulders before fumbling with his trousers again. “Put on a sack!” the manager yelled, reaching into the wooden box by the tatami mat and tossing him one of the tinfoil squares. “Put on a sack, would you. Follow the rules!” Meiko fought him even as she watched him liberate the little ring of rubber from its tinfoil square and roll it down over himself. When he leaned with all of his weight into her, she felt the room slip backwards, slide away as if the house was collapsing down into the earth. It felt like every gram of the officer's bulk had poured into her, filling her insides with a horrible, tearing weight. He shoved her knees all the way forward until they were squashed into her eyebrows. Began pumping at her with wild, canine thrusts. Meiko grew vaguely aware that the house manager had left the room once this act began, confident the officer could do no damage to the house itself. Meiko closed her eyes and let her mind flutter away. She thought of cranes lifting off into the sky from a vast body of water, taking their wisdom with them. What had her mother always called her?
My wise little crane.