the Japanese. They will put them right up … up on … on the front lines …” Meiko and her baby sister watched as their mother choked on this knowledge as if it were poison. Over days and weeks, Meiko’s father would try different ways to comfort his wife, and grew frustrated at his inability to do so. This precipitated even more arguments between them. Their fights raged for hours in the evenings, growing so intense that Meiko and her sister had to hide away from them in the small bedroom they shared.
It was on a morning during the height of these battles that Meiko, now thirteen years old, discovered the sticky marks of blood that had arrived overnight in her underpants. She found them while dressing for school. She did have an inkling about these blood marks, suspecting that they were not uncommon for a woman. She sometimes found faint droplets of crimson left behind in the squat toilet if she used the bathroom immediately after her mother. But still, Meiko convinced herself that this blood was a dire omen of illness, and to share this news would only add to her mother’s stress. She found a rag to place between her legs before dressing and hoped the bleeding would go away. Yet the discharge got worse the next day and worse still the day after, until Meiko had to discreetly drag her mother into the bathroom, close the door and show her what was happening.
At first, a blush of pride swept over her umma. “Oh my wise little crane, this just means you are becoming a woman,” she said, taking the girl’s face into her hands. “I should have mentioned something to you long before this.” She went on to explain how the girl should expect a number of days’ bleeding each month, and when it came she was to place a special kind of cloth in her underpants to catch the flow. But no sooner had her mother finished this instruction than a shadow darkened her face, as if a delayed reaction, an ominous and barely spoken secret, began sinking through her like a stone through water. “My sweet child,” she said, and began weeping. “We must figure out … what we’re going to do about this …”
Do about what? Meiko thought. About the blood? Or about me becoming a woman?
Meiko soon became the focal point of her parents’ arguments. Her father was adamant that she now leave school to get a job. The plant had yet again cut his wages, and even with the boys off at war he still struggled to feed his wife and two remaining children. “She could become a cleaner or errand girl,” he said. “Or she could use her Japanese to work in an office somewhere. That would bring in some money.”
“Absolutely not,” her mother said. “We must find a matchmaker and get her a husband. Now that she is a woman.” Meiko’s mother knew that other families were rushing their teenaged daughters into a chungmae — an arranged marriage. Girls not much older than Meiko were getting paired up with neighbourhood widowers who were often twice or three times their age. Meiko’s father scoffed. “Marriage? So soon? She’s only thirteen. Besides, who in this neighbourhood could afford an acceptable dowry for a girl with seven years of schooling and good Japanese?”
On a day during the peak of this bickering, Meiko spoke up for herself. “I don’t want a chungmae, and I don’t want a job right now,” she blurted from her ring of homework on the floor, interrupting her parents in mid fight. She climbed to her feet to face them. “I want to stay in school until I’m eighteen and then join the Jungshindae. To support you and father. And then, when the war is over, I want to find a yonae.” They both stopped to stare at her, nearly burst into laughter at Meiko’s use of that word: yonae, a love match.
“You naive fool,” her father spat at her.
“My little crane, this is not practical,” her mother said. “You don’t understand what is happening to our country. We must find you a husband right away. You shouldn’t —”
“Mother, it’s you who placed me in school. It’s you who always said it’s important to learn everything you can. Why has the blood between my legs suddenly changed that?”
Her father took two large steps across their wooden floor and struck Meiko hard on the face. She fell in a heap amidst her homework. He stood over her, trembling in rage. “What did my ancestors ever do to burden me with this life?” he quaked. “To live in a house full of vulgar whores? Am I not the head of this family?” He looked at his wife, at Meiko, at Meiko’s sister who was watching the fight from her bedroom door, her eyes filling with silent tears. “We’re all going to starve,” he said, then walked over to grab a jacket off the hook by the door. “Don’t blame me. We’re all going to starve.” And then he was gone outside, into a street vandalized with Japanese signs he could not read.
Meiko remained in school mostly by default because her parents refused to agree on what to do with her. School seemed to be the safest place to be, even if every class simply groomed the girls to serve the Japanese empire. By Grade Nine, Meiko and her classmates had flowered into silent and hardworking servants of the Emperor, skilled at music and storytelling, experts at keeping their faces pleasantly devoid of emotion. They came to class with their hair tied into the long, twisted braids that were the Korean symbol of chastity, and their developing bodies were covered in the unflattering tent of hanbok, the traditional Korean dress.
One day, their teacher announced they were having a special guest to class. She welcomed him in and told the girls he was a well-respected Japanese businessman. He took his place in front of the blackboard, his masculinity so foreign in the room. To Meiko’s eyes, he didn’t look like a businessman; he looked like an army sergeant. The teacher made some more introductions and then turned the class over to him.
“How many of you have older brothers?” the man began. Several girls, including Meiko, raised their hands. “And how many of those brothers have been shipped off to fight for the Emperor?” None of the hands went down. “And how many of you have fathers who work in factories or on construction sites, barely making enough to feed whatever remains of your families?” Most hands stayed in the air, including Meiko’s. The man nodded as if he knew all along what the answers would be. “Well, I am here today to offer you all an opportunity. An opportunity to provide for your families in a way that your men cannot.” He told them that Japan was prepared to offer each girl a year-long job in a new textile factory in the Japanese city of Shimonoseki. The government would cover everything: their transportation to and from Japan, their accommodations while there, their meals and clothes and entertainment. And the jobs themselves would be some of the highest-paying in the Empire. “You’ll most likely make more money than your fathers, and you’ll be able to send those earnings home each month to help out your families. There will also be extra pay for those willing to work extra hours.”
The girls were too frightened and excited to raise a single question. Meiko thought: Why us? Why not just send our fathers? But kept her “why” questions to herself.
“Go home tonight and discuss it with your parents,” the man said. “It’s a big decision. You’ll be away from your families for a year. But the journey will not be too arduous: Just a train ride south to Pusan and then a ferry across the Sea of Japan to Shimonoseki. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, come to the Tanghu train station two Sundays from now, in the morning, and we’ll provide you with more information. You won’t have to make any decisions then. But we can at least tell you more about this and begin filling out the necessary paperwork should you decide to say yes.”
For the next few days, Meiko could not keep Shimonoseki out of her thoughts. Walking the streets of her neighbourhood with the early January snow falling, she kept pondering what it would be like to live and work there and become the main provider for her family. Was this not what she had been training herself for all these years? It was a Korean girl’s duty to be silent, respectful, and hardworking. She knew she had probably failed at the first two, but at least she was capable of hard work. Her studies had proven that. She could go away and make enough money to put an end to her parents’ bickering.
She came home one afternoon about a week
