Sad Peninsula Read Online Free PDF

go to school: she could read the growing number of Japanese street signs and understand the stories that appeared in the free newspapers on every corner. If she and her friends were playing outside and were approached by the Kempeitai , the Japanese military police, Meiko could speak to the officers in stilted but serviceable Japanese. The police often accused them of being spies, which struck Meiko as silly. “No,” she would tell them, “we’re just little kids playing innocent games. No spies here.”
    But the more Meiko studied, the more it infuriated her father. Sometimes he came home at night to find her on the floor, her papers spread in a halo around her textbook. He’d march over to grab a fistful of them at random and head toward the kitchen stove. Meiko would chase after him in tears, upset that he had disrupted the careful system of memorization that she had set up for herself. He would fend her off with one hand while stuffing her papers into the stove with the other. When finished, he’d turn to her and yell, “Girls who study become foxes! Why don’t you get a job, you slut?”
    Getting jobs was exactly what had happened with her two older brothers that year, 1938, when they were fifteen and thirteen respectively. As planned, the boys dropped out of school after acquiring a bare minimum of education. They took jobs as delivery boys for a local Japanese restaurant. Their total combined income was less than half of what their father made at the plant, but the family was desperate for money and the boys were forced to work every day. It was also that year that the plant announced a pay cut for all Korean workers despite the growing war in China. This left Meiko’s father in a constant state of fury. He would explode at the children over the simplest of trifles, like if they raised their rice bowls a fraction of an inch off the table while eating. Whenever these outbursts happened, Meiko and the boys would mutter at each other in Japanese about their father’s bizarre behaviour. This would send him into another long rant about how the Japanese had infiltrated every aspect of their household, to the point where children could mock a father in a language he did not understand.
    Meanwhile at school, Meiko’s teachers had begun grooming the girls to join a new organization that Japan had introduced, called the Jungshindae — Voluntarily Committing Body Corp for Labor. The teachers said that this was the highest calling for every girl in the Empire, to give her body and spirit over to Emperor Hirohito and his many worthy causes. In a few years, they would be called up into good-paying jobs as teachers and nurses and entertainers, contributing whatever they could to Japan’s military success in the region. Meiko rushed home to explain the Jungshindae to her mother, expecting her to share in Meiko’s excitement. Instead, her mother exploded into anger and broke a rice bowl on the lip of her washing tub. “Don’t listen to them!” she shouted. “They will not have you. Do you hear me? I will pull you out of that school and lock you in the cellar before I let them own you!”
    But every day Meiko would come home praising some new aspect of the Jungshindae . When her baby sister, who was now six years old, heard these things she began wanting to go to school herself, but her mother would not allow it. “Why does she get study and I don’t?” the youngest daughter asked. “I wish to learn things, too.”
    â€œGirls who read books become sluts!” their father belched by rote from his wicker chair.
    Her mother squatted down to be eye level with the girl. “You will stay home with me, little one. We can’t afford to have two girls in school. I will teach you things here.”
    Meiko watched this with a shake of her head. “Umma, you should let her study. Our teachers have promised us good-paying jobs with the