shawl on its hook. He raised his left hand to show her what had happened: streaking across his blackened knuckles was a dark paste of half-clotted blood. “I got careless with one of the machines,” he told her. “They sent me home to let this heal.” Meiko hurried to her mother’s washtub to fetch a clean rag. She brought the soaked cloth over, knelt in front of him and began washing away the oil and grit seeping into the wound. “There there,” she said with the gentleness of a nurse, “let me look after that for you. Here, turn your hand this way. There. Let me wash that …” She sensed him staring down at the top of her head as she worked on him, and that was when she caught the odour of soju on his breath. It filled her nostrils each time he exhaled. Ah, so you didn’t come straight home after your accident, she thought. Meiko would not look up at him as she washed his hand; she would not look up at him even when he cupped his other hand, also filthy but unmarred, to the side of her head and allowed his fingers to crawl up into her virginal braids. She froze. “My daughter,” he said. “I feel like I fail you every day. Do you know that?”
“Father, don’t say such things,” she swallowed.
He leaned back against the wall, the wicker chair creaking beneath his weight. “Did you find a job today?” he slurred. She resumed cleaning without looking up. He let out a laugh that was tinged with frustration. “Of course you didn’t. Because you’re just a girl. Your mother’s right. You need to be in school for a couple more years and we’ll arrange a chungmae. Then you’ll become some other man’s problem.” When he laughed, his grip on her skull grew tighter, as if he wanted to grind her head into the floor, or somewhere else.
“Father,” she said, “if I am ever offered a job, do you think I should take it?”
He looked down at her with his dark eyes and drew her closer to his lap. He leaned over her until his face was nearly crushed into hers. “I no longer care,” he whispered, his words as poisonous as his breath. “Whatever happens to you, I don’t care. As long as you become another man’s problem before these devils kill me.”
Outside, they could hear Meiko’s sister hurrying up the stone walkway to their house, her mother’s voice hollering behind her. Meiko and her father quickly released their grip on one another. She was just standing up and straightening her dress as her sister burst through the door, her mother appearing a moment later. She looked at the two of them over her canvas sack of vegetables. “What are you doing here?” she asked, and for an instant Meiko thought she had been speaking to her.
Y ou don’t have to make any decisions today. That’s what the man said. You can just come and get more information about the job in Shimonoseki. That’s all.
When Meiko arrived at the Tanghu train station, she found about forty girls standing in a line that snaked up to a long table manned by what were clearly Japanese soldiers. She recognized only a few girls from her class, standing up further in the line. They were dressed as she was — in full hanbok and braids, looking to make a strong impression on these potential employers. But the other girls here were clearly not from their academy or any other. They looked as if they had been shipped in from villages outside of the city. They wore ragged, rural-looking dresses, and their hair was matted against their heads as if they spent the previous night sleeping awkwardly on a train. She also noticed that they did not seem to speak Japanese very well. A soldier was moving up and down the line asking random questions, and when one of the rural girls attempted to reply in Korean he screamed in her face and then struck her. Meiko swallowed and looked around, trying to figure out a way to slip from the line she had entered without getting noticed. But it was impossible: the soldiers were watching to make sure each girl made her way to the table, answered their questions, and then moved off to the side.
When Meiko arrived at the table, the Japanese man sitting there made only brief eye contact before hovering his pen over the large ledger in front of him.
“Name,” he ordered.
“Meiko Teshiako,” she answered.
“Year of birth?”
“1928.”
He then asked for her parents’ names, their address, the name of her academy, and how she had come to learn about the day’s recruitment.
“Recruitment, sorry?” she asked. “No, I’m here only to get more information.”
“Any sexually transmitted diseases?” the man asked.
Meiko flinched, stared at him while he waited for her answer. “I … I don’t even know what those words mean,” she replied.
He gave the smallest smile, then motioned to the side. “Okay, go stand over there with the others. We’re done.”
“But I don’t —”
He looked past her and screamed at the next girl in line. “Please move forward! You’re next. Keep the line moving please.”
Meiko floated over in a daze to join the group of girls who had cleared the table and were now huddled under a metal awning by the railway tracks. She spotted one of her classmates, Huriko, standing with her chin buried in her chest, tears pouring over her face. “Huriko, what’s going on?” she tried to whisper to her. As soon as she did, a Japanese soldier stomped over and yelled in Meiko’s face. “No talking! Stand still and don’t talk, Chosunjin!” The word he spat at her, Chosunjin, was a racial epithet for Koreans, bastardizing the true name of their nation, Chosun. His use of it froze Meiko where she stood.
Once all the girls had taken their place under the awning, they had to wait several minutes in silence while the soldiers processed the names in the ledger and typed up small passports for each girl. When one passport was completed, a soldier would call out the girl’s name and then hand her the slip of folded paper. When Meiko stepped forward to receive hers, the young Japanese soldier handing them out leered at her. There was no kindness in his grin. “You’re very beautiful, Chosunjin. Look at you — like a little porcelain doll. You will do very well where you are going.” And Meiko thought, stupidly, What does beauty have to do with working in a factory?
When all the girls had received their passports, the soldiers herded them across the station platform and told them to board the waiting train. The girls were no longer making attempts at silence: they were crying, calling out for their mothers, pleading with the Japanese to let them go. Some tried to run, but soldiers chased them down and threw them gruffly back into the line that flowed into the open train carts. Meiko was squeezed through the door and pushed deep inside, nearly tripping on her hanbok in the swell of bodies. Soon she was pressed up against the far window. All the windows were covered by a canvas blanket tied loosely down with twine to hide the view outside. Once all the girls had squeezed in, the soldiers pulled the rattling metal door shut and locked it with an iron clunk. For a few seconds, there was an absurd silence as the girls stood stunned in the darkness. Along the cart’s walls, squares of sunlight peeped around the blankets covering the windows. Soon the girls broke out with more weeping, with more calls to their mothers. “I don’t want to go to Shimonoseki,” someone yelled in panic. “I’m not ready … I just wanted information …”
There was an abrupt jolt beneath their feet as the train began to move. The girls closest to the door began pulling at it uselessly, whimpering “No! No!” as they realized there was no way to get it open. The shift and steer of the moving train squeezed them all to the right, crushing Meiko where stood against the blanketed window. The crying grew louder, but Meiko found she could not summon the breath to join in. She moved her fingers to the edge of the blanket at her shoulder and pulled it back to reveal the moving landscape outside the window. She watched as the structures of the train station and then the city itself thinned out and faded
