We seldom slept with a roof covering our heads.
Starlight always lingered above our frowned faces, rapt in sleep, as the only choice of our nightly shelter was abandoned houses brought down by fire.
Despite the nocturnal chill gushing through the mangled ceiling, we slept well. We ate what we could. We survived.
We, during the war, however, was a slippery concept. It could mean both a Northerner and Southerner, either a commie or capitalist, it didn’t really matter. Every night I tried to form we with a stranger, another human body next to me in pale darkness, to keep myself warm and shielded from too much loneliness. First I would curl up my body, gently put my forearms and shins to the back of a candidate, and if they didn’t wince, I would bring my belly to the warm wall, slowly shrouding its shoulders with both hands. Most people didn’t resist, to my astonishment. The next morning we might fight each other tooth and nail for a sliver of balloon-flower root; at roofless night, however, we were just warm bodies in need of more human heat. Sometimes, once they fell into dead slumber, I slipped my fingers into their inner pockets and pilfered anything of value: candies, silver coins, a tiny vial of snake oil for typhoid fever.
I remembered talking about this war even before it began. I was a naive little girl. I was in the English class taught by Pastor Peltier, a Canadian missionary who ran an orphanage-cum-match-factory in my North Korean hometown. While giving us a crash course on American history, he talked about a peculiar kind of war in which brothers are turned against each other. War is not always a fight among different countrymen, lectured Monsieur Peltier with passion, his milky complexion growing light pink, like the buttocks of a piglet. Westerners call this type of war civil war, he said, and my juvenile mind secretly laughed at White men’s stupidity, the inane irony of calling fratricide civil, of this civil war being in fact much more brutal than regular wars.
The war came as a nuisance at first. When I returned to my hometown after years of absence, the Comrades with red armbands had already percolated through the daily lives of the villagers, pestering them with mandatory gatherings and weekly rallies, often summoning even married women to train as sentries. It made townspeople disappear; rumors about the warm South, free of forced partisan duties, began to lure certain northern dreamers, like my mother and sister who, according to the neighbors, had already gone south long ago.
Then more started to evaporate in 1950. A family in the neighboring town perished overnight, people whispered, hit by a misguided missile. After a few months of ongoing overhead fireworks, townspeople finally saw the arrival of the Americans and what they called sawing began. The town became divided in two, like a penurious concubine serving two partners, not yet sure who to worship for survival. During the day, the Yankees with South Korean soldiers roamed the village in their hunky military truck, doling out food and asking questions; after dark, gaunt guerillas that had been hiding in the mountain descended, skulked around the village like hungry ghosts, gathering food and info by stealth. A family feud or a petty quarrel between neighbors blossomed into a bloody disaster under the strange circumstance. A villager accused his neighbor of being a communist sympathizer under the sun; under the moon the victim’s son spit on the former for being a Yankee’s stooge. The alleged commies, once taken away by the Yankee military truck, never came back, whereas many of the rumored Yankee-lovers were executed on the spot. Red-baiting and traitor-hunting took turns day-in day-out, the jagged teeth of war ebbing and flowing each day, pulverizing villagers at random.
I refused to be a helpless victim. So I headed south. The childish dream of being reunited with my mother and sister still half-alive in the back of my mind.
During the day I walked and I scavenged, every day expanding the definition of food, from barley porridge to crab apple, boiled nettle to tree bark. At night I stole warmth from the body of a stranger, under the ashen moonlight leaking through a burnt house.
▴ ▴ ▴
The night when I decided to be a boy, however, it wasn’t a house I was in. It was what used to be a school. The biggest nightly lodging thus far.
Once a modern building constructed by the Japanese, the place had been remodeled as a billet by the Yankees, now operating as a temporary refugee camp. I was lying down in one of the classrooms, looking up at the patchwork of roof, a shell-shocked chasm covered by sheets of corrugated tin. Under the tin roof, however, I could still smell the pallid moon; the glassless windows were inviting its icy breath, making my body ache once again for human warmth.
I found a perfect back. It belonged to a woman, neither young nor old. She had round shoulders wrapped in plush flesh. Her rich hips roiled each time she tossed and turned. I waited till her squirming faded away. I let out a soft, high-pitched sigh behind her ears, to disarm her, even in her sleep, with my tender female breath. I was about to latch onto her, as gently as possible, my arms folded like a praying mantis.
But the night predators poured in through the window. They were whispering, their breath rushed. I understood the nature of their whispers; I understood their language. They were the Yankees. Two of them. One White, one Black. They shoved a ball of cloth into the woman’s mouth. She writhed furiously as they took her away, her hips rolling at each protest, till a smack across her face numbed it all. Through the glassless school window came the straining sound of quiet rape.
Next morning, I roamed the streets, searching for a body of a dead boy. I found one easily, about the size of my own frame. I stripped him of his male clothes—a pair of long johns, a thick vest, and pants made of burlap. Color of rust; smell of stale stingray. Before I put them on, I bound my breasts flat with my cotton scarf. Thankfully, my hair had already been cut short.
I was tall for a woman, short for a man. Thus, perfect for a boy.
I’m only a half-woman anyway, I thought to myself, half-grinning, with my belly empty of womb.
Father used to say, before slapping me or Mama, women were like boys in a way: forever stuck in immaturity, never to learn and to grow up, thus in need of permanent spanking. I wanted to whisper to Father, if he were alive, that boys were also never to be drafted, only men were; and their loins were more likely to be left alone.
I’ve survived way worse before, I told myself, I can survive this.
▴ ▴ ▴
Never once had I seen a house unburned, uncrippled, on my way to the South.
The bombing saturated every nook and cranny of the North. The sky was pregnant with noise, fighter-bombers being its permanent occupants: when grazing the air in relative leisure, they grumbled like old ladies; farther away they purred like cats; growled like hounds grating just above the bushy hills; then when least expected, they farted thunder on my eardrums, setting fire to every thatched roof in sight.
Days after, I could take a dump in the bushes without stirring an eyelid, through the ensemble of howling airplanes and their fiery droppings. The bombing was so omnipresent that after a certain point I felt surviving was just a matter of luck.
Thus, my heart leapt with wonder when I first saw the train crossing the border. It shocked me that so many people had survived such hellfire; the train was teeming with refugees, its surface alive with fidgeting human bodies, like barnacles cloaking a sunken ship. I was among hundreds of people riding on top of the boxcars. The wind on my face grew sharper as the train accelerated through the night chill. Stealing warmth from another body was unthinkable, though. Every sliver of strength had to be squeezed out for holding onto the ridge of the steel roof. Failing to do so meant loss. I saw several little bodies disappearing, falling behind the relentless thudding of the night train. The thin strips of space their small bodies had once occupied were now filled with their mothers’ keening.
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For me, the South was the place of sootless houses.
Busan, the final destination of countless war orphans, was the only region in the country that had escaped the bombing, people said. Houses in Busan, like the newly arrived phalanx of refugees, were survivors, their walls and roofs never claimed by flames.
Nevertheless, the number of existing houses was hardly sufficient for the ever-growing flow of human survivors. The rocky hills of Ami Quarter quickly turned into a shantytown. Every week, new rows of clapboard houses sprang up there, like mushrooms after a heavy rain. The latecomers who failed to take shelter in the hills swarmed to the cemetery. The Public Cemetery for the Japanese, a burial ground constructed under the Japanese occupation, gave way to the pondoks of Korean refugees, their roofs made of rusty tin panels, walls of abandoned packing crates and mud, letting, ironically, the once-occupied occupy their dead occupiers, turning the last resort of the dead into that of the living, tombstones into cornerstones, thus slowly garnering its new nickname: Biseok Maeul, the Town of Tombstone.
Markets mushroomed, as the refugees, driven by hunger, bunched out on the streets to sell and buy, to barter and haggle, anything they could get their hands on. The most popular was Can Market. There the refugees traded Yankee-made canned food, as the American military C rations were one of the few stable sources of food. The crème de la crème was meat and spaghetti in tomato sauce, while frankfurters and lima beans always remained among the most popular. Demands for candy-coated chewing gum and Lucky Strikes were ceaseless; stolen dog tags of dead soldiers were sought out as rarities by some wartime oddballs, which served as both souvenirs and can openers.
The concubine had no confusion now, to whom to turn for survival; from waist down at least, below the 38th parallel, all walks of life revolved around the Yankees. I didn’t give a rat’s ass whom I was to serve, either the capitalist or communist, as long as they gave me a warm meal and no beating—I was, among other things, a survivor.
I walked up to a group of them one day. The boy’s attire was protecting me, I believed. With my nearly accent-free English, I asked them, nice and simple: Do you have a job for me? I caught them off guard, a bunch of GIs on their cigarette break at the entrance of Can Market. Speechless, they stared at me for a couple seconds, two of them with their mouths agape, smoke swirling out. Go away kid, a Korean man among them answered to me in Korean, waving his hand in the air as if shooing away a gnat. I speak good English, I said again slowly, I need a job, sir. I wasn’t even afraid of beatings anymore; my stomach had been empty for four days.
Where did you learn English, kid? they finally asked, after exchanging a few curious glances, a bit of laughter. One White soldier, a burning cigarette still hung on the corner of his mouth, gestured for the Korean man to come closer, and mumbled something inaudible to his ear.
I followed the Korean man—thin-lipped and owl-eyed. He said, with a lopsided grin, that they had a job for me, even though I was too young, too skinny to be a soldier. With my good English, he told me, I could be an interpreter. He promised they would feed me, put a roof over my head. My growling stomach uttered yes even before my mouth did. You’re a war orphan, right? What’s your name, boy? he asked. Yongmal, I answered, though it wasn’t my name, and it wasn’t a boy’s name either.
They took me into their military truck. Where do we go? I asked.
Without looking at me, he told the driver: to the House.
Where do we go? I asked the driver, looking into his eyes reflected on the rearview mirror. Instead of an answer, the driver gave out a dim smile and the strange noise—choppy caws, like a little animal panting, his right hand briefly pretending to scratch his cheek.
▴ ▴ ▴
The House wasn’t a house. It was what used to be a school.
Another modern school building—constructed by the Japanese, repurposed by the war.
The building was unscathed. No scar of an old chasm on its roof. No window missing.
The window glass was thick as a thumb, protected by iron bars chunky as a man’s wrist. Tears of rust, running down from the metal bars, streaked the concrete walls like stripes on a prisoner’s uniform.
They called it the House in short; the Monkey House in full. People from the nearby village sometimes called it the Truck, because the building, pigeon-colored and perpendicular, looked like a giant military truck.
I saw faces of women through the windows on the second floor. Eyes filled with silent moaning, they were hanging onto the welded wire mesh behind the window, fingers tightly clenched.
Like monkeys, clinging to a caged wall.
Their heads constantly bobbed, shoulders twitched. I know it’s not a pretty sight, the man whispered to me, but you’ll get used to it. He said those were actually sick women, and they cured them there, on the second floor of the House. I was to help them, serving as their interpreter of maladies, he explained. My task was simple: to translate Korean into English, or English into Korean, among the girls and two doctors and visiting Yankee soldiers.
In truth, the House needed no introduction. I already knew, the moment my eyes met theirs, everything. I knew the kind of pain the women had, all the bobbing and twitching and screaming and sweating—I knew these were from too much penicillin forced into their bodies. I already knew, from top to bottom, the list of their maladies. I already knew what the House was; what the House was really for.
A little shiver ran down my nape, spine, and it stopped around the pelvis, lingering there for a while. I put both hands on top of my belly, where my womb had once been.
▴ ▴ ▴
Like my own existence, the structure of the House was an irony.
Contrary to its modern cement-gray exterior, nearly every element of its interior was in warm-hued wood, including the floors, rafters, crossbeams, and columns. The parquet floor, made of cedar, always gave off the pleasant spicy aroma, even after having acquired the copper-colored stains of blood in four corners. The women told me the building hadn’t been initially built for a school; it was supposed to be a summer house, they whispered, for a concubine of a Japanese prefect. The Japanese official wanted to construct a sumptuous wooden villa for his mixed-blood lover, but he died in the early stage of the Pacific War (another paradoxical war name, I found), thus leaving the vacation home forever incomplete, and much later in the war, it was hastily repurposed and finished up as a modern school, where they dreamed to mold snotty Korean kids into loyal defenders of the empire.
Now, the House. A home of twelve homeless women—though the number tended to fluctuate. According to the owl-faced Korean warden, their real homes were either destroyed by the war, or rendered inhospitable to them by their own double-dealing deeds. While calling themselves freedom-loving Southerners, he explained, they were receiving free bags of rice from the commies through their back doors. Now they’re given a second chance, here at the House, to serve for their true country, through serving the soldiers of their country’s biggest ally. The warden emphasized that their health was a matter of importance, for it could directly affect that of the in-and-out Yankee soldiers. That’s why we have the second floor, where we try to eliminate any budding signs of transmittable diseases.
The second floor was the place that garnered the building’s nickname, and also the place where I first saw Jenny. Her real name was Jae-soon, yet all the soldiers called her Jenny. It also stuck on our tongues with time. I saw her naked body from the beginning; pigeon-breasted and pigeon-toed, she seemed like a tall bird. Unlike other women, she never dropped her gaze onto the floor. Her eyes, without shame, constantly followed mine and the Yankee doctor’s during the whole medical checkup, as if striving to read some secret code behind our actions. It made me uncomfortable. I felt as though she saw through me, somehow poking at the real trickster-me underneath my male disguise. In my mind chart, I marked her down as Jenny the hawk-eyed. On the medical chart in my hand, I marked her down as pass.
Jenny was the only woman who tried to escape the House, albeit unsuccessfully. One night the warden woke me up, ordered me to ring the alarm. He ran up to the second floor and I followed him. Through the barred window I saw Jenny. She’d somehow made it out to the backyard, now running, barefoot, toward the woods. I saw a soldier, the truck driver, following her in big, leisured strides. Run baby, run, he shouted with laughter, one hand pulling up the pants, his fly half-open. Soon they both disappeared, almost at the same time, into the darkness of the woods. When they returned, Jenny was sent directly up to the second floor. She spent the following three days there, in the dusky corner of the Monkey Room, veins in her thighs bulging black with the cocktail of injections forced into her body, her screams filling up the entire House like a never-ending banshee wail.
Jenny reminded me of an old friend of mine. And I both admired and pitied her for that. I fancied her courage, her foolhardiness. Yet I wondered, with a bitter smile, if there could really be an escape from the House.
I thought I’d escaped, too.
▴ ▴ ▴
Before the House, there had been the Station.
The junkyard, or the butcher’s floor, where the memory strived to exist only in shivers and fragments.
The Station in short; the Comfort Station in full.
Meaning of their comfort, we learned it the hard way. A bunch of hungry Korean teenage girls, leaving our home country for Japan. Factory work, they’d promised. No factory of things, it turned out—a factory of men, Japanese soldiers, in the jungle of Semarang, Indonesia, of mosquitoes, blood and rusty perspiration.
Soldiers, day after day. Sober and drunk. Sometimes missing an eye, a tip of a finger. Grease of their hands. Sweat. Semen, salty as fish, dripping. Screams came first. Silence of give-up the second. They let opium, penicillin, mercury swim in our veins. They beat us up, then sang us a lullaby. Girls died. One after another. Of malaria. Or from flogging, choking. And of all the maladies that dye the thing between your legs black, purple. Of wombs stolen, without full anesthesia, half-open eyes watching the warm tight knot pulled away from your body, a small clenched fist wrapped in blood.
Suicide was a dream we weren’t allowed to achieve.
At the Comfort Station, I met Yongmal, the owner of my pseudonym: a funny name actually, with the Chinese character for dragon and a Korean one of horse put together—two letters rarely used in a girl’s name. Yongmal was the fool, the clown. The storyteller who kept us up at night. They could never shut her up, even after they took two of her front teeth away. When the lights were out, she whispered, breathing tales down on our necks. Words spilled out: the name of her mother, sighs of her dad, the year of her first pony born, the day of her first period, first wine tasted, the tall tales of her horse-riding and puppy love and all the sweetness and stupidity of her childhood, tales of home. We were in love with her gap-toothed smile, her giggles. Every night, with her stories, she brought down the whole house.
Yongmal kept the home, fading inside us, alive. Though she died in the Station, she’d wanted me to survive. She’d wanted me to escape the damn place and go home. In a way she was lucky, I thought, for she would never know what you called home would no longer be there, eaten up by another war. She would never know I was to be thrown back inside walls again by the same hands that had saved me: those of the Allied Forces, of American soldiers, which had put a grand end to the Pacific War.
▴ ▴ ▴
As time went by, the reason why they put me on the job became clear, as the unofficial manager and interpreter of the House. In their eyes I was a little boy, never a man, thus an unlikely tomcat to put his little dirty paws on their meat, the wartime victual reserved for the Yankees only. They were intent on keeping the girls’ bodies as unspoiled as possible, to keep their military bodies healthy, working. They must have thought that their House, along with its secret, was safe and sound. They didn’t know they’d let a bug in—a wrong one with sharp little teeth, slowly gnawing at its four corners.
When Jenny was locked up in the Monkey Room for three days, I was to watch her, make sure she wouldn’t run away again, or die. Most of the time she wasn’t fully herself, only able to moan or scream. In rare moments, however, when she did flash her real self, we talked. As much as I was drawn to her, I was appalled by her; I knew where her audacity would take her, I’d seen it, and I couldn’t afford another loss. Yet still, we talked. And I smuggled in more food and water for her. I was a listener mostly, she the talker. Though I had some stories spill, I tried to keep quiet, for I knew it was better for both of us. Like Yongmal, Jenny talked a lot of home. She also told me how she’d come to the House; all it took to get her here, she said, was two bags of barley. My little sisters had been starving for days, so I happily took their food and wrote down my damn name on their list. How the hell could I know what Namrodang was? she howled. A young girl who couldn’t even go near the school gate?
▴ ▴ ▴
With time, I got used to the routine of the House—Jenny also helped me learn its ins and outs. Two doctors visited the House: one Korean, another American. The Korean one came more frequently, each time with a nurse and a box full of needles and vials. The White one appeared only once every few weeks. He never engaged in the treatment directly; he was rather an observer, reading charts, taking note of progress or degradation. And once a month, just like they did in the Station, they took all the women out, put them in the back of their military truck, and drove to the big military hospital in the city, where the women underwent a more thorough checkup.
I knew where they kept the medical supplies. They were stacked in the makeshift storage room on the second floor, near the entrance of the Monkey Room, to which I had no access. The night-prowling Korean warden carried the key with him always. I figured he never fully trusted me with the girls or the valuables. It wasn’t an issue for me, however: I was a natural-born pickpocket who’d been surviving the war, with no shame, through stealing. Not only did I steal warmth from other bodies, I also took their valuables. Their meal, money, medicine—you name it. Whatever they’d buried in their bosoms got me though one day after another.
And poisoning wasn’t a stranger to me—not at all. It was a face in a crowd, familiar, shooting me a furtive smile. Or a little sentinel, keeping guard on my pocketful of dirty dark secrets. With you, I’ve already toppled down two men, she susurrated into my ears. Yes, poisoning was she, not he, for it was, they say, a feminine way of doing it: underhanded and insidious, therefore never manly enough a fashion. For me, it was the only fashion conceivable, as helpless as I had been, stripped of choices and dignity. You feel no shame turning to the only set of teeth you’re left with. Poison, for the love of God, was true democracy, for it didn’t discriminate—it would get you, rich or poor, communist or capitalist, woman or man.
▴ ▴ ▴
Though tempted, I never revealed my true self to Jenny, to any other woman of the House. As much as I longed to save them, I struggled to preclude myself from attachment. I’d avoided having any small talks with them. I evaded, or ignored, their soliciting eyes. I knew those faces would visit my dreams even long after the smell of shellfire died out. I strived not to remember their names, all those familiar disyllables that would roll on my tongue if I let them. All except for Jenny, of course.
I felt that Jenny, like Yongmal, came into my life by a certain force, over which I had no control. I wished her hawky eyes, those disturbing yet exciting little glares, would remain forever as treacherous, as full of fight. I wished I would always remember her that way. So when the day dawned—the morning of the monthly medical checkup in the city, the morning when I worked up those deceitful slipknots under all the women’s wrists, which could easily come undone at one long gentle tug, after putting the warden’s revolver under Jenny’s knickers, the gun with only one bullet missing, the one now wedged somewhere between the sleeping guard’s two ears, the gun, I told her, to be pulled out only when the truck would decelerate along the steep, serpentine path through the mountain, to be shot in the back of the driver’s head as soon as she and other women quietly freed their hands from the slipknots, the morning when I fed the truck driver the half-true lie that the warden had passed out under the influence again, the big morning, if luck would remain in their favor, of their only shot at escape—I did something to Jenny I hadn’t really planned on: I hugged her. I pulled her toward me and held her tight from behind, stealing a shard of her warmth, giving her a little of mine too, so now I had a piece of her, she of me. I felt her jutting rib cage purr gently in my arms. Neither of us moved. Albeit briefly, no woes of the world could scathe us.
The real problem lay within the House itself. Even with the warden down, the driver and the guard down, the House would always be there, making it impossible for us to escape from it, even long after we were taken out of those walls. So I’d started to pilfer fuel. Anything that’s a fan of flame, in fact: gasoline for the truck, kerosene for the stove, rubbing alcohol out of the doc’s white box, even that stinking liquor the warden had stashed behind the kitchen shelf. I’d poured a wee bit of cloudy toxic liquid into his liquor bottle instead and got my syringe full of morphine ready. I’d felt an ironic gratitude toward the doctors, toward the warden; like many other slaves, I’d learned how to wear the look of an I-know-nothing halfwit while keeping an eye and ear wide open, constantly picking up crumbs of knowledge from the master. How odd had it been in the end—to watch the warden’s face in peace, in complete surrender to the big sleep, at odds with his usual air of anxiety, the big nervous eyes incessantly on the rove, ready to swoop down on any sign of a scampering mouse. I gave him the respite he’d needed badly.
I knew its raw, tender guts underneath the sturdy skin. The iron-gray outside of the House was nothing but a veneer, sheltering the warm, fragrant frame of wood.
If one can’t really get out of the House, I figured, why not turn it inside out?
Carefully, I injected the concoction of the stolen liquid into its skeleton, dousing every column, crossbeam, every corner of the parquet floors with the piercing perfume of the inflammables, feeling its sweet and sinister aroma lift my head, make it float around the House as though I had no body, an odd grin curving my lips, my eyes.
I could have left the area immediately. Instead, I walked slowly up the mountain hill surrounding the back of the House, and I stole myself into the teal thickness of its woods. I spent the entire morning there, hidden, watching.
I saw the thin flapping wings of firebirds through the barred windows, warming up their little bodies to take flight. Burn baby, burn—my lips moved without a sound.
What a beauty. What a pleasure it was. To burn, to see things smolder, disappear into the dances of the amber tongues, driving each other wilder, thicker, at each caprice they conjured. It happened much faster than I thought, a hundred strands of those scalding tongues sticking out through the bars, licking, caressing up the wall, painting blazing black over the dull gray. Soon, along with a change in the course of the wind, the House blew one of his last breaths, sending the flickering fireflies in my direction, the beautiful remnants of flame that tickled my face, leaving petite smudges of darkness on my skin that I would probably never be able to wash away, that I would rather wear proudly. Now the crossbeams began to rumble down, dozens of them, giving up a roaring round of applause. For one last time, I put my index finger right under my nose, breathing in the lingering scent of kerosene. I drank its headiness to the lees. Then I took one last good look at the collapsing maws that had once been the steel-guarded windows of the House. They’d probably thought those iron sticks could keep their dirty secret forever in. They just didn’t know they’d let the wrong bug in—a firebug, a coat-turning little trickster that set their roof on fire, set to bring down the whole damn House.