The baby I could keep came when I was already dead.

I was twelve when I was murdered, fourteen when I looked into the Yalu River and, finding no face looking back at me, knew that I was dead. I wanted to let the Yalu's currents carry my body to where it might find my spirit again, but the Japanese soldiers hurried me across the bridge before I could jump.

I did not let them get too close. I knew they would see the name and number stenciled across my jacket and send me back to the camps, where they think nothing of using a dead girl's body. When the guards started to step toward me, I knew enough to walk on, to wave them back to their post, where they would watch for other Koreans with that "special look" in their eyes. Before the Japanese government posted the soldiers—"for the good of the Koreans"— the bridge over the Yalu had been a popular suicide spot.

My body moved on.

That is why, twenty years after it left my spirit behind at the recreation camp, my body was able to have this baby. Even the doctors here say it is almost a miracle. The camp doctor said I would never have a living child after he took my first one out, my insides too bruised and battered, impossible to properly heal. So this little one is a surprise. This half-white and half-Korean child. She would be called tweggi in the village where I was born, but here she will be American.

When the missionaries found me, they thought I was Japanese because of the name, Akiko, sewn onto the sack that was my dress. The number, 41, they weren't sure about, and thought, Perhaps an orphanage? They asked me—in Korean, Japanese, Chinese—where I came from, who my family was, but by then I had no voice and could only stand dumbly in front of their moving mouths as they lifted my arms, poked at my teeth and into my ears, wiped the dirt from my face.

She is like the wild child raised by tigers, I heard them say to each other. Physically human but able to speak only in the language of animals. They were kind and praised me when I responded to the simple commands they issued in Japanese: sit, eat, sleep. Had they asked, I would also have responded to "close mouth" and "open legs." At the camps where the Japanese called us jungun ianfu, military comfort women, we were taught only whatever was necessary to service the soldiers. Other than that, we were not expected to understand, and were forbidden to speak, any language at all.

` But we were fast learners and creative. Listening as we gathered the soldiers' clothes for washing or cooked their meals, we were able to surmise when troops were coming in and how many we were expected to serve. We taught ourselves to communicate through eye movements, body posture, tilts of the head, or— when we could not see each other—through rhythmic rustlings between our stalls; in this way we could speak, in this way we kept our sanity.

The Japanese say Koreans have an inherent gift for languages, proving that we are a natural colony, meant to be dominated. They delighted in their own ignorance, feeling they had nothing to fear or learn. I suppose that was lucky for us, actually. They never knew what we were saying. Or maybe they just didn't care. I'm trying to remember exactly when I died. It must have been in stages, beginning with my birth as the fourth girl and last child in the Kim family, and ending in the recreation camps north of the Yalu. Perhaps if my parents had not died so early, I might have been able to live a full life. Perhaps not; we were a poor family. I might have been sold anyway.

My father was a cow trader. He traveled from village to village, herding the cows before him, from one farmer to the next, making a small profit as the middleman. When he was home, my older sisters' job was to collect the dung and, after we parceled out a small portion for our own garden, sell the rest to our neighbors. Sometimes we dried the dung for fuel, which burned longer and cleaner than wood. Most of the time, though, we used sticks that my sisters collected from the woods.

My job was to help my mother wash clothes. We each had a basket, according to our size, which we carried up the river we called Yalu Aniya, Older Sister to the Yalu. Going up was easy, the load light on our heads. Coming home was harder, since not only were the damp clothes heavier but we were tired from beating the clothes clean against the rocks. I remember that as we crouched over our wash, pounding out the dirt, I pretended that my mother and I sent secret signals to one another, the rocks singing out messages only we could understand.

My mother died shortly after my father. I didn't see my father die; he was almost thirty miles away. As with his life, I know about his death primarily through what others have told me. The villagers who took him in say he had a lung disease, coughing up blood as he died. They also said he called for my mother.

She was always a good wife; she went to him quickly in death, just as she did in life. One night after we had carried home the wash, she kept saying how tired she was, how tired. Come, Mother, I told her, lie down. I kept asking her, what could I do? Do you want soup, do you want massage? Till finally she put her hand over my mouth and guided my fingers to her forehead. I stroked her softly, loosening her hair from the bun she tied it in, rubbing her temples where I could feel the heat and the throb other beating heart. Even when the erratic tempo slowed, then finally stopped, I continued to pet her. I wanted her to know that I loved her.

I touch my child in the same way now; this is the language she understands: the cool caresses of my fingers across her tiny eyelids, her smooth tummy, her fat toes. This, not the senseless murmurings of useless words, is what quiets her, tells her she is precious. She is like my mother in this way.

Because of this likeness, this link to the dead, my daughter is the only living thing I love. My husband, the missionaries who took me in after the camp, my sisters, if they are still alive, all are incidental. What are living people to ghosts, except ghosts themselves?

My oldest sister understood this. When my second and third sisters ran away together to look for work as secretaries or factory workers in Pyongyang, the oldest sister tried to keep our father's business going by marrying our closest neighbor. The neighbors didn't have much money, but they had more than us and wouldn't take her without a dowry. How could they buy cattle without any capital, they reasoned.

I was her dowry, sold like one of the cows before and after me. You are just going to follow second and third sisters, she told me. The Japanese say there is enough work for anyone in the cities. Girls, even, can learn factory work or serve in restaurants. You will make lots of money.

Still, I cried. She hugged me, then pinched me. Grow up now, she said. No mother, no father. We all have to make our lives. She didn't look at my face when the soldiers came, didn't watch as they herded me onto their truck. I heard them asking her if she wanted to come along; your sister is still so young, not good for much, they said. But you. You are grown and pretty. You could do well.

I am not sure, but I think my sister laughed. I hope that she had at least a momentary fear that they would take her too.

I am already married, she said.

I imagine she shrugged then, as if to say, What can I do? Then she added, My sister will be even prettier.

She didn't ask why that should matter in a factory line.

I knew I would not see the city. We had heard the rumors: girls bought or stolen from villages outside the city, sent to Japanese recreation centers. But still, we did not know what the centers were like. At worst, I thought, I would do what I've done all my life: clean, cook, wash clothes, work hard. How could I imagine anything else?

At first that is what I did. Still young, I was kept to serve the women in the camps. Around women all my life, I felt almost like I was coming home when I first realized there were women at the camps, maybe a dozen. I didn't see them right away; they were kept in their stalls, behind mat curtains, most of the days and throughout the night. Only slowly were they revealed to me as I delivered and took away their meals, as I emptied their night pots. Hanako 38, her name given because her face was once pretty as a flower. Miyoko 52, frail and unlucky as the Miyokos before her. Kimi-ko 3, with hair the color of egg yellow, which made the officers laugh when they realized the pun of her name: Kimi the sovereign, Kimi the yolk. Akiko 40. Tamayo 29, who told the men she loved them and received gifts and money that she, stubborn in her hopes for a future, would bury in the corner of her stall.

Unless they had to visit the camp doctor, their freedom outside their stalls consisted of weekly baths at the river and scheduled trips to the outhouse. If they needed to relieve themselves when it was not their turn to go outside, they could use their special pots. It became my job to empty the pots. I also kept their clothes and bedding clean, combed and braided their hair, served them their meals. When I could, I brought them each a dab of grease, which they would smooth over their wounds, easing the pain of so many men.

I liked caring for the women. As their girl, I was able to move from one stall to the next, even from one section of the camp to another, if I was asked. And because of this luxury, the women used me to pass messages. I would sing to the women as I braided their hair or walked by their compartments to check their pots. When I hummed certain sections, the women knew to take those unsung words for their message. In this way, we could keep up with each other, find out who was sick, who was new, who had the most men the night before, who was going to crack.

To this day, I do not think Induk—the woman who was the Akiko before me— cracked. Most of the other women thought she did because she would not shut up. One night she talked loud and nonstop. In Korean and in Japanese, she denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop their invasion other country and her body. Even as they mounted her, she shouted: I am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive. I am seventeen, I had a family just like you do, I am a daughter, I am a sister.

Men left her stall quickly, some crying, most angrily joining the line for the woman next door. All through the night she talked, reclaiming her Korean name, reciting her family genealogy, even chanting the recipes her mother had passed on to her. Just before daybreak, they took her out other stall and into the woods, where we couldn't hear her anymore. They brought her back skewered from her vagina to her mouth, like a pig ready for roasting. A lesson, they told the rest of us, warning us into silence.

That night, it was as if a thousand frogs encircled the camp. They opened their throats for us, swallowed our tears, and cried for us. All night, it seemed they called, Induk, Induk, Induk, so we would never forget.

Although I might have imagined the frogs. That was my first night as the new Akiko. I was given her clothes, which were too big and made the soldiers laugh. The new P won't be wearing them much anyway, they jeered. Fresh poji.

Even though I had not yet had my first bleeding, I was auctioned off to the highest bidder. After that it was a free-for-all, and I thought I would never stop bleeding.

That is how I know Induk didn't go crazy. She was going sane. She was planning her escape. The corpse the soldiers brought back from the woods wasn't Induk.

It was Akiko; it was me.

My husband speaks four languages: German, English, Korean, and Japanese. He is learning a fifth, Polish, from cassette tapes he borrows from the public library. He reads Chinese.

A scholar who spends his life with the Bible, he thinks he is safe, that the words he reads, the meaning he gathers, will remain the same. Concrete. He is wrong.

He shares all his languages with our daughter, though she is not even a year old. She will absorb the sounds, he tells me. But I worry that the different sounds for the same object will confuse her. To compensate, I try to balance her with language I know is true. I watch her with a mother's eye, trying to see what she needs—my breast, a new diaper, a kiss, her toy—before she cries, before she has to give voice to her pain.

And each night I touch each part other body, waiting until I see recognition in her eyes. I wait until I see that she knows that all of what I touch is her and hers to name in her own mind, before language dissects her into pieces that can be swallowed and digested by others not herself

At the camp, the doctor gave me a choice: rat poison or the stick. I chose the stick. I saw what happened to the girl given the rat bait to abort her baby. I did not have the courage then to die the death that she died.

As the doctor bound my legs and arms, gagged me, then reached for the stick he would use to hook and pull the baby, not quite a baby, into the world, he talked. He spoke of evolutionary differences between the races, biological quirks that made the women of one race so pure and the women of another so promiscuous. Base, really, almost like animals, he said.

Rats, too, will keep doing it until they die, refusing food or water as long as they have a supply of willing partners. The doctor chuckled and probed, digging and piercing, as he lectured. Luckily for the species, Nature ensures that there is one dominant male to keep the others at bay and the female under control. And the female will always respond to him. He squeezed my nipples, pinching until they tightened. See?

I followed the light made by the waves of my pain, tried to leave my body behind. But the doctor pinned me to the earth with his stick and his words. Finally he stood upright, cracked his back, and threw the stick into the trash. He rinsed his hands in a basin of water, then unbound my hands and mouth. He put the rags between my legs.

Fascinating, he said thoughtfully as he left the tent. Perhaps it is the differences in geography that make the women of our two countries so morally incompatible.

He did not bother tying me down, securing me for the night. Maybe he thought I was too sick to run. Maybe he thought I wouldn't want to. Maybe he knew I had died and that ropes and guards couldn't keep me anyway.

That night, with the blood-soaked rags still wedged between my thighs, I slipped out of the tent, out of the camp. Following the sound of my mother bearing clothes against the rocks, I floated along the trails made by deer and found a nameless stream that led in the end, like all the mountain streams, to the Yalu.

I was strapped down when my daughter was born too. My hands cuffed to the bed, flat on my back with my knees up, I heard the low keening of a wounded animal in the etherized darkness. Surrounded by doctors, unable to move, I felt my mind slip back into the camps. You're a doctor, I screamed, help me, help me get home. But he only laughed and pushed himself on top of me, using my body as the other soldiers had done. Afterward, as he wiped himself on my shift, he opened the screen partition and let others watch him examine me. This one is still good, he called over his shoulder. He pried the lips of my vagina open with his ringers. See? he said. Still firm and moist.

I tried to protect my daughter from the doctors, from their dirty hands and eyes. I scissored my legs closed, wanting to keep my child cradled within me, safe. But they roped my legs, stretching them open into the Japanese character for "man." One doctor pushed on my stomach, another widened me with a double-pronged stick, and this rime my baby came into the world fully formed and alive.

We caught her, someone said—and when I heard that woman's voice in the room full of men, I knew Induk was there. Slipping into the body of a doctor, she stood beside me, shadowed by mask, gown, and a halo of light. And though I could not see her face, though it had been some time since she last came to me, I knew it was her, just as I've always known. Even the first time.

She comes in singing, entering with full voice, filling me so that there is no me except for her, Induk.

That first time, she found me sprawled next to an unnamed stream above the Yalu, the place where I had discarded my empty body, and invited herself in.

I saw her with my eyes closed, though how I knew she was Induk I do not know, for she looked like my mother, standing there next to the river with her arms outstretched, long strips of hair coming undone from the married woman's bun at the back other neck. It was as if, without their earthly bodies, the boundaries between them melted, blending their features, merging their spirits. Now I cannot remember what either my mother or Induk looked like when she was alive and a separate person.

Here, baby, here, Induk said, her voice creaking like a hundred thousand frogs. She shuffled closer, hands cupping her breasts, which turned into an offering of freshly unearthed ginseng.

It is not myokkuk, Induk said, as I gnawed on a raw root. She stroked my head, combing out the tangles with her fingers just as I did for her when she was alive, then she said: But seaweed soup is mostly good for making milk anyway. You don't need that now.

My stomach cramped, and I threw up what I had eaten. I rinsed my mouth with water from the stream, and my stomach rebelled at even the taste of water Yet I could not stop my mouth from sucking at the root.

There was no need for me to get up. I lay by the river, already feeling the running water erode the layers of my skin, washing me away, but Induk filled my belly and forced me to my hands and knees. She led me to the double rainbow where virgins climb to heaven and told me to climb. Below me, a river of human-faced flowers stretched so wide and bright I could not keep my eyes open.

She spoke for me: No one performed the proper rites of the dead. For me. For you. Who was there to cry for us in kok, announcing our death? Or to fulfill the duties of yom: bathing and dressing our bodies, combing our hair, trimming our nails, laying us out? Who was there to write our names, to even know our names, and to remember us?

And now, said Induk, there are only the dead to guide us. Here, she said, giving me the image of a woman. I saw a fox spirit who haunted the cemeteries of deserted villages, sucking at the mouths of the newly dead in order to taste their otherworld knowledge.

This is Manshin Ahjima, Induk said. Old Lady of ten thousand spirits. Go to her, and she will prepare you.

I wanted to say I didn't know where she lived, but then I saw the exact spot where Manshin Ahjima lived and how to get there. I'd have to cross over the Yalu, scale seven mountain peaks in the deep country, then follow the road to the outskirts of Sinuiju. Through a scattering of gray adobe houses, all identical, I would go to the house fronted with mulberry trees. There I would find the old lady and her ten thousand spirits.

I do not know how long I left my body by the river, stirring periodically with cramps and the need to vomit. It lay in its own filth, moving only to fill its mouth with ginseng and water, the instinct for survival in the blood and bones.

When I finally opened my eyes, I saw not heaven but partially chewed and digested bits of ginseng root in the dirt next to my face. I felt clear and empty, as translucent as the river beside me. Noticing that the bleeding between my legs had stopped, I peeled the rags, stiff as scabs, away from my body and, carefully folding them, placed them on some rocks away from the running water. After taking off the rest of my clothes, I waded into the stream and rubbed at the dried blood caked on my legs from groin to calves. The mud-colored flecks turned liquid red in my hands, then dissolved under the patient licking of the river's tongue.

Rubbing handfuls of small pebbles against my head and skin, I washed my hair and body until I felt raw. I let the cooling air dry me. By the length of the day, I knew that soon it would be the season to replant the stalks of rice in the paddies. When my parents were still alive and I was still a child, everyone in our family worked to grow the rice. Where we lived, there was time only for one planting, one harvest, so everything had to be done quickly and well. As the youngest, I was responsible for feeding the workers their meals of rice and soup, carried to them on trays balanced on my head. When I delivered the food without spilling, I was allowed to play—a function also rooted in practicality; as I jumped through the rows of fragile plants, waving sticks into the air, I kept scavenging birds away from our future meals.

But as I grew and second and third sister were hired on neighboring farms, I took over more of the work. Mother, oldest sister, and I would spend hours bent over the knee-deep silt, our fingers cradling the baby rice, laying them into the oozing earth.

During one season of planting, my mother gave birth to a dead baby. Smaller than one of my mother's outstretched hands, the infant slipped between her fingers in a gush of blood and sour-smelling fluid. My mother wrapped it in a bundle, packing it neat as a field lunch, before I could see it, but oldest sister saw. It was deformed, Soon Ja whispered. Tail like a tadpole. Or maybe, she added as an afterthought, it was a boy.

We walked with our mother to the river, taking the clothes that needed to be washed. My mother divided up the clothes between my sister and me, and humming under her breath, she walked downriver. We listened to her voice, rising in waves above the rushing of the water, sing the song of the river: Pururun mul, su manun saramdul-I jugugat-na? Blue waters, how many lives have you carried away? Moot saram-ui seulpumdo hulro hulro sa ganora. You should carry the sorrow of people far, far away.

And as we beat our clothes clean, we watched out of the corners of our eyes as she tightened the knot on her baby's shroud and set it into the water where the current pulled it down. Into Saja's mouth, oldest sister told me later in an attempt to torment me. An offering for the gatekeeper of hell.

When I was dry from my bath, I took the rags that had held back my blood and all that was left of my first baby, and instead of throwing them into the water, I planted them in a clean patch of earth next to the stream.

The day after Induk called me out of the river, I went looking for the spirit I knew I could never find. Go to Manshin Ahjima, Induk said as she dipped her hand into my chest and pulled out my maum, the force of my heartbeat, and led me forward by a silver thread.

I walked and slept, walked and slept, and throughout the journey kept my eyes fixed on Induk beckoning before me. At times, her form would blur until it doubled, then quadrupled, and she would become Induk and my mother, and in turn my mother's mother and an old woman dressed in the formal top'o of the olden days. I realized I was walking with my ancestors.

I tried running to my mother, but she shook her head and remained just outside my reach. It was then that I noticed that she held a small book, no bigger than the palm of my hand, which I recognized as the Ch'onja-chaek, the most basic school primer. When she began to turn the pages, I strained to read what it said, but to my surprise, I found I could not understand the words. Even concentrating on the rapidly moving pictures milked most of my energy.

As my mother nipped through the book, I saw myself and my sisters as children, hanging onto our mother as she moved through our barley field and tended to our garden. And I saw us holding onto her body as we cried the death cries for her spirit. I saw myself underneath the pumping bodies of Japanese soldiers and, in the later pages, saw my oldest sister beneath the same soldiers. I saw myself sitting in the river, and I saw myself walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping, until I died.

At this point my mother closed the book. When I asked her why I could not see the rest of the book, the oldest spirit, whom I knew to be my great- grandmother, said, If you read the final chapters, you would know the universe. You would be dead.

When I looked up, I was alone and could smell the sea, so I knew I had followed the river west. Ahead of me I saw the cluster of small adobe homes nestled into the hillside. I knocked at the first house, wanting to ask if I could sleep in the courtyard. No one answered there, nor at the second home I came to. Finally, after failing to wake anyone at the third home, I entered the courtyard anyway and disrobed at the well. In the cold night, I laid my clothes on the brittle mud surrounding the well and bathed in the ice-cold water, wanting to purify myself and knowing I never could.

My skin felt waxy, as Induk's had the day after the soldiers killed her, the day after she reclaimed her name and I became the new Akiko. When the other camp women and I went to the river to bathe, we found her skewered body, abandoned alongside the path. We wanted to take her to the river with us to prepare her body for the separation of its spirit. Someone she loved should have cleansed her skin with her favorite scented oil. Someone who loved her should have laid her body out, with her head to the south, and prepared a feast to feed her soul for its next and longest journey.

The women from the camp wanted to do these things for her, but in the end we left her, just as the soldiers had, mounted on the pole, her nakedness only half concealed by the forest's undergrowth, her eyes dry and open and staring toward the river.

When my husband brings home toys for our newly born daughter, I pick out the dolls with the plastic skin and the unyielding, staring blue eyes and put them in the linen closet. Their skin feels like day-after-death skin, cold and hard though still fairly pliant. I feel sick thinking of my baby lying next to, gaining comfort from, the artificial dead. After I bury the dolls under the sheets and towels, I pick up my child, placing her against my chest. My body feels cold against her sleep-flushed warmth, yet she still snuggles, roots against me. As she nurses, her heat invades me and becomes mine, her heart beats against mine, becoming mine, becoming me, and gives me life.

I try not to think of the dolls, stacked against each other in the closet, staring at us through the doors and walls with their unblinking, sightless eyes.

I woke at dawn with my fingers dangling like bait in the water at the edge of the river, and a rope looped around my neck. Old-lady breasts, flattened and elongated from years of childbearing, flapped against the side of my head. When I tried to sit up, the breasts squawked, Aigu! The dead is sitting up! and swung away.

Lifting my head against the noose, I could see that the breasts belonged to a gray-haired woman sitting cross-legged and naked on my clothes. Though her body was covered with wrinkles and age spots, her face was curiously unlined, youthful. I knew this was the Manshin Ahjima whom Induk had told me to find.

She tugged on the end of the rope.

Manshin Ahjima, I asked her, why am I tied?

Aigu! the woman cried. The dead knows me! The old lady jumped to her feet, and the rope between us stretched taut.

I lifted my hands to the rope, then pulled gently. The rope slithered from her grasp and onto the ground. Please, I said, why?

The woman's hand jerked as if she still held the rope. You were lost, she said, between this world and the next, and I was trying to lead you back.

She lifted her breasts and scratched her scarred belly. Besides, you were scaring me, growling like an animal one minute, crying like a baby the next.

The woman shuffled closer, then knelt to peer into my face. You aren't a tiger spirit, are you? She held her hands out, palms down. If so, I am ready to go. I've tended the mounds, burned the incense for the spirits whose families have been lost or run away. I've seen and I've remembered which son was taken by the Japanese, which son was killed by bandits, and which went to Shanghai as a freedom fighter. I've...

The old woman stopped talking, blinked, then touched my hair. I've seen the tiger spirit haunt the graves before, she said, but only at night. You are just a little girl.

When she called me a little girl, I remember I wanted to cry. I wanted to curl into a ball, cover my head, and call, Mother! Mother! as I did when I was very young and feeling alone, as I did from the rooftop of our home the night my mother died and I tried to catch her fleeing spirit. But I didn't, because I knew no one would ever again hold me in tenderness. Instead I stood up and looked around.

And I saw that we were not in a village but in a graveyard. When I realized that the homes that I had knocked at the night before were houses of the dead, I started shaking, and perhaps then I did start to cry.

Here, Manshin Ahjima said, handing me my clothes. I don't suppose a tiger spirit would need these rags to keep warm. And I don't suppose a tiger spirit would have such messy hair. Tiger spirits are really rather prissy, you know. The old lady's lips flapped, then stopped. I knew she was waiting for me to say something, to respond with a smile or a nod, but I could only stare at her mouth, watching for when her lips parted in a certain way and I could see the black gap where she had lost some teeth.

Olppajin-saram, the mouth suddenly said. And again, louder, as if breaking a spell or casting one: Olppajin-saram. You've lost your soul. That is why you came to the graveyard. You were trying to steal someone else's spirit, a wandering spirit, maybe, one that was confused about where it belonged.

She lifted the rope from my head. This is useless, she said, throwing it to the ground. You need a pyong-kut, a healing ceremony.

I asked her if she could help me.

When she shook her head no, I became desperate. I begged her, telling her I would pay her for her services.

Manshin Ahjima wrapped her braid slowly around her head and seemed to consider the possibility. She looked down at me, then eyed the pitiful bundle of my clothes lying by the well. I was embarrassed, not by my nakedness or hers but because I knew and she knew I had nothing to pay her.

The old woman pulled her dress, white as death, around her freckled, flabby body and tied the sash tight across her chest. I cannot perform a kut for you, she said, because I no longer do the devil's work. But I will help you because that is the Christian way.

Manshin Ahjima bent to pick up a thin gold-plated chain, which she slipped around her neck. The old lady held the chain out so that I could see the tiny cross, smaller than my thumbnail, before she slipped it under the neckline of her dress. You see, she said, I've been saved.

She would help me, she said, because I reminded her of herself when she first got the sinbyong, the possession sickness. And of her daughter whom she sent away to live with her grandmother when the spirits first began to visit her, many years ago. The spirits are very jealous, Manshin Ahjima explained, They cannot stand it if you love someone more than them.

Manshin Ahjima touched my hair. Come, I will braid your hair for you, and then I will take you to the Pyongyang missionaries for food and clothes,

The missionaries had saved her from starvation and damnation, and in return Manshin Ahjima let them call her Mary.

Be prepared, she said. I think they call all of the girls Mary.

We followed the train tracks into Pyongyang, keeping mostly in the bordering woods, though sometimes slipping onto a side road to make it easier on the decrepit ox pulling her cart. We depended on that ox not only for transportation but also for sustenance. Some nights, after failing to forage anything to eat, Manshin Ahjima would nick the ox under its shoulder blade to siphon off some of its blood. I learned to savor the taste of blood.

She taught me to find lost things, something she taught all her daughters, because, she said, a woman must always find her own way.

Find the place of darkness within yourself, Manshin Ahjima explained, and imagine what you have lost. Then picture yourself in the last place you saw the object and spiral up and away, as if you were flying circles around that spot. Your spirit finds the object, so the better you can recreate the lost thing in your mind and in the spirit world, the more likely that you will find it in your hands again.

When Manshin Ahjima urged me to try to find something I had lost, all I could think of was my mother. I could not see her face clearly; even then, so soon after the time my sisters and I buried her alongside our winter's kimchee, the details of her face lacked focus in my memory. But she was all I could think of, and what I saw when my mind flew into its own darkness was a woman buried backward in a shallow forest grave, her face pressed against the earth, her mouth full of snakes.

Induk's voice erupted from Manshin Ahjima's mouth: It is an omen.

When we entered the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company building, where the missionaries hid from the Japanese, Manshin Ahjima began yelling.

She was half-dead, Manshin Ahjima bellowed. Crazy out of her mind, dangerous. Thank the good Lord I was able to nurse her back to health and bring her here.

Manshin Ahjima pulled the cross out from under her blouse. Of course, she added, I spent all the money I had to feed her. I went hungry myself; you know.

You have such a good heart, Mary Ahjima, the missionary women cooed around Manshin Ahjima. You will surely be blessed.

Thank you, Manshin Ahjima said. I'm sure the good Lord will provide, Yes, the missionary ladies agreed, as they pressed money into her hands. He always does.

Manshin Ahjima wrapped the coins in a strip of cloth, then slipped it under her skirt. After she had tied the cloth to her thigh, smooched her skirts, Manshin Ahjima turned to go. Her eyes swept across me, but she did not look at me. I do what I can, she said. I do what I can, but my God is a jealous God, and I am in the midst of a war.

Wait, I cried, but I did not recognize my voice. Don't leave me, I yelled after her in words that did not sound like words.

The missionaries held onto my arms. Cuckoo, one of them said. Unsure of what she meant, I could not tell if she was referring to me or to Manshin Ahjima. I cried out again for Manshin Ahjima, and I cried for my mother.

In the end, I let the missionaries strip me down, burn my clothes, bathe my skin. I wanted to tell them that it would do no good; I would never become clean enough to keep.

When Manshin Ahjima stumbled out of the missionary house, fondling her thigh where the money—the price of my trust—was tied, she took my hearing with her. By the time the echoes of her footsteps on the wooden stairs of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company building had faded, I could not hear the sound of my own voice.

As the missionaries pulled at my hair, my clothes, my arms, I watched their chattering mouths but could not make out what they were saying. Eventually I turned my eyes away and gave my body to them. After bathing, dressing, and feeding me, the women pressed a Bible into my hands and led me to a small room, a closet in the women's sleeping quarters, that was not much bigger than the stall I had had in the camp.

In the darkness of that room, I cried for Induk. She, like me, must have been deaf, for she never came. But then again, maybe I had not even called for her, my voice lost with my hearing.

In the days that followed, the missionaries assigned me to various tasks about the house. Sometimes they put a broom in my hands, and I would sweep until they took the broom away. If they put me in front of a sinkful of dishes, I would wash them until the sink was empty and someone turned the water off. Once, they positioned me at a table piled with matchboxes and labels. With big mouth movements and exaggerated gestures, one of the lady missionaries showed me how to glue the labels on the boxes. I sat and glued until all the boxes had labels, and then I glued labels on the table until I had run out of labels. I was considering what else to glue, when someone relieved me of my duty.

I would watch the broom scratch across the surface of the floors and on the stairs in front of the house. I could feel the water in the sink running down my hands as I rubbed my fingers across the smooth and resistant surfaces of plates and cups. And I smelled the pungent stickiness of the glue when I pasted the labels on the matchboxes, table, and chairs. But without the sounds of these actions, I had no way to connect them to myself. No way to judge time, distance, action, reaction.

Invading my daily routine at the mission house, shattering the gaps between movement and silence, were the gruntings of soldier after soldier and the sounds of flesh slapping against flesh. Whenever I stopped for a beat, for a breath, I heard men laughing and betting on how many men one comfort woman could service before she split open. The men laughed and chanted niku-ichi—twenty-nine-to-one, one of the names they called us—but I heard the counting reach one hundred twenty-four before I could not bear to hear one more number.

Whenever I stopped cleaning or gluing to stretch cramping fingers or crack my stiff neck, I heard the sounds of a woman being kicked because she had used an old shirt as a sanitary pad. Or I heard a man sigh loudly as he urinated on the body where he had just pumped his seed.

And always, a low rumbling underlying every step I took at the mission house, I heard the grinding of trucks delivering more men and more military supplies: food rations, ammunition, boots, and new women to replace the ones that died, their bodies erupting in pus.

Because I could not risk looking away from my chores, it took me a long time to recognize the others staying in the home. Every day, I met the same people over and over again as if for the first time. No matter how many times I would glance at the faces floating by and away from me, I was never able to catch and hold onto the individual features of each person.

The missionaries saved several girls by pretending to hire them as employees of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company. Used as a shield from the Japanese, who, not trusting foreign influences, discouraged Christianity but encouraged businesses for the revenue that could be sent back to the Emperor, the Mentholatum and Matches building had been erected at the start of the Japanese occupation and now appeared generations old.

Roughly my age, the girls who were rescued were round-faced and pretty in their innocence, as I once had been. They braided their hair with bright-colored ribbons that flashed against their black hair and uniforms when they marched out of their common sleeping quarters and into the kitchen. Like children, they squirmed in their seats, stifling giggles and gossip when I swept past them.

Later, when I could once again hear what others heard, I caught their whispers flying against me: Why does the minister always save the sweetest pastry for the devil girl? And see how he always touches her head, gives her the prettiest ribbons for her braid?

Even the missionaries gossiped. I heard Sister Red Nose say, The wild child is possessed, a false light luring away the faithful. Sister Milk Breath, giving me the name that Manshin Ahjima predicted would be mine at the mission, muttered, Mary Magdalene, a curse, whenever I passed her way.

Once, when questioned to his face about his treatment of me, the minister smiled a fleeting quirk of the lips, and said, What man of you, having a hundred the sheep, doth not leave the ninety and nine to go after that one which is lost, until he finds it?

Putting his hand on my head, he looked at his sheep until they dropped their eyes. Rejoice, he said to them, for I have found a lamb that once was lost. Later the young girls fluttered around me. Will the handsome minister save you? they giggled.

I wish he would save me, one said.

As long as he saves me some ribbon, another grumbled. Akiko must get more than her fair share, don't you, Akiko?

Oh, it's not fair, the girls cried. Akiko always gets more of everything because they say she's touched. I think you are just acting. You wait till the war is over, Akiko. Our families will find us and we'll marry rich men and have everything. What will you have, crazy Akiko, with no family and no mind?

Because they were still young, they had faith that the war would end and the Japanese would be defeated. That their lives would resume their prewar scripts, as if the war and their abandonment caused only a brief stutter in the opera they envisioned for themselves.

Because they were still babies, really, I did not tell them what I knew was true: The war would never end, because the Japanese, like all that was evil, would wait in the shadows, shape-shifting and patient, hoping for a chance to swallow you whole.

I began to recognize the minister because of the way the girls, forgetting or ignoring proper behavior, gathered around him. Like puppies, the girls would fall about his feet and legs, and pant for a length of ribbon, a piece of candy, a box of chalk; for writing paper, toothpaste, a kind word. Thank you, Sonsaeng-nim, the girls would sing out, and as if they were pets, the minister would reach out, touching a nose, stroking the hair of those around him.

Stop, he would say. I am not an honored teacher. I am just a child, like you all, in God's eyes.

But the girls would cry out: No, no, not true! Look at your body, thin and long—an aristocrat's body! And your hands, so graceful—a scholar's hands! And your voice, they said, like God's!

The minister would laugh, saying, Stop! But his eyes would shine like blue glass.

Because I had begun to recognize him as an individual, I watched him carefully, intensely, as if memorizing his features, his gestures, were one of my chores. Often, as he gave away his gifts, he closed his eyes and lifted his chin. Pushing his chest forward, he would open and shut his mouth quickly, pursing his lips, blowing quick puffs of air. After a few days I realized he was singing,

Now, years later, I recognize those same body movements and hear the words to the songs he sings to our baby. When she is fretful, crying so loud that the only thing she hears is the pain within her, only he can quiet her. He holds her tight against his chest, pinning her arms within her blanket, and sings. Soon she stops struggling, and as her screams fade into hiccups, she lifts her head toward the sound of his voice singing about whales of Jojojonah. Noah's art-y art-y made out of go-phers barking barking. Jesus loving children.

They are silly songs that my husband sings to comfort our child, but I hate them and I hate him.

I hate that he can quiet her with his voice, the same voice that lulled and lured the girls from the Pyongyang mission. The same voice, sounding so honest and joyful that you want to believe, even when you know the truth. The same voice that fools everyone but me. I hate that voice because my daughter loves it.

I cannot sing to my daughter like that, in a voice full of laughter, for I never learned runny songs, songs that make you laugh and laugh. I remember only bits and pieces from those my mother sang when she was working. And they were songs that filled you with sadness, that made you want to cry until your throat swelled with salt.

After one of the missionaries' communal dinners, the person who came to take the chopsticks from my hand was the minister the girls always followed. By then most of the people there had stopped speaking to or looking at me, unnerved by the silence by which I was surrounded. But when this man took the chotkarak away from me, he held my chin and looked into my eyes. He looked until I was forced to stop listening to the women crying in the comfort camps, until I looked back and saw him. And then he smiled, rubbed a napkin over my lips, and helped me stand. He took my hand and led me down the basement stairs, where the world turned on its side once again. |

In the basement meeting room, he placed me on a bench between two other missionaries. I concentrated on watching him walk down the aisle to the pulpit, a but my vision narrowed and buckled under the increasing intensity of camp sounds. During his speech, each time I saw him slap the pulpit for emphasis, I heard the sounds of women's naked buttocks being slapped as they were paraded in front of a new arrival of troops.

When the congregation stood, opening and riffling through their black books, I heard the shrieking of bullets ricocheting at the feet of women the soldiers were momentarily bored with.

And when the people around me all at once opened their mouths wide, I heard every sound from every day I spent in the camp all at once, so loud I felt I was drowning under a raging river, until, in a rush, my ears shattered.

After a moment of utter silence I heard singing, but singing like I've never heard before. The only songs I had heard before that day were sung by one person at a time, or by a group of people who all sang the same part in the same way.

What I heard after my ears cracked open was a single song, with notes so rich and varied that it sounded like many songs blended into one.

And in that song I heard things that I had almost forgotten: the enduring whisper of women who continued to pass messages under the ears of the soldiers; a defiant Induk bellowing the Korean national anthem even after the soldiers had knocked her teeth out; the symphony often thousand frogs; the lullabies my mother hummed as she put her daughters to sleep; the song the river sings when she finds her freedom in the ocean.

My daughter's cries filter into my dreams. Just before I wake, her crying turns into my mother's singing. My mother is crying and dancing and singing a song that I heard her sing repeatedly in my childhood, but in my dream I cannot quite make out the words. I try to embrace my mother, but she dances away from me again and again. Just as I finally reach her, her song erupts into the screams of an infant.

I look toward my husband's bed, see his unmoving form huddled beneath the blankets. Dazed with sleep, still seeing my dream, I go to my daughter. As I pick her up, her body stiffens with her screams, and out of my mouth comes my mother's voice, singing the song I forgot I knew:

          Nodle Kang-byon pururun mul
          Kang muldo mot miduriroda
          Su manun saramdul-i jugugat na

It's a song full of tears, but one my mother sang for her country and for herself. A song she gave to me and one that I will give to my daughter. I want to shake my baby into listening, force her to hear, but I only sing louder and louder:

          E he yo! Pururun mul, kang muldo
          Na rul mit-go nado kang mul-ul miduriroda

Over my daughter's cries, I continue to sing and sing, until she begins to quiet. Her body falls into mine and the air in her room becomes sweet and heavy with the breath of her sleep, and still I sing. I sing until I reach the end of the song, until I can remember no more.

          Mootsaram-ui seulpumdo diwana bol-ga
          Mootsaram-ui seulpumdo hulro hulro sa ganora.