our small cocktail table. Beer and shattered glass flew everywhere. The crash stopped the band and the talking. The only sound was me and Ernie scuffling back our chairs, and then she was advancing, jabbing the stick at Ernie, screaming at him in incoherent Korean.
Kimiko salvaged a full bottle and scuttled off to the side, hiding herself in the crowd.
Ernie twisted and dodged, hands outstretched, trying to ward off the stick, stumbling backwards over chairs and tables as people jumped out of the way, drinks and glassware smashing. Finally he crashed into the amps of the band on stage. Ernie grabbed the broom handle, trying to pull it out of the Nurse’s grasp. They grunted and cursed at each other. She let go of the stick with one hand and clawed at his face, screaming.
“You go out every night! Play with woman! No take care of home! No take care of rent! No take care of food!”
Ernie ripped the stick from her grasp and just stood there panting, not knowing quite what to do with it. The Nurse lunged again. He dropped the stick and threw his hands up to protect his face.
She screamed and clawed and slavered, and Ernie backed closer and closer to the main door. I tried to pull her off but she elbowed me in the ribs, stomped on my foot, and went after him some more. Locked arm in arm, they went out the swinging doors of the club. A crowd gathered.
They strained against each other, muscle on muscle, and then the Nurse let go, all at once, and Ernie had to hold her up to keep her from collapsing.
She was crying, pulling away from Ernie. And Ginger was there, comforting her. Other women stepped forward to help.
Both the Americans and the Koreans in the crowd turned their attention to Ernie and me. Their comments became progressively uglier. I tugged on Ernie’s elbow. He seemed to come out of his trance and he followed me as I pushed our way through the crowd, heading for the welcome darkness of ltaewon’s back alleys. And then we were running.
Heels clicked behind us. Kimiko.
When the light from the street lamp hit her face, she stared at us. Deadpan, she said, “You buy me drink?”
Ernie looked like chalk. I stifled a laugh.
I turned back to Kimiko. “Sure. Why not?”
I dragged both of them to Milt Gorman’s place, the Roundup. Ernie went to the latrine to rearrange his ripped shirt and his scratched face. Kimiko stuck close by me while we ordered our drinks. Ernie returned. He sipped listlessly on his beer. He paid no attention to our conversation, and my efforts to cheer him up were useless. After he drained the last of his suds, and without a word, he got up and left.
Milt Gorman stopped by and asked me how the investigation was going. I told him it was over. He smiled and had one of his waitresses bring us a couple of beers. The nice-looking young woman gave us some strange looks as she poured our beer and tidied up the table. Kimiko ignored her. A lot of the GIs were giving us strange looks, too. I was a little uneasy about the attention but I ignored it.
Something made Kimiko decide to tell me her life story. I didn’t have anywhere to go so 1 listened.
Her father was a very rich man, rich enough to own large tracts of land in North Cholla Province, land that was worked by tenant farmers. He had a main wife and second and third wives, but Kimiko’s mother wasn’t a wife at all. Just a scullery maid. And her earliest memories were of running through the pigpens and the open fields and the orchards ripening with pears and apples. There were plenty of children to play with and most of them were related to her in some way, but as she got older and started school, her place was made clear to her. She was not a real child of a real wife and as such she would be allowed six years of schooling and then must go to work, like her mother.
There was a large household to feed, the biggest burden being the noon meal, when Kimiko’s father was obligated to feed the day laborers who were so often working in various of the fields. She and her mother packed up wooden carrying boxes with rice and bean curd soup and cabbage kimchi, and her mother would head in one direction and Kimiko in the other.
After Kimiko finished her sixth year of schooling, she noticed changes in her body and, much sooner than the other girls her age, she started to turn into a woman.
It was her breasts that caused her the most grief. They were large and pointed and she strapped them in tightly, hurting herself every morning when she put on her chima and chogori, hoping they wouldn’t get any bigger and cause her any more shame. In Korea large-breasted women were considered to be stupid, and her body seemed to be betraying her, confirming everyone’s already low opinion of her.
I asked Kimiko about her first experience with love. It must have been on a beautiful spring evening, I said, under the blooms of a cherry tree in the orchard.
She shook her head. No one touched her at her father’s house. “No can do. Not supposed to.”
As Kimiko reached her thirteenth year her mother’s health started to fade. More and more of the chores in the big kitchen fell to her, and her father would allow no new help. Finally, after months of hacking and spitting up blood, in the heart of a cruel winter, Kimiko’s mother wasted away and died. Her father buried her, without excessive ceremony. The snow was too deep and the watching eyes of the first, second, and third wives too critical to allow for much in the way of mourning. Only Kimiko grieved. And now the full weight and responsibility of the kitchen fell upon her and she threw herself into her work.
As she lay dying, her mother had given Kimiko a small brooch, a gift from her father when they had first started meeting, late at night after the first wife had gone to bed. It was made of jade, a finely etched design of white cranes rising from their nests.
In the spring, when the orchards burst back into life, Kimiko packed a small bag and walked through the fragrant fields, away from the life into which she had been born. She walked for three days, sleeping on the side of the road, begging handouts from strangers, until she arrived in Chonju, the capital of North Cholla Province.
There she sold the brooch, for much less than it was actually worth, and bought a new skirt, new blouse, and a ticket on the steam vehicle to the capital city of Seoul.
When she arrived in bustling Seoul Station she had no money, just her wits and her burgeoning young body.
Kimiko wandered, trying to find employment. She wheedled information and food but after a few days she was profoundly hungry and tired of sleeping in the street, huddled under the clay-shingled alcove of a temple or a large house.
In a wine shop, an old woman with a brazenly made-up face looked Kimiko over.
“Do you speak Japanese?”
“Only what they taught me in school, ma’am.”
The woman laughed a harsh laugh. “That’s enough. The Japanese soldiers don’t expect too much talk from you. You can get a full-time job, food, and a place to stay. In Itaewon, the Japanese village.”
Kimiko’s eyes widened and her throat convulsed. She was unable to speak.
“Well, what do you say, girl? I have a friend there who owns a wine shop. A large, grand wine shop. Not like this little hovel.”
Kimiko nodded, and in a few minutes the woman had bundled her into the back of a pedicab and they were heading south, past Namsan Mountain, into the sloping Han River lowlands of Itaewon.
The wine shops were large, made of wood and concrete, and signs with Japanese lettering were everywhere. Some of the buildings were two or three stories high, and young women looked down at the urchin in the pedicab from their balconies above the puddled dirt street. Kimiko felt small and alone.
The woman who had brought her got out, went into the largest of the wine shops, and was gone for what seemed a long time. She came out all smiles, and another, even older woman came out and took a good look at Kimiko. She was led into the bowels of the darkened shop and she realized now that she had been sold.
It was hard to adjust. Many of the other girls hated her immediately, just because she was new and younger. But slowly she made a few friends and they washed her up and gave her new clothes and taught her how to wear her hair piled up in the Japanese style and how to put on makeup. Soon she was entertaining the Japanese soldiers who came to the wine shop every night to eat and drink rice wine and clap their hands and sing. The work was much easier than that in the kitchen at her father’s house and soon the men started to notice her. They noticed her shyness and her youth and quietly they began whispering to the old proprietress. One evening Kimiko was sold to an older balding man who, it was said, was a very important officer on Yongsan, which was the headquarters of the
