Comfort Woman (15 page)

To cleanse the impurities from my system, I ate food blessed by the spirits. For breakfast and dinner, my mother set blocks of white rice cake, bowls of water, oranges, and mixed vegetable
namul
onto our altar, offering the Birth Grandmother and her sisters first helpings. After rubbing her hands in prayerful supplication, she'd bow stiffly from the waist. “Please share with us our food and your blessings,” she'd say. “Please make this house peaceful. Please make the child turn out well.” Then we would both kneel, waiting for the spirits to finish their meal. When the rice no longer sent spirals of steam into the air, we knew that the spirits were finished and that it was our turn to eat.

I tried cheating, eating the hot lunch at school. Pizza and Tater Tots, or loco-mocos—over-easy egg over gravy over beef patty over rice—cost twenty-five cents, so if I took only one money envelope from the Wishing Bowl, I could eat whatever I wanted for several weeks.

But my body always betrayed me. My mother listened to my stomach's noises, looked into my eyes, smelled my feet, and knew that I had eaten dirty food. “Rotten cow's milk, pig guts, and red-hot fat,” she would comment, and that night I would have to drink endless bowls of blessed water while my mother chanted and sprinkled the ashes of burnt incense stick on my stinking parts. Sometimes this would go on through the night, so that when I woke in the early-morning hours to use the bathroom, I created landslides from ashes piled on the pillow near my mouth, on the sheets near my hands, on my stomach and crotch and feet.

When I stopped fighting and ate only what was acceptable to my guardian spirits, I wondered why I had fought in the first place. Eating food that had been blessed, I began to feel the spirits fill my body, making me stronger, smarter, purer than my normal self. Each bite of the food tasted and tested by the Birth Grandmother and the Seven Stars seemed to ripen and bloom in my mouth, so that even one grain of rice, one section of orange, one strand of bean sprout, filled me to fullness.

I became so full that I consumed only what the spirits themselves ate, feasting on the steam evaporating from freshly made rice, on the scent of oranges and pears. I saw food take flight from its physical manifestation, turning into light that shot through my body. And I saw the light flow through me, swirling like blood under skin turned translucent as the shade of a lamp, until it eddied in the tips of my fingers.

My mother saw the light in my hands as well. “Your hands are so pale,” she murmured once, “I can see the blue
hyolgwan
burning under its skin.”

And when I massaged her back, my fingers migrated toward the
sal
hidden in her muscles, alongside her bones. “Saa, saa, saaa,” my mother would groan with pain and pleasure. “Kill the
sal.”
And I would press my fingers into the knotted muscles until I felt them loosen and dissolve under my heat. With the light, I could dip into her body to pull out the walnuts of pain lodged in her back, sucking like leeches against her spine or between her shoulder blades. Sometimes when I massaged my mother, I felt my arms disappear up to the elbows, my body reabsorbed by hers. In those moments, I knew I was truly my mother's daughter, that I nursed her with my light.

I aimed the light into myself, feeling for the poisoned arrowheads implanted in my body in order to kill my own pain. I fed the light with more spirit food, until it grew larger than myself. The bigger the light within me became, the smaller my body got, until I seemed to shrink into myself, becoming as elemental as the food offered to and consumed by the gods.

My body reabsorbed my hips, my breasts, the small belly that sloped between my pelvic bones. My hair fell out, leaving tufts of dry lifeless strands tangled in hairbrushes or in the shower drain. I knew that except for the down—like the woolly lanugo coating the fetus in the womb—developing on my arms and legs, I would soon become hairless as a newborn. I continued to devour the steam of rice, waiting until I would be tiny enough to slip completely into the world my mother lived in.

But no matter how clean, how small I became, the
sal
—too deep within me to uproot—remained, a seed burrowed low in my belly, to kill the light.

To ensure my safe passage through the critical year of the fire snake, my mother decided to meet me after school one day in order to purify the campus. Taking the same route as the morning bus, my mother walked and chanted her way from The Shacks to Ala Wai Elementary. Every few yards, she dipped into her shoulder bag and threw out handfuls of barley and rice—scrap offerings to lure the wandering dead and noxious influences away from the path I took to and from home every day. By the time she reached the campus, she had collected a gang of kids. “Eh, bag lady! Eh, crazy lady,” they called out as they circled her. “Watchu doing? Feeding the birds?”

When my mother continued to chant and toss out grain, ignoring them, they must have grown bolder, pressing in on her with outstretched hands. “I like. I like,” some teased. “Gimme some.” And others, spurred by dares, came to slap at her bag or maybe her hands before scurrying back to the safety of the group.

Seeing that these devil children refused to be tempted by the meager handfuls of rice, my mother probably stepped up the exorcism. She had come prepared with talismans that attracted luck, incense sticks that purified the air and flushed out hidden pockets of Red Disaster, and lumps of moxa and red pepper to scare away troublesome imps. After first trying to bribe the children to go away by offering them her prized good luck packets, my mother took out a handful of moxa and red pepper balls. One by one, she lit the pellets with her Bic and threw them at the children.

“Shame on you! Your mothers must be so sad to have given birth to monsters,” she scolded, flinging the smoldering lumps into the growing crowd.

“Hey, you crazy!” one or two of the kids yelled when a ball of moxa or pepper hit its mark, leaving a small ash-gray circle on a piece of clothing or a body part. The rest of the children edged in closer, howling with laughter at each word my mother spoke.

“Shame-u, shame-u!” they mimicked in singsong voices. “You maddahs mustu be so sad-u!”

When I first saw the frail, wild-haired lady in pajamas throwing handfuls of pebbles into the crowd, I did not realize she was my mother. Only when she raised her arms into the air and pivoted toward me for a moment, only when I caught the faint cry of “Induk,” did I recognize her. I wanted to scream, to tell the kids to shut their mouths and go to hell. I wanted to pound the laughing heads into their necks. But I couldn't; looking at the only part of myself that I thought contained power, I saw my hands as the others around me must have seen them: feeble, scrawny, ineffectual. And I knew them then for what they were: the skeleton hands of death; and the light for what it was: Saja laughing just under my skin.

I wanted to help my mother, shield her from the children's sharp-toothed barbs, and take her home. And yet I didn't want to. Because for the first time, as I watched and listened to the children taunting my mother, using their tongues to mangle what she said into what they heard, I saw and heard what they did. And I was ashamed.

“Shame-u shame-u, sad-u sad-u!” my schoolmates chanted, unintimidated by the moxa balls or my mother promising vengeance from Induk, until they were interrupted by the vice principal and several burly teachers.

“What the hell is going on?” Vice Principal Pili demanded once the crowd had quieted. When no one spoke up, he looked around for familiar faces, children he recognized from detention hall. “You, Angelo Villanueva. You, Primo Beaton. You, Toots Tutivena. You causing trouble again?”

“No, Mr. Pili! Wasn't us. Was that crazy lady,” said Angelo.

“Yeah, was her t‘rowing fire at us,” agreed Primo, who rubbed at a black mark on his forehead.

And Toots Tutivena, whom I dubbed my eternal archnemesis in that moment, said: “Was that crazy lady who I know for a fact is Beccah Bradley's maddah.”

Vice Principal Pili scowled at them. “Okay, all of yous. Get out. I don't wanna see your faces hangin' around here after school no more unless it's in detention.” After the three he singled out worked their way to the edge of the crowd, where they remained, reluctant to leave before the action died and the bag lady went home, he swung his face toward my mother. “Can I help you?” He frowned, his question almost mocking.

Recognizing authority, my mother straightened the strap of her shoulder bag and smoothed the front of her pajamas with fingers that left black streaks. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I looking for daughteh. Name is Roh-beccah Blad-u-ley.”

“Rebeccah Bradley?” Pili asked. “Is that right?”

When my mother nodded, he yelled out, “Rebeccah Bradley! Is Rebeccah Bradley here? Does anyone know Rebeccah Bradley?”

Before Toots Tutivena could finger me in the crowd I had joined, merely curious, when they started chanting, “Shame-u shame-u, sad-u sad-u,” I slipped away. At the moment I was called upon to claim my mother, I couldn't. Instead I ran away, and the farther I ran from my mother, the smaller I seemed to shrink, until I was smaller and flimsier than the cheap moxa balls my mother burned to ward off the
sal
of malevolent beings.

I undress my daughter slowly, taking care not to bend her arms at odd angles as I slip the shirt from her head, tucking my fingers between her skin and the pins as I undo her diaper. I dip a finger into her belly button, see her wiggle in surprise, and I remember how, just a few short weeks ago, she screamed with anger and fear when I peeled each piece of clothing from her body to reveal the red and wrinkly vulnerable skin surrounding the stub of her umbilicus.

Now she laughs as she stretches her legs and I tickle the rolls of fat on her thighs. I love nothing more than this: the velvet of her body underneath my fingertips, her powder-and-milk smell, her laughter and her perfect nakedness.

The missionaries dressed the days in prayer. We gave thanks and praise-bes throughout the day and were taught to begin and end our day in communion with the Lord. After waking each day, we met in the basement, where we sat for a while in silent prayer before the sermon. And at the end of each day, we met in the basement again for singing and more communal prayer. We prayed for an end to hunger, for world peace, and for salvation. The minister taught that in all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive. That if we prayed hard enough, fervently enough, and to the right God in the right heaven, our prayers would be answered. Blessed were the meek, the persecuted, the reviled, for we would be exalted in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Often the missionaries would describe heaven as a place of spiritual freedom and God as Korea's own avenging angel. In chorus, we sang out words like: Fight, O Lord, against those who fight me; war against those who make war upon me. And what I remembered most from each sermon were the verses that focused on justice: When God arises, His enemies are scattered. As smoke is driven, so are they driven; as wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish before God.