The Bronze Girl
by Sara Kaboudvand
[Trigger warning: Story makes reference to experiences of sexual violence.
While difficult to read, these experiences are an important element of telling the story of the Comfort Women of World War II.
As explained by the Association for Asian Studies, the term "'Comfort women' refers to the system of sexual slavery created and controlled by the Imperial Japanese government between 1932 and 1945. It is the largest case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history."
For too long, the story of the Comfort Women has been obscured by the larger story of the atrocities of World War II. This is an opportunity to begin your process of hearing these voices.]
“If we forget, we lose”.
“If we die, they win”.
---
An old woman sat in her wheelchair looking lifelessly out her fifteenth floor apartment window. She cursed at the young girls riding the seesaw in the playground below. Young girls inexplicably provoked her; but young men disgusted her. Something about the fact that girls were the most beautiful when they laughed during play brought her pain; she remembered that she would once laugh and play, too. The idea that such innocence was the item of lust for some young men enraged her in ways others could not comprehend.
---
It was the summer of 1941 when Kim Bok Sun turned fifteen. She loved spending her days painting with her younger sister and dressing up, pretending to be a princess. After they played with ink or their mom’s makeup, Bok Sun and her sister would scrub their hands thoroughly. Bok Sun hated the look of ink on her skin; the dirtiness and discontinuity from her fair, soft skin irked her. When she wasn’t playing, she helped out with household chores so she could one day become the perfect wife that her mother was; she awaited her brothers’ return from school so that they could chase each other in the yard, but most of all, she waited for the handsome prince she knew would soon come and court her.
---
At around ten a.m. Suah, the old woman’s caregiver, arrived. “Good morning eorushin! I just bought ingredients to make kimchi jjigae and samgyeobsal; we are going to have a feast this weekend!”
The old woman briefly looked in her direction, but merely offered a nod of acknowledgement. Suah was not offended by this anymore; after two years together, Suah learned that this old woman was no gentle heart, and even a glance should be taken with great gratitude. Suah sighed as she walked over and grasped the handles of the old woman’s wheelchair to turn her away from the window.
“Aeecham,” remarked the old woman, “I don’t
want to watch the stupid television. Stupid news anchors talking America this America that.”
“But eoreushin, you need to stay informed! Watching a little TV is good for people your age.”
The old woman hated televisions. She thought of them as machines from the future, completely
unwelcome in her home.
“Come on, eoreushin, cheer up! Maybe we can find a nice romance drama to watch.”
She hated romance, too.
As Suah chopped the onions and kimchi in the kitchen, the old woman sat with her eyes shut tightly, trying to drown out the useless blabber of the news anchor. But in the next moment, she heard a word that she had blocked out of her consciousness for six decades. The news anchor
spit it out with absolutely no sensitivity or regard for the pain it caused the old woman -- “Japan”. She felt violent stabs between her legs. The Rising Sun flag flashed its murderous red in the woman’s tearful eyes, and her ears were overtaken by the violent noise from the truck that day.
---
That particular August day was the same as any other. Bok Sun got up from the table to wash off the ink that tinted her hands after a few hours of painting, and that’s when she heard the rumbling of the heavy wheels and the barbaric yelling.
“Koko ni on’nanoko wa imasu ka!” (Are there any girls here!)
Bok Sun had heard of the Japanese soldiers going around to girls’ houses and taking them away; her best friend had been taken a couple weeks ago. Bok Sun’s mother reluctantly stepped out of the house, wiping her hands on her long dress.
“Hello, officers. My daughters are not home. They are with my husband.”
Why did her mother lie? Bok Sun was young and innocent, but smart enough to know her mom would only lie if she sensed danger. So Bok Sun quietly took her younger sister by the wrists and swiftly led her to hide in the cupboards. But it didn’t matter
“Yokotawatte iru Josenjin meinu!” (Lying Josenjing bitch!)
The men stormed the house destroying everything in their way. When they finally found the girls, they took them by the hair and dragged them to the yard.
“AGE!”
Bok Sun tried her best to soothe her sobbing sister.
“ANSWER! AGE!”
“Juu go desu.” (It’s fifteen.)
She already knew her sister could not answer. “And my sister is twelve.”
The men smirked and cracked jokes Bok Sun would only understand fifteen years later, and animalistically scanned Bok Sun’s body up and down.
“Fifteen. Get in the car.”
One man slapped her desperate mother unconscious and proceeded to clutch her younger
sister’s screaming mouth with his dirty hands. The other carried a frantic Bok Sun on his shoulders and threw her onto the back of the truck. To her surprise, there were other girls. Some seemed her age, some in their early twenties. The older ones were hugging the younger ones, and Bok Sun shifted next to a girl who told her she was seventeen.
“They are taking us to a cotton factory. They said we can all be together, and that we will make money to send to our families”.
Bok Sun liked the idea of that, so she stopped crying.
When they arrived, there were lines of soldiers laughing and hollering at the truck. They threw words that she roughly translated to “sexy”, “naked”, “mine”. They made thrusting motions with their hips and stuck their disgusting tongues out. This wasn’t a cotton farm.
---
“Lunch is ready!”
Suah wheeled the old woman to the usual spot at the dining table and positioned her in front of a bowl of steaming white rice.
“What is this?” The old woman motioned to the sausages plated a few inches away from her bowl.
“They’re sausages! I thought you might like to try them!”
In a flash, the old woman flipped the plate of sausages, launching them into the air for a brief moment before they landed with the crash of the breaking plate. “No American food.”
---
In the winter of 1945, a group of American soldiers visited the camp and brought “American snacks”. Sausages, chocolates, biscuits. The Americans also brought “cameras”.
They told Bok Sun that they would take a picture of her and her best friend to show their families. The girls had talked about how much they missed their families, how they wished there was a way to tell them they were okay. So they posed together, holding each other tightly and flashed their radiant smiles; radiant enough to cover the agony that was their life.
The American soldiers looked at the girls and smiled amongst themselves. She didn’t understand “American” at the time, so luckily what they were saying didn’t hurt her at that moment.
“My, maybe we should get some Korean prostitutes for ourselves.”
Later Bok Sun asked her Dutch friend what the one word she caught meant. When it was translated, the girls cried because it was impossible to mend the pain that followed when the atrocities they were facing were narrowed down to the word “prostitute”. She threw up for the first time in a while.
---
The day went by as meaninglessly as the other days, and before she could take another arduous breath, it was ten p.m.. Suah undressed the old woman and prepared her pajamas. The old woman was always overcome with a sensation of shame when she was naked in front of another. She didn’t mind it, though; but it wasn’t like she felt anything anymore.
After getting ready for bed, the old woman and Suah sat in front of the television for the late night news. When they turned to the channel, the old woman was caught off-guard for the second time that day.
“Pyunghwa Park, along with the South Korean government ,has announced its official reveal of
the Statue of Peace, tomorrow morning, at eight a.m.”
The woman had seen pictures of this statue for a couple months now, deeply triggered every time by how much it resembled her sisters from the truck. Now it was at the park only five minutes from her house. She was suddenly overcome with a flurry of determination.
Suah tucked her into bed around eleven, completely unaware of the plan the woman was formulating. The woman’s back hit the soft mattress, but despite the warmth and comfort of her own bed, she was taken back to the sharp, cramped wooden platform against which her body was slammed every night for four years.
---
That first night, Bok Sun stayed crouched in the corner of the wooden booth, trying to hide from the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong. The frail wooden door swung open fiercely revealing two heavy-breathing, sweaty, dirty, indescribably hideous Japanese soldiers. Bok Sun’s first instinct was to run, but there was no place to run to. One man grabbed her by her short hair and the other ripped the ribbon tying her hanbok closed. She was naked in an instant.
Her mother had taught her from a young age how important it was for a woman to protect her body, and never reveal their inner skin to men who were not their husband. She was taught her skin was her dignity; her pride.
Their carnivorous gaze on her exposed skin felt like cockroaches all over her body. In the next few moments, Bok Sun experienced hell, and pain; so much pain. They took turns over and over and it seemed like there was no end. When one was in her, the other pulled her hair and carved her skin. She had no screams or tears left when it was over. The beasts left satiated, and Bok Sun lay on the cold ground with ink in the shape of the Rising Sun in her inner thigh. It was the mark that meant she now belonged to them.
That night she lost her innocence, her dignity, her spirit, and her life. In the morning, she had been a girl, and by the night, she was dead.
---
It was around three a.m. when the old woman gave up on sleep. She heaved her body across the bedsheets to retrieve a box that had been shoved under her vanity table. When she held the box in her hands, she saw that dust balls decorated the crinkled lids, and indistinguishable stains from the past years tainted the beige of the flimsy box. With trembling hands, she opened the box, and the picture stared right up at her. On the left side was a beautiful, slim young girl holding tightly in her arms a slightly less beautiful, but nevertheless innocent, cute girl. Their smiles were contagious but had a vague sense of despair. The old woman remembered the sunlight from that day; how fresh everyone smelled because it had been the girls’ bathing day.
She remembered the flowery fragrance that her friend exuded. And even though she didn’t want
to, she remembered the wicked smiles of the American soldiers behind the camera. She sobbed
at the reminder of the pain these girls were experiencing; the hell they lived, the hell her friend was killed in, and the hell she continues to live in now. She hugged the picture tightly in her
chest and wept the rest of the night away.
---
After a year at the camp, Bok Sun was reunited with her friend Myung Hee. They embraced and cried in each other’s arms, too aware of the suffering of the other. They caressed each other’s markings and scars in hopes that their warmth could outweigh the cold of the torture. Myung Hee was the only thing that kept Bok Sun alive. Again and again, Myung Hee saved Bok Sun from suicide, frantically cutting the rope she tried to hang herself with, drinking away half of the alcohol so there wouldn’t be enough to die, just enough for both to have severe stomach issues. Myung Hee reminded Bok Sun it would be like giving up to die.
“If we die, they win,” she would always say.
In 1945, when the Americans were fast approach-ing to “save the girls” this time, the Japanese soldiers lined them up in a ditch and began shooting them one by one.
“Kill them all! Leave no evidence!”
All the girls could do was sob out the last few tears they had left after years of crying, and wait their turn. In her last moment, Myung Hee gave Bok Sun a handkerchief she had embroidered with her name.
“If you don’t die, remember me. Remember all these girls. Don’t let them forget what they did to us”.
The Americans arrived just in time to force the Japanese soldiers to run off; their last kill was Myung Hee.
---
In the morning , the old woman woke Suah up for the first time.
“Take me to the park”, she said.
Suah rubbed her eyes in confusion; “Where, eoreushin?”
“The park. Pyonghwa Park. I want to go see Myung Hee”.
Suah had so many questions, but she had been with the old woman long enough to know they
wouldn’t be answered. So she got up and got ready to take the woman to the park.
---
“Okay eoreushin, where shall we go? Do you want to take a walk? Look at some flowers?”
“Take me to the girl”.
“The girl… the girl?”
“The bronze girl.”.
“Do you mean the peace statue?”
The old woman nodded.
“Oh, um, alright then.”
When they arrived at the statue, the old woman began wheeling herself closer. Suah tried to help but the woman swatted her away. When she was close enough to touch the statue, the old woman smiled.
“Myung Hee yah, I kept my promise”. The old woman patted the plump cheeks of the statue, tearing up at the thought that it looked so much like her younger self. “I remember still.”
Suah finally understood the past two years. The grimacing when she undressed the old woman, the fear when she would open the door too aggressively, and most of all, the knife marks and hideous scribbles all over her body. Suah fell to the ground in regret and despair.
The old woman reached into her purse and pulled out the handkerchief from sixty years ago. To Suah’s surprise, instead of wiping her own tears, she gently dabbed the eyes and cheeks of the statue.
“It was so hard, wasn’t it? I am sorry for what happened to you,” she said in a shaky voice. She imagined the statue smiling. It gave her comfort. “But it’s okay, Myung Hee yah, it’s over now.”