“Deal,” I reply.
“Good.” She settles back again and flags down the waitress to order us, me, a pitcher of water.
Out 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.
Chapter 5
North. 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:
WAR MATERIALS
and below that:
ESSENTIAL
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.
What 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