Sad Peninsula Read Online Free PDF Page B

Jungshindae . In a few years, we’ll be able to support both you and father.”
    Her mother’s eyes filled with an emotion Meiko could not understand. “Don’t listen to them,” she wept. “My wise little crane, do not listen to them. And you are to come straight home after school — every day. Do not linger on the streets with your friends. Do you hear me?”
    The girls could not know what their mother knew, nor could their father. It took being a housewife, going to markets every day, talking to other women, to learn what she had come to know: that young girls in their teens had begun disappearing from the neighbourhood. It became a common sight to see a mother, not much older than Meiko’s, splayed out on the curb outside her house in anguish, her fists pounding her face as she screamed incoherently at the sky. The only words that Meiko’s mother could make out were, “My daughter! My daughter! Mydaughtermydaughtermydaughter! Theyhavetakenmydaughterawayfromme!”
    In early 1941, the boys both received draft notices from the Teishintai — the Japanese Volunteer Corps for Men. The government was mobilizing the entire country for war and this included conscripting Korean boys as young as fifteen into the Imperial army. When the draft notices arrived, Meiko’s mother burst into wails and collapsed onto the floor in front of her washtub. Within a couple of weeks, the boys were sent to the city of Daegu for six weeks of basic training before getting shipped off to the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Meiko’s mother was inconsolable. Her husband lamely brought up the boys’ lost income in his first attempt to comfort her, as if this were partly the source of her grief. “Are you insane!” she wept as she shoved his arms away. “Don’t you realize that your sons are as good as dead? As good as dead! Their lives mean nothing to the Japanese. They will put them right up … up on … on the front lines …” Meiko and her baby sister watched as their mother choked on this knowledge as if it were poison. Over days and weeks, Meiko’s father would try different ways to comfort his wife, and grew frustrated at his inability to do so. This precipitated even more arguments between them. Their fights raged for hours in the evenings, growing so intense that Meiko and her sister had to hide away from them in the small bedroom they shared.
    It was on a morning during the height of these battles that Meiko, now thirteen years old, discovered the sticky marks of blood that had arrived overnight in her underpants. She found them while dressing for school. She did have an inkling about these blood marks, suspecting that they were not uncommon for a woman. She sometimes found faint droplets of crimson left behind in the squat toilet if she used the bathroom immediately after her mother. But still, Meiko convinced herself that this blood was a dire omen of illness, and to share this news would only add to her mother’s stress. She found a rag to place between her legs before dressing and hoped the bleeding would go away. Yet the discharge got worse the next day and worse still the day after, until Meiko had to discreetly drag her mother into the bathroom, close the door and show her what was happening.
    At first, a blush of pride swept over her umma . “Oh my wise little crane, this just means you are becoming a woman,” she said, taking the girl’s face into her hands. “I should have mentioned something to you long before this.” She went on to explain how the girl should expect a number of days’ bleeding each month, and when it came she was to place a special kind of cloth in her underpants to catch the flow. But no sooner had her mother finished this instruction than a shadow darkened her face, as if a delayed reaction, an ominous and barely spoken secret, began sinking through her like a stone through water. “My