Whenever I stopped cleaning or gluing to stretch cramping fingers or crack my stiff neck, I heard the sounds of a woman being kicked because she had used an old shirt as a sanitary pad. Or I heard a man sigh loudly as he urinated on the body where he had just pumped his seed.
And always, a low rumbling underlying every step I took at the mission house, I heard the grinding of trucks delivering more men and more military supplies: food rations, ammunition, boots, and new women to replace the ones that died, their bodies erupting in pus.
I remember thinking that I could not stop cleaning, washing, cooking, gluing, because if I did, the camp sounds would envelop me and I would be back there, trying to silence the noises I made eating, crying, relieving myself, breathing, living. As long as I was quiet, there was the hope that I would be overlooked and allowed to die in the darkness.
Each day, I woke in silence, not sure of where I was. Then, when I sat up, saw the Jesus-on-the-cross hanging on the back of the door, and realized I was in the Mentholatum building with the missionaries, I would begin to hear the thunder of delivery trucks and the grinding metal of gears shifting. The rumbling of the trucks would get louder and louder, and I knew that if I did not jump out of bed and hurry into action, I would be delivered into the camps once again.
I worked hard at the mission house, holding on to the labor to keep from spinning back into myself.
Because I could not risk looking away from my chores, it took me a long time to recognize the others staying in the home. Every day, I met the same people over and over again as if for the first time. No matter how many times I would glance at the faces floating by and away from me, I was never able to catch and hold on to the individual features of each person.
The missionaries saved several girls by pretending to hire them as employees of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company. Used as a shield from the Japanese, who, not trusting foreign influences, discouraged Christianity but encouraged businesses for the revenue that could be sent back to the Emperor, the Mentholatum and Matches building had been erected at the start of the Japanese occupation and now appeared generations old.
Roughly my age, the girls who were rescued were round-faced and pretty in their innocence, as I once had been. They braided their hair with bright-colored ribbons that flashed against their black hair and uniforms when they marched out of their common sleeping quarters and into the kitchen. Like children, they squirmed in their seats, stifling giggles and gossip when I swept past them.
Later, when I could once again hear what others heard, I caught their whispers flying against me: Why does the minister always save the sweetest pastry for the devil girl? And see how he always touches her head, gives her the prettiest ribbons for her braid?
Even the missionaries gossiped. I heard Sister Red Nose say, The wild child is possessed, a false light luring away the faithful. Sister Milk Breath, giving me the name that Manshin Ahjima predicted would be mine at the mission, muttered, Mary Magdalene, a curse, whenever I passed her way.
Once, when questioned to his face about his treatment of me, the minister smiled, a fleeting quirk of the lips, and said, What man of you, having a hundred sheep, doth not leave the ninety and nine to go after that one which is lost, until he finds it?
Putting his hand on my head, he looked at his sheep until they dropped their eyes. Rejoice, he said to them, for I have found a lamb that once was lost.
Later the young girls fluttered around me. Will the handsome minister save you? they giggled.
I wish he would save me, one said.
As long as he saves me some ribbon, another grumbled. Akiko must get more than her fair share, don’t you, Akiko?
Oh, it’s not fair, the girls cried. Akiko always gets more of everything because they say she’s touched. I think you are just acting. You wait till the war is over, Akiko. Our families will find us and we’ll marry rich men and have everything. What will you have, crazy Akiko, with no family and no mind?
Because they were still young, they had faith that the war would end and the Japanese would be defeated. That their lives would resume their prewar scripts, as if the war and their abandonment caused only a brief stutter in the opera they envisioned for themselves.
Because they were still babies, really, I did not tell them what I knew was true: The war would never end, because the Japanese, like all that was evil, would wait in the shadows, shape-shifting and patient, hoping for a chance to swallow you whole.
I could not seem to differentiate among the missionaries, with their pink skin, mud-and-straw-colored hair, and large noses that blocked the space between their pale, watery eyes. If not for the clothes, I would have had trouble distinguishing the men from the women, for even the women were tall, with big hands and knuckles.
Their actions, too, made it difficult to label them as men and women, for they did not behave as proper men and women. In the world before the camps, the unmarried women and men I knew lived separately. From the age of six, I was taken away from the babies of both sexes and taught the ways of women. Though we would play on the swing, standing tall as we were pushed high enough to see into the boys’ courtyard, girls were not supposed to talk or look at boys. In our family’s home, my sisters and I rarely saw my father. When he was home, we prepared his meals and served him first. After he finished eating and went into the back room to smoke or sleep, we would eat our meal. That was what was respectful.
Even in the camps, where the soldiers banged in and out of the comfort cubicles, in and out of our women’s bodies, what was left of our minds we guarded, kept private and separate.
At the mission house, I was embarrassed by the disrespect between the men and the women. Lives overlapping, men and women ate and worked together. They looked into each other’s faces as they spoke, laughing with mouths open. Even while worshiping, they sat side by side, unseparated by a curtain or sheet, on the same bench, thighs and shoulders almost touching.
I began to recognize the minister because of the way the girls, forgetting or ignoring proper behavior, gathered around him. Like puppies, the girls would fall about his feet and legs, panting for a length of ribbon, a piece of candy, a box of chalk; for writing paper, toothpaste, a kind word. Thank you, Sonsaeng-nim, the girls would sing out, and as if they were pets, the minister would reach out, touching a nose, stroking the hair of those around him.
Stop, he would say. I am not an honored teacher. I am just a child, like you all, in God’s eyes.
But the girls would cry out: No, no, not true! Look at your body, thin and long—an aristocrat’s body! And your hands, so graceful—a scholar’s hands! And your voice, they said, like God’s!
The minister would laugh, saying, Stop! But his eyes would shine like blue glass.
Because I had begun to recognize him as an individual, I watched him carefully, intensely, as if memorizing his features, his gestures, were one of my chores. Often, as he gave away his gifts, he closed his eyes and lifted his chin. Pushing his chest forward, he would open and shut his mouth quickly, pursing his lips, blowing quick puffs of air. After a few days, I realized he was singing.