Heo-nae

Cassidy Law, Hong Kong

These thoughts will never reach you. These words will never be read or heard. You will never know that I am thinking of you, now, at the end. But I miss you, and your chicken porridge that makes home smell like home, and the river where we used to catch fish together.

I want to come home.

Two months ago, they brought in a batch of new girls again. One of them was from Taegu. She was so frightened, crying for her mother, the way I had when I first arrived. When Akiko pressed the worn, soiled cloth that used to be Sayaka’s into her hand and taught her how to put it inside herself, she still couldn’t understand. She couldn’t fathom the hell this was, until after the sun went down and the soldiers came. I listened to her wail and scream, so weary in my own suffering I could only wonder: when would she learn that it was all futile?

The next morning, Akiko found her dead in what used to be Sayaka’s room. She told me the girl hanged herself, a far better fate we all secretly craved but didn’t have the courage of pursuing, but she didn’t know I had already seen the body. I saw the wound on her head, where a soldier must have bashed it against the wall when she fought back. I saw the fingerprints on her throat, a purple collar stark against the paleness of her skin, and those on her arms and waist, holding her down so she couldn’t flee. I saw the stains left behind, proof of soldiers abusing her broken body, long after she drew her last breath.

She was only thirteen, the same age I had been when I was taken to this comfort station. It is for girls like me and her, taken unfairly, that we fight back.

If I don’t make it back to you, these are my last thoughts, addressed to you. Would you know, if I do not survive? Would you feel something break, and fall to your knees weeping? Or would you thank the deities for finally taking mercy upon my weary soul? I hope that you do not weep for me, for the girl you raised, the girl who laughed by the river, who helped you stir the porridge, is long gone. She died a long time ago, in a small room where sunlight barely got through, under a man much like the ones who come every night.

In your sorrow, would you lie restless at night, wishing for closure? You deserve to know the story of my three years spent as a comfort woman for the Japanese soldiers. It began two months ago, the day after the girl from Taegu died, as I lay motionless beneath one man after another, dreaming of you and our river.

***

When the soldiers’ faces began to blur together into an unidentifiable, terrifying mass of flesh and I could no longer keep track of how many there had been, panting on top of me, I tried to drown myself in memories of childhood, when I was pure and innocent and carefree, playing by the river.

In my mind, cold water splashed onto my face. Laughing, I let you push me into the river, and the currents pulled me downwards. I welcome the lightweight feeling of being underwater; it separated me from the outside world, holding me within a sphere of turquoise and deep blue which no one could penetrate save for the curious fish swimming past. It felt like liberation.

It was only a daydream.

The soldier pulled out of my body, panting hard, his breath hot on my face. ‘There’s a good girl,’ he said in thick, accented Korean. ‘Next time, I'll look for you, Manami.’

Manami – this was the Japanese name Obaasan gave me when I arrived, stripping me of the name and identity I always bore, rendering me just another faceless girl – a comfort woman, though the name was darkly ironic – stationed here, whose only purpose is to satisfy the delicate needs of Japanese soldiers. Our Korean names, Obaasan declared, were too confusing, too difficult for soldiers to remember. Better to give us Japanese names, to give the soldiers a sense of comfort and home.

At long last, dawn arrived, returning the soldiers to their military duty. I was glad to see them go. Even the slightest movement brought a new wave of pain – I could not bring myself to wonder if it was a symptom of syphilis or chlamydia, both currently rampant in our comfort station and had taken the life of Sayaka – but I was desperate to wash off the stench of sweat and blood, even if I would never feel clean again, and each night only brought more ‘visitors’. A hand clutched against my abdomen, I limped slowly towards our common bathroom, where we took turns sharing the few basins of water.

‘The Japanese are losing,’ Akiko’s hushed voice reached me through the half-closed door. She was the prettiest of us all, a favourite among the higher-ranked officers who were occasionally so satisfied with her ‘service’ they let her in on military secrets.

‘Does it mean our countrymen might rescue us?’ Maaya asked, uncertain hope in her voice. She was one year older than me, having just reached seventeen, but sometimes it felt as if she was younger. She had been able to retain that childish naivety and bravery to hope for better days. Mine had long been squashed and left to die.

Akiko shook her head as she passed the water basin over to me. ‘I doubt a few dozens of country girls stolen from their mothers’ arms would be a priority. But last night, the general muttered something about being stationed elsewhere. If the nearby military camp was relocated, it might give us an opportunity to escape.’

I flinched at the terrifying prospect Akiko was raising. We all longed for escape, but we dared not even let the word cross our minds. It would not end well. I was the living example of that.

‘Even if the camp is relocated, you would still have to make it past Obaasan, the guards, and the electric fence,’ I said quietly, because being cruelly pragmatic was better than seeing them lifeless at my feet. ‘It’s impossible. You will never make it.’

Almost unconsciously, my hand strayed tentatively to my back, where ugly scars mapping the story of how I tried to escape and failed.

I could not recall the first week I spent here in clear images, as if my brain was trying to protect me from reliving it again. Shots and snippets of it came to me in my nightmares, greasy hands grabbing my hair, unrecognizable faces one after another, sharp, unbearable pain that shot through my entire body, ripping me into half until all I heard were the echoes of my scream and cries. He could not fit into the body of a thirteen-year-old, but to them, we were not fellow creatures to be treated with dignity, only tools to use. So he kept shoving, not stopping even as I bled and bled and cried and cried and begged and pleaded.

I had not known how to drown myself in the refuge of my mind then. Escape had seemed so tempting, the only sensible thing to do.

There was no thought in my head as I bolted. Someone – probably one of the older girls called after me, panic lacing through their voices because they had seen too many girls die in an attempt to escape. If only I had been fortunate enough to enjoy the luxury of a quick death.

Obaasan caught me before the bullets or electric fence could. Pulling me by my hair, she dragged me back to the station all the way through the yard, as I sobbed and kicked and thrashed in her hold. In front of everyone, she stripped me naked and whipped me across my back, punishment for being so ungrateful as to try to escape when the empire had given us purpose.

The scars would remain on my back for all of eternity, etching my pain into the ridges of my body. Every time the shadow of pain returned, I would be reminded of my powerlessness. It was a reminder that we could never hope to rewrite the story of our lives, overturn the hand fate had chosen to deal us with.

‘What can be worse than our lives right now?’ Akiko demanded, refusing to back down. She had always been the fiercest of us all. ‘Tell me you aren’t tired of being a plaything, used and discarded whenever they want. Tell me you wouldn’t trade everything – anything – just to see our families again.’ Her voice broke. ‘Because I will. I’ve made myself survive so long just for this... a chance to live the life we should have had.’

‘They think they can scrub us clean and stamp us with their own names. Look at us! We are covered in scars and bruises. Everywhere on our bodies, we see their marks, their hands.’ She spat on the floor, fiery and defiant in the morning light. ‘But we’re still under there, somewhere. We can be ourselves once more, if only we dare to fight back.’

For a moment, I let myself visualize days where I did not have to wake up, dreading death either by chlamydia or a violent soldier. I wanted to believe Akiko and feel that defiant fire. But all I felt was the shredding pain of Obaasan’s whip, the phantom pain across my back, the certainty that any attempt would end in death.

I turned away from her that day, and I did not pledge myself to her cause. I wonder if you would be disappointed at my cowardice. You, who always taught me to be brave and strong.

Over two agonizingly slow months, the plotting intensified. The girls gathered their information, piece by piece, at the cost of their dignity. The hope in their eyes grew, and I could not escape it. It seeped into the cracks of my despair, and despite my certainty of failure, I began to feel it too–a wild, treacherous, beautiful hope that terrified me more than the soldiers ever could.

The day of the escape dawned dark and overcast, the sky heavy with unshed tears. The bell sounded for the changing of the guards, and Obaasan's shrill voice cut through the morning air, demanding we begin our work.

They expected meek, broken girls. In all the time they had been here, they never saw their commands met with resistance, their abrasiveness met with anything but terrified obedience. With the element of surprise on our side, we almost thought we stood a chance.

Obaasan and the guards could not have expected to be tackled by angry, desperate girls, who tied their torn, dirty nightclothes around their necks and pulled; they could not have expected to have their guns wrestled away, the weapons once fitting so smugly into their hands slamming into the back of their heads in a reversal of power they would never have thought possible; they could not have expected for the younger girls to tear at the electric fence with a ferocity even the battlefields had never witnessed.

It was violence like I had never seen, a silent desperation that turned into a raw, guttural scream. I had endured violence at the hands of men for three years, but I had never seen the rage and pain of girls who had nothing more to lose, not even their lives.

And even now, as I witnessed this tragic, beautiful, one last stand against the abuse we had suffered, a voice still whispered at the back of my mind: what if it wasn’t sweet freedom that awaited us as dusk fell, but the end of a rifle, dark and unforgiving as the blow of death we were sure to receive? What if this hope proved to be nothing but foolish fantasy, what if we failed to weave the strands of tragedies into new beginnings?

Obaasan appeared, screaming at us to stop, to remember our ingratitude to the empire that had given us purpose. Her voice was a shrill, distant nuisance. I saw one of the guards raise his rifle. I heard the crack of gunfire. I saw Maaya fall to the ground, her eyes wide with shock. Then Hina. Himari. Ayaka. The bullets buried themselves into their targets, and they were dead before their bodies hit the grass.

But they kept running. They had broken through the fence. Freedom was a mere hundred yards away – a thicket of trees, a river roaring with life, and beyond that, I did not know what. But it was away. It was elsewhere. It was not here.

Yet I was still standing in the courtyard, watching chaos unfold around me, watching the death of these ferocious girls, paralyzed with fear.

‘Run!’ Akiko grabbed my hand, pulling me towards the gap in the fence. ‘Come with us, Manami.’

And in that moment, something broke open inside me. The Japanese name, the name they thrusted upon me as if I was only something they owned and could freely rename, the name that meant ‘love for the sea’, the name that was not mine – it felt like a chain around my neck, heavier and more bruising than any man’s hand had been. I looked at Akiko, her face streaked with tears and blood, her eyes wild with hope that had taken root inside me and blossomed into defiance of the same shade, and I shook my head. For the first time in three years, I spoke my truth.

‘Heo-nae,’ I whispered. ‘My name is Heo-nae.’

I wish there was a way to let you know, it was your face I saw in my mind then, your voice that whispered to me ‘Be brave, Heo-nae’. It was the memory of you that gave me the strength to reclaim the name I had lost with my childhood. Yet Akiko did not hear me over the gunfire. She just pulled me forward, and I ran with her, towards the unknown, towards the life I had been denied.

***

I can hear the pursuit behind us. The guards are shouting. Gunshots echo in the woods and within my ears, raining death upon us. Amidst the chaos, I have been separated from Akiko. I do not know if she has made it. All I can focus on is my own survival. I am running faster than I have ever run in my life. The river is so close that I hear the rush of water, the sound of freedom and play and innocence.

I burst through the treeline, and there it is. Its waters are dark and swift, but if I cross it, I may be safe. I do not allow myself a second thought. I plunge into the water, hoping it will carry me away, hoping it will wash me clean, hoping it will deliver me to you.

The cold is a cruelty I do not expect, after everything else. I have underestimated the strength of its currents, and overestimated my physique. Three years of starvation and abuse have left me frail. I kick and I flail, but the water has grabbed hold of me. I feel a sharp pain in my back. A bullet?

My movements grow sluggish, and I feel as if I am not in possession of my body.

Cold water rushes into my lungs, which try their very best to expel the intrusion, to no avail. I claw at water, soundless scream swallowed up by the apathetic river – where is the turquoise sanctuary of my childhood dreams? I thought that the desperate, animal instinct to survive had long been beaten out of me, but I was wrong, because my lungs are burning to take in more air, and I am desperate to get home to you.

Do not take me. Wordlessly, I plead the deities whom I have long stopped believing, begging any who might have enough mercy to heed the prayers of a girl they have long forsaken. Let me come home.

And yet, the cold embrace of the river is so relaxing, so intoxicatingly familiar I slowly close my eyes. Because I am feeling it again, the sensation that belonged solely to childhood, to times with you, to days I thought were long gone – the weightlessness of being underwater, the way it separated me from the world, the way it held me in a sphere of deep blue that no one could penetrate.

I know it will not be long before I lose all thoughts and feelings, but my panic gives way to something lighter. I have my name back. I am Heo-nae. I am your daughter. I am not just a comfort woman, a plaything, a broken thing. I am a girl who laughed by the river. I am a girl who loved your chicken porridge. I am a girl who was loved, who belonged.

I will never see you again, will never feel your solid embrace again. But know that I am thinking of you, at the end. Know that I tried. Know that I did not die as Manami, the faceless girl. I died as Heo-nae, your daughter, running towards freedom, even if I never reached it.

Be brave, Heo-nae. I can almost hear your gentle voice, calling out to me.

I tried to be brave, Mom. I am brave. I smile as I see your face above the rippling water, unchanged despite the years that have gone by. I let out a whoop of joy as you pull me up from the water, as I close my eyes and inhale deeply, drawing in the smell of the river and the trees and your chicken porridge.

I am home, I whisper to you, to myself, to resounding silence.

Cassidy is an 18-year-old writer, about to tumble into university and the strange, terrifying business of becoming an adult. Most days, she's in a theatre, a bookstore, or a café with a laptop and a deadline she's ignoring.