The dress billowed around me, a bell on the water, and then, caught by the current, entangled me. I fell to my knees.
See how earnest she is, the minister shouted to the witnesses as he yanked on my elbow. What’s the matter with you? he whispered. Get up!
Instead I threw myself facedown into the river. Stolen by the cold, my breath rushed out, bubbling in the river’s froth. I held my body stiff, felt the waters turn me, testing my sturdiness against its rocks, and then I let go. I felt the pull of the river in my legs and my lungs, felt the need to dissolve into her body. I opened my eyes and my mouth to taste her—and then I was yanked by the hair and jerked upward.
I gagged on air. Nose streaming, eyes burning unprotected in the wind, I turned to look at the minister. Wet up to the chest, one hand clutching my hair, he delivered me unto the Lord. I baptize thee, he said, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
He pulled me from the river by the hand and the hair, and as I stumbled away from the river and into the arms waiting along the bank, I felt empty, desolate, abandoned.
Drenched and dripping, I heard someone ask me if I took the minister as husband. I nodded, unable to speak, and then I was led to the cart and given my own clothes.
You are born again, said the woman who had given me my wedding gown. As a Christian, as a wife, and as an American. Congratulations.
Before we left the river’s edge, I reached down to touch the earth. I felt the mud under my hands, then quickly took a pinch into my mouth. I rubbed it across my tongue, the roof of my mouth, and I ground it between my teeth. I wanted to taste the earth, metallic as blood, take it into my body so that my country would always be a part of me.
As thousands of exiled patriots from Manchuria returned to Korea to cheer the enemy’s descent into their own lands, the Christian missionaries and those who followed them were in turn pushed south. We moved toward Seoul, hundreds of us, through a nation we thought free. And just as many people from the south moved north. In the months when all directions were open for travel, people roamed the country, searching for family members and homes, pieces of their lives and themselves that were severed and scattered during the war. Or they moved to escape memories, to search for new lives and new homes.
Now, because I have my daughter to protect from restless spirits, I wonder about those dead. Did they follow their sons and daughters across the country? Or did they remain at home, abandoned and uncared for? I think of Induk, who somehow followed me not only across the country but across the world, to become my guardian. I think of my own mother and father, who stayed behind, or got lost, following another daughter or another family. I wonder if their spirits are fed and clothed, content, or if they have turned outlaw and beggar, without kin, without home.
Near Kaesong and Panmunjom, we passed roadblocks set up by the military. I thought of the soldiers at the Yalu River and tried to run away, but the minister husband pulled me alongside him. As we moved toward them, I could feel their eyes studying me—my face, breasts, hips, and poji—judging my worth as a niku-ichi P, and I knew they would pull me aside, question me, ask me how I had escaped, and then send me south to hell, to Japan. But when we moved past them, I saw that they were not even Japanese. Bored, the guards did not look at me at all, or at any of the faces moving past them, but stared instead at a point above the human river, toward the mountains in the north.
And then the soldiers, rifles crossed against their chests, waved us through the barricade, and we were on the other side. It still seems strange to me to think of Korea in terms of north and south, to realize that a line we couldn’t see or feel, a line we crossed with two steps, cut the body of my country in two. In dreams I will always see the thousands of people, the living and the dead, forming long queues that spiral out from the head and feet of Korea, not knowing that when they reach the navel they will have to turn back. Not knowing that they will never be able to return home. Not knowing they are forever lost.
When we arrived in Seoul, we found a room in the Severance Hospital Mission. Since we had left all the belongings from the Pyongyang mission on the cart, we entered the room with nothing but ourselves and the clothes we were wearing. The minister husband pulled me toward the bed, saying, Tell me how to be with you. As man and wife, we will be one flesh.
He held my face in his hands. You do not have to tell me of your past, for whatever you have done, you are now cleansed by the washing of water with the word.
His hands drifted down my neck and settled on my shoulders. He pressed his thumbs into my shoulder blades. I want to drink the water from your cistern and love your body as my own. But I do not know what you know of consummation, he whispered. Do you know what it feels like to take a man, how you will have to stretch and how it will pain you the first time? I will try to go slow.
He pressed me to his chest, tilted his hips toward mine. There will be blood the first time, he said. Do you know?
I knew what it felt like to stretch open for many men, and I knew about blood with the first and with the hundredth, and about pain sharp enough to cut your body from your mind. I could not form the words, but I must have cried out, for the minister husband pushed his lips against my head and said, Don’t worry, sweetie, my little lamb. I will be gentle, he said, and then he bit my neck.
It is better to marry than to burn, he whispered, and I am burning for you. There is something about you—the way you look so innocent, yet act so experienced—that makes me on fire for you. You are not a virgin, are you? he asked.
He cooed to me and petted me, then grabbed and swore at me, as he stripped the clothes from our bodies. When he pushed me into the bed, positioned himself above me, fitting himself between my thighs, I let my mind fly away. For I knew then that my body was, and always would be, locked in a cubicle at the camps, trapped under the bodies of innumerable men.
Without the mission and the sermons that had structured his days, my husband became like a man without a head. We traveled from church to church, drifting toward the tip of the peninsula until we reached the port of Pusan. From there we crossed the ocean, pulled by the missionary’s need to teach the word of his God, continuing his odyssey across the United States, from the Larchmont Presbyterian Church in New York to the Florida Chain of Missionary Assemblies, wherever we could obtain an invitation to teach or study or speak. I would stand by my husband’s side in my Korean dress as he lectured on Spreading the Light: My Experiences in the Obscure Orient.
When we were not in a lecture, the minister husband dressed me in a white blouse pinched in at the waist and a dark-blue skirt that clung to my hips and barely covered my knees. I felt naked in the way the clothes touched my body, but this was the uniform I was to wear as the minister’s wife. During the day, I pulled my hair back into a knot that reminded me that I was married. If I forgot and wore my hair in a long braid slung over my shoulder, the husband would scold me: You look like a little kid. And yet at night that is how he wanted me: hair down in braids to my waist; eyes wide and blank; lips dropped into a pout and ready to cry. At night, when he climbed on top of me, he’d take the ends of my hair, put them into his mouth, and suck. Afterward he’d pull the blankets over me, tucking them around my chin, and ask me to recite my prayers. Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, I would say, while thinking of Induk, her body bathed in a river of light.