Chapter 3
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