Chinese Comfort Women (18 page)

I suffered horrible torture in the comfort station. One day a Japanese soldier came in the afternoon. He put his two legs on my abdomen, which hurt me badly and made me bleed. I resisted as hard as I could, trying to push him off my body. The Japanese soldier then beat me and stabbed my leg with his bayonet. I used all my strength to crawl toward the door. Several people saw me and one young man who was a distant relative of mine saved me from being killed, but the bayonet stabbing crippled me.

I realized that, sooner or later, I would be tortured to death by the Japanese troops at Gaotaipo; I was determined to escape. I worked as the nanny in the house, so I knew the way out. When my wounded leg recovered and I was able to walk, I made up my mind to run away.

I did so in the early morning one day toward the end of 1943. The weather was very cold. I sneaked out the back door of Gaotaipo Comfort Station when the rest of the people were still sound asleep. Running for my life, I dared not look back. I ran all the way to my mother’s house in Ligangtou Village. After a period in hiding, I settled down in the village.

After the liberation my life changed. I worked hard and became the leader of the local women’s work team. At seventeen I married a man of the Tang family, but I was unable to bear a child. We adopted an abandoned boy who was very sick and almost dead. I held him in my arms and felt very sorry for him, so I brought him home from the local police station.

I haven’t been to Gaotaipo again since my escape. For about half a year I was raped by the Japanese troops there; I never want to see that place again. When I escaped from Gaotaipo, I brought a few things with me, including a Japanese lunchbox and some Japanese clothing. I didn’t keep them because they made me angry and upset when I looked at them. Now I only have this left. I saw the girls in the comfort station use it. I thought it must be useful medically, so I took it with me. But I didn’t know what it was.

[Lei Guiying showed the interviewers a small bottle with dark powder in it. A test conducted later indicated that the powder was potassium permanganate, which must have been put in wash water for hygienic purposes in the comfort station.]

Now my adopted son has grown old and I have great-grandchildren. I don’t have many years left to live. The anguish of my torture in the past is pent-up in my heart and is stifling me. My son said to me: “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were forced to become a comfort woman. You should not let this page of history be buried in silence.” I think he is right. I must tell the truth, and I want justice.

Since the redress movement began in the 1990s, support for the Chinese survivors increased in China. When Lei Guiying suffered a stroke and was brought to the emergency room in the Jiangsu Province Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital on 22 April 2007, people from all walks of life came to visit her; flower and fruits baskets piled up in front of her room. Young people from northern China who had never met Lei Guiying also came to visit her and made donations to pay for her medical treatment. Lei Guiying fell into a coma that evening: she never woke up. On 26 April 2007, Lei Guiying died at the age of seventy-nine. She was laid to rest in the Tangshan Christian Church cemetery
.

(Interviewed by Chen Ketao in May 2006; interviewed by Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei in July 2006)

Zhou Fenying

After the fall of Nanjing, Japanese forces advanced into the adjacent areas. In March 1938, the Japanese army occupied Rugao, a small county about 280 kilometres east of Nanjing. Japanese soldiers raped women indiscriminately, including young girls of eight or nine and seventy-year-old women. At the same time, the troops established comfort stations both inside and outside Rugao city limits
.
⁴
Zhou Fenying was kidnapped and taken to one of the military comfort stations in the area during this period
.

Figure 9
Zhou Fenying, in 2007, speaking to interviewers of her wartime experiences.

My parents were natives of Wenchi Village, a small village across from Yangjiayuan Village, where I live now. My father’s name was Zhou Fusheng. My mother didn’t have a formal name. People called her the “Sixth Girl.” My parents owned no land, so the family depended on my father working as a farmhand for others. I was born in the Lunar Fifth Month [1917]. My parents already had four sons when I was born, and the family was often starving. Seeing no way to provide for another child, my parents thought I might be
able to survive if they could give me away. However, it was not easy to find a family to take me. In rural places at that time boys were wanted because they were seen as able to do the farm work when they grew up. Girls were unwanted and were called “money-losing goods” since they would serve another family when they were married and their parents had to spend a fortune to pay for the dowry. One day, in despair, my parents placed me on the roadside in the early morning, hoping that someone would see me and take me home. However, an old woman in the neighbourhood recognized me and brought me back to them. Holding me tightly, my parents cried their hearts out.

When I turned five I was sold to the Ni family in nearby Yangjiayuan Village to be a “child-daughter-in-law,” as was commonly done at the time. [A child-daughter-in-law would be treated as an adopted child first and then become the wife of their son when she reached adulthood.] I was so young that I no longer remember anything else about my family of birth except the nicknames of my older brothers.

My father-in-law was called Ni Er and the villagers called my mother-in-law Ni Er’s. They had two sons: the older son was called Ni Jincheng, and the younger one Ni Gui. I was Ni Jincheng’s child-bride-to-be. Ni Jincheng was ten at the time, five years older than I. My mother-in-law was a capable and tough woman. My father-in-law rarely stayed home. He had an affair with another woman and had a child with her. My mother-in-law raised her two sons mostly by herself and the family was very poor. Jincheng and I weren’t married until 1936, when he was twenty-four and I was nineteen. People said that I was an exceptionally pretty girl for I was fair-skinned and of slight build. [During the interview trip, local people told the interviewers that Zhou Fenying had been a famous beauty in the area. She was already ninety and had lost her eyesight at the time of the interview, but she still dressed neatly, wearing a straw hat that protected her face from the sunlight.] Jincheng and I grew up together and we loved each other very much. He protected me as if he were an older brother. We “separated out” from my in-laws’ house after we were married. I said “separated out,” but we didn’t really have our own house to move to. We just added a small room to my in-laws’ straw-thatched cottage and built our own cooking stove. This little thatched addition with mud walls became our bridal chamber.

The Japanese army occupied Rugao about two years after we were married. [Rugao is located in the Changjiang River Delta. Yangjiayuan Village, where Zhou Fenying lived, is in the Town of Baipu, Rugao City.] I clearly remember the day when the Japanese troops came into our village. It was in the spring of 1938 and that day was my cousin Wu Qun’s birthday. She was about my age and also good-looking. My husband was away from home
working in the fields. We heard that the Japanese troops accompanied by local traitors had come to kidnap girls. All the women in the village ran desperately trying to escape. My cousin and I ran for our lives. We crossed a little river and hid ourselves behind a millstone in a villager’s courtyard, but the Japanese troops chased after us and found us. Later we learned that the Japanese troops had been looking for good-looking girls to put in their comfort station. Because my cousin and I were known for our good looks, we had been targeted. The Japanese soldiers tied our feet with ropes so that we could not run away. Then they had us loaded into a wheelbarrow, one on each side, where they tied us tightly with more ropes. They forced some villagers to push the wheelbarrow to the Town of Baipu. The ropes and the jolting of the wheelbarrow hurt our bodies like hell all the way.

At Baipu we were unloaded at Zhongxing Hotel. The owner of the hotel had fled before the Japanese army came, and the Japanese troops made the hotel their comfort station. We were scared to death and couldn’t even cry. When I looked around, I saw about twenty girls were already there. The barracks held about fifty Japanese troops, who kidnapped dozens of young women from nearby villages to be their comfort women. Each of the girls in the comfort station was given a number. The number was printed in red on a piece of white cloth, which was about three
cun
long and two
cun
[1
cun
equals ⅓ decimetre] wide. People said that the numbers were given based on the looks of the girls; I was made number one.

We were not allowed to step out of the station. There were two or three elderly women from the Town of Baipu who cleaned, delivered food and water and so on. There was also an old woman, a Chinese, who supervised the women and collected fees. This old woman gave us a yuan or so every month to buy daily necessities, but this money was far from enough. Because we were only given two coarse meals a day we were always hungry. I had to save that money and ask people to buy me some food when I was starving. At mealtimes we were taken to a large room with six or eight big tables, each of which seated eight people. Each of us had a small room with a bed, a small table, and a little stool. There was also a basin in my room. All the women had to share towels and one big tub of water for bathing. I wore my own clothes all the time I was in the station, and, as time went on, I had to ask my in-laws to send me a change of clothing.

I was extremely frightened when I was forced to service the Japanese troops. I had heard that Japanese soldiers would stab every Chinese man and rape every Chinese woman they found. On the first day I could not stop crying and my mind fell into a trance, so one of the cleaning women stayed in my room with me until a Japanese soldier came in. The soldier became very angry
when he saw me crying. He pushed his bayonet against my chest, snarling in a low voice. I thought he was going to kill me and I almost passed out. The Japanese soldier then raped me.

The Japanese troops came to the station about every seven days, and we were made to do other jobs when the soldiers didn’t come. Many of the soldiers had two or three stripes on their epaulettes, so I guessed they were officers. They paid the old woman with military money to buy tickets before coming to pick girls. Quite a few of them would pick me, and some came to my room regularly. I cried every day, hoping that my husband could free me from this place. However, the place was closely guarded by the soldiers and there was no way for him to rescue me.

The Japanese officers made me follow their orders. If I obeyed they sometimes gave me a small gift, but if I showed even the slightest unhappiness they would yell at me. I was forced to do whatever they told me to. I remember that a Japanese person wearing white clothing came to check our bodies, including our private places. I didn’t understand what he was doing at the time, but I was very scared and my whole body shook when he checked me. The Japanese doctor also came to check me when I fell sick in the comfort station. The old woman gave us some small rubber caps and told us to put one on the soldier’s penis when he arrived.

I was kept in the comfort station for about three months. In the seventh month that year [1938], Mr. Yang, a clerk who was working in the puppet town government, helped free me. People said that Mr. Yang had had an interest in me because of my good looks, so he paid a ransom and used his connections to get me released. Mr. Yang wanted me to be his concubine, but I refused. I told him that I had a husband and I wanted to go home.

When I was released my mother-in-law did not want me to return home. She could not take the widespread gossip in the village, where people were saying that I had been defiled by the Japanese troops. However, my husband, Jincheng, accepted me. He said, “Fenying was kidnapped by the Japanese troops, but this was not her fault.” He brought me home despite what the villagers and my mother-in-law said. Still, he was deeply humiliated because they looked down on me. I could sense that his heart was filled with anger and hatred toward the Japanese troops. At the time Chinese forces were enlisting soldiers to fight the Japanese army in our area. Jincheng wanted to join the Chinese army, but I didn’t want him to leave. I said to him: “If you really want to go, take me with you. I’ll go anywhere you go.” I then followed him everywhere. The Chinese enlisters came to our town several times, but Jincheng was unable to join the army because of me. However, he was determined to seek revenge. One morning when I woke up I found he was gone.
That was at the end of the year [1940], the Lunar Eleventh Month. I knew he went to fight against the Japanese forces. Jincheng never returned home. Years later the local government informed me that Jincheng had joined the First Regiment of the New Fourth Army (Xinsijun).
⁵
He was killed in a battle at Guxi in Taixing County in 1941.